Tulare County farmer Doug Phillips, left, spent years learning how to grow “red kiwis,” right, including erecting shade structures, above, because the plants don’t do well in the San Joaquin Valley’s heat and low humidity.
Even though kiwifruit is native to China, it was New Zealand that first commercialized it in the 1940s, with exports of “Chinese gooseberries” making their way to U.S. shores as early as the late 1950s, UC reported. The late Ca l i fornia produce marketer Frieda Caplan is often credited with renaming the fruit after New Zealand’s similarly fuzzy f lightless national bird when her Orange County-based company began selling kiwifruit in 1962. Phillips planted his f irst kiwifruit in 1973, after seeing his neighbor’s successful backyard plantings, which had been growing since the 1960s “as a kind of rare fruit deal,” he said. “They were beautiful—loadedwith fruit,” he described the plants, “and we thought, man, that’s for us.” Perfecting newvarieties Phillips ventured into growing different kiwifruit varieties in the late 1990s, when he heard about gold- f leshed kiwifruit fromNew Zealand, which he tried to grow in 2000. He found they weren’t suitable for the state’s climate and went back to focusing on greens. A few years later, he tried growing red-f leshed kiwifruit from China, bringing back plant materials to begin experimental plantings. Those varieties don’t like the San Joaquin Valley’s heat and low humidity, he said,
and it’s taken him years to learn how to grow them better with different techniques, including through i rr igat ion, erect ing shade st ructures and using specialized equipment to help pollinate the crop. Bees, he noted, don’t seem to like the shade structures, necessitating artificial means to blow adequate amounts of pollen into each f lower so the plants can produce “maximum (fruit) size and yield.” Af ter many attempts, Phi l lips said he’s f inal ly narrowed down a handful of “really good” varieties of red and gold kiwifruit that can grow well in the state and have good taste, size and shelf life. He markets the reds as “golden red kiwis” or simply “red kiwis.” Getting to this point, he said, has not been easy, noting it took him at least 15 years of “playing around” with different growing techniques and cultural practices to improve production of his red kiwifruit. Other farmers also are bringing different kiwifruit varieties to the market and increasing plantings. For example, farmer Jerry Kliewer of Reedley, whose family has been growing kiwifruit since 1973, currently grows a plus-sized kiwifruit variety from Greece that’s 50% larger than the Hayward. Marketed as the Mega Kiwi, the variety made its market debut in 2017. The state’s largest kiwifruit grower, Pasadena-based Sun Pacific, grows the crop in the San Joaquin Valley
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September/October 2021
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