Pruning Arctic Kiwis

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This was not a comfortable week to be working on the farm. Temperatures plunged to as low as -15 deg. C. However, since we had just finished a row of Kiwi trellises, this did not deter us from work.

Our objective this week was to prune our Arctic Kiwis ...in Arctic conditions no less :)

With our first row of Kiwis, we were very aggressive and trimmed the bushes back to a single vine (which we could train to climb on the new structures). For this second row, we decided to be a little gentler. Since some of these bushes fruited in the fall, we wanted to see what would happen if we kept 2-3 vines with at least 2-3 years of growth.

There is very little information available on pruning these types of Kiwis, even less on pruning and training Kiwis which have been neglected for many years.

In the end we started with bushes that looked like the following....

And ended up with this.....

Most of these vines took from 2 hours to half a day each of pruning. The most difficult were those that had "fallen" on themselves. The easiest were those that had manage to climb some tree (those were also the ones that had the most fruits).

The difficulty is in the rather aggressive growing behaviour of the vines.  They form "pigtails" and will tend to wrap themselves around each other. The following picture provides an idea of what we had to decipher.

I have often compared these to messed up balls of twine. In hindsight, that's probably over simplifying  the situation. At least twine has a beginning and an end. This was more like separating a bowl of spaghetti, if you can image spaghetti strands that can tightly bind to each other.

As we got closer to the root stock, things did not even look any better.

In any case, we managed to finish our Kiwi pruning for the year. We still have some 11 rows of Kiwis to weed, trellis and prune, but we want to see how our first two rows will come along before we do any further damage. Spring will tell!

I did mention that it was a very cold week to be pruning. It was the kind of weather where your mustache will grow icicles. 

Luckily we still had quite a bit of farm waste to burn, so we were able to warm up regularly.

Having finished the Kiwis earlier than anticipated, we have now directed our attention to the grapes we discovered last fall. If you remember, Tristan and I had discovered some great tasting "wild" grapes. It turns out that these were growing up some trees but were rooted in a row of trellises we were only able to find after weeding the far side of one of our Kiwi plots.

The vines are very old and are producing what I believe are Concord table grapes but again, they have been badly neglected. So our current project is to bring this row of grapes to the light and attempt to prune them.

This row of grapes is completely obstructed with very large trees, some sumac and thorn bushes, as well as a few fallen trees. These trees were completely taken down by the Kiwi vines. This is what we are starting from, a view between our row of grapes and our last row of Kiwis.

The first step this week was to take down some major trees, as well as some Sumac which were completely "pulled" by the Kiwis and ended up growing at a sharp angle.

I will leave you this week, with an observation.

We moved to the country and settled on a farm with the hope of leading a more sustainable lifestyle. Part of this effort will be growing our own food (or a large part of it).

It was an amazing pleasure this week to start to shop the seed catalogs for the vegetables we would plant this Spring. I never thought it would be so much fun to consider the many varieties of vegetables we could grow. We're in fact already dreaming of the bounty we will harvest next fall!

So we've now ordered our seeds. Our key source of supply is an Ontario-based dealer in heirloom, rare, organic and sustainability grown seeds: The Cottage Gardener. Of course, we've decided for the most part to try some rather odd plants...being "foodies" we do want to try different culinary experiences.

Given the selection at hand and the amount we plan to grow (and as novices, we are perhaps being a little too keen), I've decided to have a family competition. We will each take responsibility for at least 6-10 plants and we will see who can produce the most food at year end.

I have discovered this video which is a real inspiration 6,000 lbs on 1/10th acre. If a family can do it on a small city plot in Los Angeles....surely we should be able to do as well (I hope!).

Stringing in the Snow

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Prior to leaving for Asia, we did have the opportunity to do some farm work even though Winter was in full swing.

We've learned that working in the cold is not that bad as long as you are properly dressed. In fact, you rapidly heat up while working and having layers that you easily can peel off helps a lot. The most difficult thing to overcome is the snow. It constrains your movements and certainly slows you down, where a task that may have taken an hour can rapidly turn into an hour and a half.

