 True Name/ Common Name:
Kiwifruit – Actinidia deliciosa
The kiwifruit has many nicknames, most of which are based around the layman’s attempts at classifying them. For instance, the Chinese gooseberry, the macaque peach, willow peach, goat peach, hairy pear, vine pear, unusual fruit, and wonder fruit. Description of Look and Flavor:
Kiwifruit grow on a woody vine that is too weak to support a lot of fruit without structural help. The fruit grows to about the size of a hen’s egg, but with a brown and hairy skin covering the outside. The flesh of the fruit is a bright spring green adorned with a ring of small black seeds through the center that can be eaten without any problems. Some describe the flavor as a jumble of strawberry, banana, and pineapple, but I don’t quite agree. Growth Period/ Harvest –
These used to be a late fall fruit exclusively, but do the recent global cultivation and their ability to be stored, kiwifruit are now available nearly year round. California and France have the opposite growing season from New Zealand, which allows a new crop to come up in what would have been the off-season. Nutritional Info –
One of the many fruits that are packed with vitamin c, kiwi also has almost as much potassium as a banana! They are good sources of vitamins A and E, folic acid, chromium, and they contain enzymes that aid digestion. Other Uses –
Extracts from kiwi can be used to treat the mange in dogs and the stems from the plant make a strong rope or suitable paper for some people in China. If you peel the bark of the plant, nearest the roots, off in one long flat piece you can place it in hot ashes and the bark will coil itself into a hard narrow tube that can be used as a pencil. History –
A baby on the fruit scene, kiwi is an unnatural cultivar that was only commercially popularized in 1959 by New Zealand. They tried to market the fruit by naming it after New Zealand’s national bird, the kiwi, thus we get the name of the fruit and a modest amount of confusion when we speak about either of them. Interesting Facts/ Misnomers -
These vines grow as male or female, females bearing fruit, and are notoriously hard to pollinate because bees aren’t usually attracted to their flowers. So farmers have to overpopulate the area with bees and force competition among them and ensure pollination of the kiwi. That sounds like the beginning of a bad horror movie to me, hope he doesn’t have apiphobia (fear of bees)!
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