Tastes Like Kiwi and Honey, an Endless Harvest From One Vine. Survives 25 Below Zero.

📖 The Nature’s Lost Vault Book Is Now Available. Learn more: https://naturelostvault.com/book.html Everyone knows the fuzzy brown fruit you slice in half and scoop with a spoon. Almost nobody knows its sweeter, tougher, forgotten cousin, the one your grocery store will never put on a shelf. This is a forgotten fruit that tastes like a ripe kiwi folded into honey, with no fuzzy skin to peel. You eat it whole, straight off the vine, skin and all. It is rich in vitamin C, it ripens in your own backyard, and a single mature vine can drop up to one hundred pounds of it in a good autumn, year after year, for decades. It is also one of the most cold hardy fruits on Earth, shrugging off winters that would kill an orange grove. So why have you never seen it for sale? The answer is not a conspiracy. It is the quiet economics of the modern grocery store. The fruit is the hardy kiwi, and its small, grape sized berries are called kiwiberries (Actinidia arguta). They are too soft, too thin skinned, and too short lived to survive the trucking, warehousing, and shelf time that a national supply chain demands. So the produce system chose the fruit that ships, and the better one was left to backyards, farmers markets, and the handful of gardeners who still know it exists. Early October is the hinge of the whole story, the one window of the year that is both harvest season and planting season. In this episode we trace where this cold hardy fruit came from, how it was passed over for its tougher supermarket cousin, and how anyone with a patch of ground and a strong trellis can grow their own homegrown fruit for the next twenty autumns. If you care about forgotten crops, growing your own food, and the kind of quiet self reliance the modern food system trained out of us, this one is for you. Nature's Lost Vault uncovers the plants, crops, and remedies the modern world left behind, and hands them back to the people willing to use them. Sources - Ferguson, A. R. "The Genus Actinidia." In Kiwifruit Science and Management, edited by I. J. Warrington and G. C. Weston, 15-35. Auckland: Ray Richards Publisher, 1990. - Ferguson, A. R., and Hongwen Huang. "Genetic Resources of Kiwifruit: Domestication and Breeding." Horticultural Reviews 33 (2007): 1-121. - Fisk, Chad L., Mina R. McDaniel, Bernadine C. Strik, and Yanyun Zhao. "Physicochemical, Sensory, and Nutritive Qualities of Hardy Kiwifruit (Actinidia arguta 'Ananasnaya') as Affected by Harvest Maturity and Storage." Journal of Food Science 71, no. 3 (2006): S204-S210. - Latocha, Piotr. "The Nutritional and Health Benefits of Kiwiberry (Actinidia arguta), a Review." Plant Foods for Human Nutrition 72, no. 4 (2017): 325-334. doi:10.1007/s11130-017-0637-y. - Latocha, Piotr, Tomasz Krupa, Ryszard Wolosiak, Ewa Worobiej, and Julitta Wilczak. "Antioxidant Activity and Chemical Difference in Fruit of Different Actinidia sp." International Journal of Food Sciences and Nutrition 61, no. 4 (2010): 381-394. - Nishiyama, Ikuo. "Fruits of the Actinidia Genus." Advances in Food and Nutrition Research 52 (2007): 293-324. - Strik, Bernadine C. Growing Kiwifruit. Pacific Northwest Extension Publication PNW 507. Corvallis: Oregon State University Extension Service, 2005. - Strik, Bernadine C., and Kim E. Hummer. "Ananasnaya Hardy Kiwifruit." Journal of the American Pomological Society 60, no. 3 (2006): 106-112. - U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service. "Actinidia arguta (Siebold and Zucc.) Planch. ex Miq." Germplasm Resources Information Network, GRIN-Taxonomy. National Germplasm Resources Laboratory, Beltsville, Maryland, 2023. - "Actinidia arguta." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation. Last modified 2025. - "Actinidia kolomikta." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation. Last modified 2025. #Gardening #Homesteading #GrowYourOwnFood #SelfSufficiency