I’ve been interested in growing kiwis for a while - Seattle has a really good climate for them, and what’s not to like about kiwis, yum! But I have a smallish urban yard, and most kiwi vines are ginormous - they get to be 30 feet or more. I recently found a smaller vine at Raintree, the Arctic Beauty Kolomikta kiwi - it’s a manageable size for my yard, it produces lots of very small kiwis, and it has gorgeous variegated leaves, too.

Kiwis need a male and a female to produce fruit; I have room for three plants, so I got two females and a male. My plants came last week, and last weekend we put in a kind of arbor/trellis structure for them. As you can see, it’s kind of like an old-fashioned clothesline - the helpful horticulturalist at Raintree gave me advice on what kind of structure is best for these kiwis.

I didn’t want to use treated wood to support a food-bearing plant, plus I plan to grow smaller plants underneath the vines while I’m waiting for them to get big enough to bear fruit (that takes a couple of years). But I was concerned about the main supports rotting away pretty rapidly if I stuck them in regular postholes, since they’d be in direct contact with the soil.

My friend Michelle told me about post stakes; they were a perfect solution. My stakes are 30 inches long. You drive them into the ground, put the 4×4 post into the box at the top, then tighten the bolts to secure it. Michelle and Alexander made them all level and nice for me.

We used t-brackets to secure the crosspieces across the top of each post. I had (almost) enough Cat-5 wire left from the bean and pea supports to run across the top of the structure.

If all goes as planned, the kiwis will grow up the posts and across the wires, and the fruits will hang down within easy reach. It takes around 4 years for kiwis to really start producing fruit - that’s a long time to wait, but I planted my raspberries 10 years ago and I’m happy I did; now they produce almost more than we can eat. Almost.