Pruning Kiwis

To view the latest from Ridge Berry Farm visit our new blog and site!

With the family just recovering from the flu, the past couple of weeks have not been very productive. However, with the weather warming up, it was time to start some work outdoors.

We started by cleaning the remnants of the ice storm. In particular, it was time to clear an old willow which had fallen. It turns out this wood is harder to cut and heavier than we had anticipated. In fact, the willow's trunk is beyond the capacity of our small chain saw.

One massive willow to clean up

It turns out the best we could do was to trim the spurious branches. We now have a large bifurcated trunk sweeping over the creek.

Cleaning up the willow proved a lot more difficult than planned

From the willow, we returned to pruning our Kiwis. These have taken very well to the horizontal trellises we built last year. Evidence of this is the tight "pig tailing" of the vines on our polyamide cables.

"Pig tailing" trellised vines (with old never pruned vines in the background)

With the trellised vines, our pruning time has been brought down to 1 hour per plant. Because they are not yet trained (we are aiming for 5 nice longitudinal vines, one per cable), it is still difficult as spurious growth tends to wrap around itself.

Although neater than their old counterparts, pruning these is still a difficult process

Our polyamide cable has proven itself. It has maintained its tensile strength over the seasons and it is easy to deploy. We have however encountered one minor problem: it is also easy to cut with plain old shears....and not being careful enough, this is exactly what we did!

The result is not as dramatic as you would expect. Instead of re-stringing over a 100 feet of cable, we simply used a "splicing" tool normally reserved for metal cables.

Cut cable...no problem, just splice

With the flu, we also decided to do as much indoor work as possible. This week, this has entailed cleaning, organizing and decorating the house and our gallery for a photo shoot. We hope to use some of these photos for a "before" and "after" review of the renovations as well as on our web sites.

Working on the gallery 

We now have a really nice display of our Schneider collection

We concluded this week with the bottling of our last batch of wine for the past year (2013): an Arctic Kiwi wine.

This was our second attempt at a Kiwi wine. The first turned out quite well, but we did it using a kiwi "mash" which was a rather messy process. This latest brew used whole fruits...and the results were just as nice. No matter which way it is done it reminds me a lot of a late harvest white wine with a strong hint of pineapple.

Straining and bottling the last brew.