For a garden wrangler there are few projects more full of mischief than an untamed kiwifruit. When facing a vining medusa running 60 feet along a teetering 25 year old trellis and unpruned for several years, it does not take long to admit that you are in for quite a skirmish. Most plants even at their wildest grow in something of a straight line. Even corkscrew willow, curling and vigorous, barely entangles one branch with another. But when describing an untamed kiwi, one utilizes all the wild and unruly descriptors available in the mother tongue, borrows a phrase or two from somewhere else, and still feels deficient.
Certainly there is artistry in a cane that, having reached skyward, spirals back upon itself into a botanical double helix drawn from the imagination of Dr. Suess. But that singular artistry is a rare thing. Even to the trained eye, twenty feet of new growth layered and entwined with twenty and twenty and twenty feet of old growth — to say nothing of uncontrolled encounters with maple and bamboo and rhododendron and downspout — can only be described as one big tangled mess. If one has any expectation of progress — or income — Dr. Suess must be set aside and whimsy replaced with a cold-hearted determination to “get through it”.
In my maritime northwest corner of the North America, only ivy, wisteria, and Himalayan blackberries come close to equalling kiwifruit for chaotic vigor. Wild clematis, a major pest east of the Cascades, has made inroads, and both hops and grapes, usually controlled under cultivation, are daunting in their undomesticated vigor. In the Southeast, one must deal with kudzu, where it "... is estimated to cover 3,000,000 hectares (7,400,000 acres) of land in the southeastern United States, mostly in Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina and Mississippi", (from Wikipedia). Other corners of the planet have their own wicked vines.
There are cases where kiwifruit have completely taken over natural areas. In parts of New Zealand such as near major shipping ports, excess fruits were dumped only to sprout and then take over. Botanical war has been proclaimed against kiwi vines that are not under cultivation, sprawling and crawling and climbing over and through native vegetation. In western Massachusetts some hardy kiwis escaped decades ago and they too climb up and over and through everything, an impenetrable and tangled mass 60 feet high. In this case the origin story is less clear and Actinidia enthusiasts cry foul as they find themselves pitted against steely eyed conservationists who seek a total state ban on cultivation of the hardy kiwi.
The one thing certain is that very few people know how to contain an established kiwi vine. In a commercial operation, 90% of growth is removed by the end of the growing season. Aside from the main trunk and scaffold branches, almost nothing of the plant remains that is older than two years, and even of the younger growth much is selected out. New growth is redirected away from the fruiting part of the vine which grew new only last year, and male plants are grown on a separate structure and pruned on an earlier cycle. The pruning tools are never really put away but shortly after harvest the pruning equipment comes out fully, the canes that fruited are removed, and the new canes trained in place for next year.
Where I would vary from how a commercial operation grows kiwifruit (beyond the obvious of scale) is by experimenting more in trellising and training. It is commercially easier to harvest kiwis that grow just overhead, and so this is the main model followed. But it is often harder for the small grower to manage them when trained in this way, and so year after year new canes pile up on old ones in one hopeless out of reach tangle. Look at systems for training grapes and you will find dozens of variations. This is because grapes have been in cultivation for thousands of years. I would take a page from the book of grapes and try a trellis that is lower to the ground, to keep regular pruning at its easiest.
A well-trained Kiwi vine is generous in its fruitfulness. But an under trained Kiwi vine is exasperating. If you cannot maintain your Kiwi arbor, try rebuilding the structure and retraining the vines to a form you can more easily maintain. If that still doesn't work it is no sin to admit defeat and and replace that vining vigor with something else.
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