Our task prior to our trip was the "stringing" of raspberry canes. If not restrained between cables or ropes, these canes will rapidly fall or fold to the ground. Although we had attempted various methods in the past, we were searching for a clean, efficient and flexible way to do this. In the past, the previous farmer had used everything from nylon rope to telephone cable.

Our new solution was based on the Polyamide cable we used for our Kiwi trellises. Again, this material is easy to deploy over very long runs; it maintains tension under varying temperature conditions; and, it does not weather. It also ties and unties rather neatly.

In order to hold the cable to our old metal T-bars, we bought some pre-shaped anchors from our favourite on-line supplier Dubois. They basically come in two parts.

We encountered two problems with these. The first is the packaging. Pulling them out of the box reminded us of the old "Barrel of Monkeys" game....although in this case we did not want to pull out 50 tangled pieces at a time.

The second problem was actually tying the anchors to our posts. It really took two persons to mount these to the T-bars because of the difficulty in bending the metal.

In any case, the final result was more than satisfactory.

In the end we managed to cleanly "string" all of our raspberries. We were so pleased with the results, we decided to also tackle our very tall blackberry canes.

When we returned from Asia, we were rather surprised that all the snow on the farm had melted. The region had gone through an abnormal warm spell (with temperatures reaching 15 deg. C the day before our arrival).

This gave us an opportunity to finish our second row of Kiwi trellises. We now have a slope that seems equipped for a ski lift!

We have some 11 rows to complete now and we've decided to take it a year at a time. The reason is that the next step is pruning and then slowly training our vines onto these "arbors". We want to do this while maintaining some fruit production and I fear that once radically pruned, we will stop fruit production on the newly trellised vines.

What was most surprising this week is that Tristan was still able to harvest (in mid-January no less!) the remainder of his spinach. I would have never thought we could do this in Canada.

We also had the time to clear the dead pine trees and Wisteria vines that we cut down from our ridge during the Christmas break. This of course required some significant fires.

The thing to note about dead Wisteria vines is that the wood burns rapidly, quickly turning to ash, but it does not go into flame. This makes for an unsustainable burn. With our large mass of dead Wisteria, we had to resort to some dramatic solution: basically using petrol to get the fire started and then stocking it with pine branches.

We were thrilled to finally get rid of these aggressive and invasive vines.

I leave our readers this week with a quick update on renovations. Construction on the property has not stopped. This month showed great progress on the barn and the new country store is really starting to look like a professional commercial space.

A Canadian Farmer in Hong Kong

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Now that we are on our way back home, and before we return to our regular farm blog, I wanted to send this short note from Hong Kong.

This quick trip to Asia has been a great cultural experience for Tristan. In fact a hearty meal at the Po Lin Buddhist monastery has helped him renew his interest in vegetarianism.

With the incredible diversity of foods offered in Asia, our trip was also a small study in food production. We were looking to Asia for concepts we might bring back to Canada...after all our Arctic Kiwis are of Chinese origin.

An example of this is the Persimmon. This fruit is very popular in all major Asian nations (from Korea, to China and Japan). Although available in Canada, it is not often found and as far as value added processing, I have personally never been exposed to anything made with Persimmon.

This is a shame because we know this is a fruit (technically a large berry) we can grow in Niagara. It is also a very versatile fruit, which surprisingly can be dried to look like these patties in the following picture.

There are different versions of dried Persimmon and this is the Chinese version we found in Hong Kong (for roughly 50 cents a piece). There is a very expensive Japanese version where the Persimmon is "massaged" into shape (normally sold for about $4 a piece).

How do they taste? The texture is that of dates however they are not as sweet and have a much milder flavour. I believe they would go very well with a nice Brie.

These are the kinds of things we just love experimenting with and I am now certain we are coming back with a few new ideas for the farm.

Finally I would like to say that we have been getting a lot of very encouraging feedback on our farmhouse and barn restoration. I would like to thank our readers for this and let you know that we will keep updating everyone on the progress of construction throughout the year.

Postcard from KL

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As indicated in our last blog, Tristan and I are in Asia so our next farm posting will be on January 20.

In the meantime we send you this picture "postcard" from Kuala Lumpur.