Harvesting the Kiwi

Our local weatherman on television advised us that on early Friday morning we would have a freeze in our area of the state.  So on Thursday morning I donned my warmest outdoor work clothes and went outdoors to prepare for the freeze.  Some chores close to my house had priority but then I gathered all of the giant market baskets that I had stored in the Cedar House, got in my golf cart and headed up to the Kiwi vines.  Of my three female vines I only had two to bear fruit this year.  I fully expect that next year the other one will be as productive as the two I picked from on Thursday.

 

It was pleasant enough to be outdoors and working among the vines.  I wore work gloves as reaching through the many vines can cause some scratches on your hands.  After about two hours of picking I had the four market baskets filled to the  top.  Since it was near lunch time, and a good break time, I went up to the house and unloaded the four baskets into the sun room.  Since there is no heat in the sun room it is ideal to store the kiwi there.  After lunch I gathered up all of the containers I could find, to put the rest of the kiwi in, as I picked them.  I filled up another smaller market basket, a five gallon bucket, and several other baskets and bowls.

As I was working, I found two bird nests up at the very top of the vines.  I just left them there as it was too high to get them down.  Many of the larger kiwi were up above the wires.  In the past I have weighed the average size fruit and found them to weigh three ounces.  This is the same size that is sold in the grocery stores.  However the larger ones weigh more, four to four and a half ounces total.  I made a clean sweep and picked all sizes, even the smaller ones which may or may not be worth the effort to peel them.

My daughter and I talked about buying an electric food dehydrator to try drying out some of the kiwi this year.  First, however, they must be ripe enough to eat.  It will not be an easy chore to determine when they are all ripe, simply because there are so many of them this year.  When they do ripen, I expect it will all happen at the same time.  This may be the year that I try some kiwi jelly!

I have many friends who like the kiwi, so thankfully they will use some of them.   With the hot, dry weather we had this past summer any harvest at all is a wonder.  I can understand why so many very small kiwi were on the vine this year.  There simply was not enough moisture in the ground for them to all develop properly.  At any rate they have all been picked for this year.  I cannot say that for the  muscadine grapes.  There were too many for me and for my grape loving friends to pick them all.  Even the deer and birds could not manage to eat all of those grapes.  Gardening is a fun hobby for the summer and fall.  When the cold winter winds begin to blow the outdoor phase of gardening is at an end.  Preserving some of the fruit is the last phase, until the seed catalogs arrive.  Then it all begins over again, otherwise there will be no harvest next fall.  So, as long as I feel game enough to repeat it all, there will always be something to harvest from this land.