Plant · P-476

Fuzzy Kiwi

Actinidia chinensis var. deliciosa

Fuzzy Kiwi is the grocery-store kiwifruit vine - a vigorous twining climber that needs a male vine for every five or six females before any of them will bear. Its brown, fuzzy, egg-sized fruit is loaded with vitamin C and a mature planting can produce 8 to 30 tonnes per hectare, but the plant demands two opposite things in the same year: months of winter chill to break dormancy, and a six-to-eight-month frost-free growing season to ripen the crop. Trained on a sturdy trellis or pergola it also casts dense summer shade, but it needs steady water, shelter from wind, and soil on the acid side - it dislikes alkaline ground outright.