We have been out at the orchard working under the vines. Picking will be in about 4 weeks time so we are thinning out the reject fruit. If our reject rate goes above a certain percentage we are charged a penalty by the packhouse, so it is worth our while to pull off any imperfect fruit.
Fruit can be rejected for a number of reason - signs of disease, misshapen fruit, small fruit etc. In the first photo you can see all the thinned fruit lying on the ground. It is a crime to waste so much fruit, much of it is perfectly good, just with minor flaws. I dislike wasting fruit at any time, so thinning is not a pleasant task.(Apart from that I get a sore neck, shoulders and arms!)
These are just a few photos of the vines. And one of some reject kiwifruit that you will never ever see in the shops!
5 comments:
I love kiwi fruit! How much land do you have for growing them?
We have about 17 acres of land in kiwifruit. We don't live on the orchard, it is out of town.
We also had a block of macadamia nuts, 25 trees, but we have removed 20 of them leaving just enough for our own use. It was getting too hard to harvest them and there are few outlets for selling them.
The picture of the imperfect fruits gave me the best laugh in many a day! Personally, I'd buy them - just so I could display them prominently in a fruit bowl... :-D
We find some rare and wonderful fruit shapes! The top one in the photo is called a fan, the one on the left a flat, and the other - well its just misshapen.
Sometimes we find a fan shape that is almost a full circle. If allowed to ripen, they are usually lovely and sweet.
Some gold kiwi popped up in our supermarket the other day, had to get them for old time's sake.
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