Bought a Fig Tree & Kiwi Vine Today. Any advice?

kbmbillups1
kbmbillups1 Posts: 1,391 ✭✭✭✭✭

I'm excited to have bought another fig tree today and a kiwi vine. I have a 4 or 5 year old fig tree that has never gotten any figs. I recently learned that it's male. I tried to google it to see if there was a way to tell when you buy the tree if it's male or female. I didn't find anything helpful so I just went for it and bought another one. It does say it's self pollinating and that you only need one. So hoping I get fruit this time.

I've never seen Kiwi vines before so couldn't pass it up since it says it grows well in my zone here in Georgia. The tag also says it grows quickly but isn't invasive and produces a lot of fruit. I want to get an arched trellis for it to grow on since we can't have vines growing on our fences per the HOA. That's my dream anyway.

I'm excited to plant them! I have organic dirt left from my garden, worm castings, compost, and mulch. Do you think I need anything else?

My husband was not as excited as me. He's thinking about the holes we'll need to dig. 😀 They aren't very big plants. So, even if we dig the hole 3X the size of the root ball it won't be anything major. 😊

To think I went to buy marigolds for my garden and came back with a little extra!

Comments

  • EarlKelly
    EarlKelly Posts: 230 ✭✭✭

    @kbmbillups1 good for you. Never have grown figs, iffy in my zone. But planted kiwi vines last year. Just a thought for you. Not sure which species you bought, but there is also a male and female plant. The ones I got from Stark nurseries. Figured if I had a problem they are there to help. So far growing great, hope you have good luck with your fruit.

  • Melinda
    Melinda Posts: 123 ✭✭✭

    I love the idea of training the fig over the trellis! We have four trees, it took about four years or so for mine to fruit, as well.

  • kbmbillups1
    kbmbillups1 Posts: 1,391 ✭✭✭✭✭

    @Melinda A friend of mine gave me several gallon bags filled with figs last year b/c is family doesn't like them. It would be amazing if I finally got a few figs of my own!

  • Karin
    Karin Posts: 272 ✭✭✭


    Really sorry but I have to say - it soooooo irritates me when people refer to "kiwifruit" as "kiwis". A kiwi is a flighless bird native to our beautiful country, it is NOT a fruit and does not grow on a vine! I know, I know, most everyone in the world has taken to calling kiwifruit kiwis, but arrrgggghhhh!!!!!


    Rant over............

  • herbantherapy
    herbantherapy Posts: 453 ✭✭✭✭

    @kmartin.mail awww I’m sorry. I understand your frustration! In my neck of the woods/ ocean we have jellies and no matter how many brochures and experts say Jellies the world refuses to stop calling them "jellyfish". They are not FISH!!

  • Karin
    Karin Posts: 272 ✭✭✭

    @herbantherapy wow I didn't think of that one. I guess they're not jelly either tho - what weird names we sometimes call our fellow creatures!

    Mainly I get itrritated because the kiwi is our national bird and sort of part of our identity. The name "kiwifruit" was a marketing gimmick when exporting the fruit overseas, because when I was growing up we called them "Chinese gooseberries" - that was never going to cut it when exporting from New Zealand lol

  • kbmbillups1
    kbmbillups1 Posts: 1,391 ✭✭✭✭✭

    @kmartin.mail I have never heard them called anything but kiwi sorry if I offended you.

    Regardless of what it's called I hope it grows and actually gets fruit on it.

  • MissPatricia
    MissPatricia Posts: 318 ✭✭✭

    Webster's Dictionary, copyrights 1962-1970: 2. [also K -] the brown, hairy, egg-sized fruit of a subtropical vine. jellyfish: any of a number of related free-swimming, mostly marine coelenterates, with a body made up largely of jellylike substance and shaped like an umbrella .... It appears to me that calling the fruit a kiwi or Kiwi is perfectly correct and calling a jellyfish a jellyfish is likewise. Most words have more than one definition. A jellyfish is not a fish, but the name of the marine lifeforms is still jellyfish.

  • Momma Mo
    Momma Mo Posts: 138 ✭✭✭

    We have fig trees and they fruit twice a year in our area. We bought and planted "Hardy Kiwi fruit" last year. They came back this year, but no fruit yet.

  • Karin
    Karin Posts: 272 ✭✭✭

    the dictionary just publishes what are common usages. Calling kiwifruit kiwis is not accurate. Kiwi is the Maori word for our national bird. Here is some info for you:

    https://www.kiwisforkiwi.org/about-kiwi/kiwi-facts-characteristics/kiwi-calls/

  • Lisa K
    Lisa K Posts: 1,936 ✭✭✭✭✭

    @kbmbillups1 you may want to check on the Kiwifruit vine, my understanding is you need at least one male for every two females.

  • kbmbillups1
    kbmbillups1 Posts: 1,391 ✭✭✭✭✭

    @Lisa K Thanks! That would be my luck. Planted it today. My husband and one of his friends who has a truck when to a tractor supply store and bought me a cattle panel and 2 posts for my arched trellis. I'll check it out.

  • Lisa K
    Lisa K Posts: 1,936 ✭✭✭✭✭

    @kbmbillups1 you are welcome, would love to see pictures of the trellis!

  • kbmbillups1
    kbmbillups1 Posts: 1,391 ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited May 2020

    @Lisa K Here is my cattle panel trellis. It's not a symmetric as I wanted it but it had to be the least amount visible from the street as possible for the HOA. Our ground is serious red clay. We hammered and hammered and even borrowed a heavier hammer but couldn't get the stakes in any further.

    We dug out a wide hole and as deep as we could but the red clay was too hard to dig through. I have several raised beds that I made with concrete stepping squares and filled with dirt because our ground is so hard. I ended up filling in the hole with good dirt, compost, etc and then putting concrete stepping stone around it too and filling it with dirt to plant my kiwi vine in. So far so good!

    Even though I don't think the trellis is going anywhere we were having very bad wind and storms later that day so my husband wanted me to tie it to the posts. He said he didn't want to have to pull the cattle panel out of the woods behind the fence. 😁

    The hardest part was finding a friend with a truck who would take my husband to the tractor supply store so we could get the cattle panel home. It took us about an hour to put it up.

    I figure if my vine doesn't grow I can always move the trellis to my raised beds and grow cucumbers on it.


  • Lisa K
    Lisa K Posts: 1,936 ✭✭✭✭✭

    @kbmbillups1 very cool!