Jackie French's tips for growing kiwifruit in Canberra

New Zealanders firmly conquered the feral "gooseberries". They made them climb pergolas and pruned them, and bred them into many varieties, longer and fatter, but still hairy. If you find a bald kiwifruit (as opposed to a "kiwi berry") it has been defurred – although some varieties are less hairy than others.

There are five tricks to growing kiwifruit.

Number one – selection. Some varieties need more chilling than others. You can grow kiwifruit anywhere but the tropics, as long as you have the right variety, water, a place for them to climb, and enough energy to hack them back when they do climb. Ours keep trying to invade the bedroom.

Hopefully, your local nursery has done the selection for you, but if you buy online, do check what the particular variety you are ordering requires.

There is also a fruit called a kiwi berry that is smaller, rounder, not fuzzy at all and said to be sweeter, with a green to purple skin so soft you do not need to peel it. Some sources say it does not to need a pollinator. Others say you need the correct male pollinator and I suspect they are correct, as ours has grown for years and produced no fruit whatsoever.

There were also rumours years ago about a red kiwifruit. I ordered one, but it turned out to be green. I've no idea if the red one exists as more than a plant breeder's dream.

Trick number two: kiwifruit need a sex life if you want baby kiwis – ie, fruit. But they are also promiscuous, so one male to eight females is fine. This, however, will give you a small truck-load of fruit, so you might prefer to make your vines monogamous, one male and one female, intertwined, if possible, as the closer the male is, the more likely the female flowers are to be pollinated.

Do not buy a single vine with the male and female grafted on to the same plant. The male will not be as vigorous (this is not a comment of the male of any species except kiwifruit), and may decline and vanish or be removed by a kindly pruner.

Trick number three: in frosty areas, do not plant until late spring. Established kiwifruit will survive heavy frost, drought and being run over by a bulldozer (ours have survived all three). But they will be cut by frost, so you need to grow them fast and high, so that by the next winter they have good wide and deep root systems and high stems.

Trick number four is water. This only matters for the first four or five years, but in their first few years, they need to be kept moist in hot weather or they will suddenly, definitively, die on you. That wilted kiwi is probably a dead kiwi.

Trick number five: look up "how to prune a kiwifruit" because I can't draw diagrams and you will need them to do it well. Most importantly, do not just "give it a haircut" and cut back the long tendrils, or they will die back and you will get a tangled chunky mess. Kiwi will still fruit for years if you don't prune them at all, but your garden will gradually be taken over by kiwifruit vine. Follow the New Zealand example and keep your kiwis well tamed and neat, up a fence or pergola or even wandering through the apple trees, as long as those trees are established and sturdy, or they might collapse under the weight of vine. Kiwifruit need to grow vigorously to be healthy, but a vigorous kiwi can be enormous.

Once you have planted them, train them to one central stalk and let it grow upwards. Then wait. You might get fruit in three years, or you might need to wait for five or six years. Kiwifruit bloom in late spring, soft white blooms that turn waxy yellow and are very, very slippery when rotting on paving, so beware if you are growing them near the front door. But this late blooming does mean they are far more frost resistant than early-flowering fruit.

The fruit are best left until all the leaves have dropped in winter and they have had a frost or two. In frost-free areas, just give them a few weeks of cold nights. They will eventually soften on the vine – especially if pecked by the silvereyes – but mostly you need to pick them and wait a few days, or even longer.

Incredibly unripe fruit will also eventually soften but will not taste of much, which means that if you have eaten kiwifruit that had little flavour, it might have been picked before its prime.

Home-grown are, inevitably, better – unless the birds get them. Or the vines invade your rose garden and smother them all. You have been warned.

This week I am:

* Hunting to see if we actually have any kiwifruit this year, or if the birds have found them before they have even sweetened with winter.

* Celebrating the first pink camellias of winter ... yes, I know it is still autumn, but they'll bloom into winter, too.

* Picking fat red chillies, both red, fruit-laden branches for vases (stunning) and the fruit itself.

* Trying to find friends who need more chillies.

* Keeping an eye on the self-sown tomato that has survived two small frosts and is still growing. Not fruiting, mind you – it still hasn't fruited at all. But if, by some miracle, it survives winter, it is getting a good fruiting variety grafted on to part of it, and the left rest to ... possibly, totally unlikely, but you never know ... become a frost-resistant tomato variety. We do have frost-resistant tamarillos and avocados, carefully bred more than 40 years ago and I have been planting cold-climate tomato varieties that might have mated, so a frost-resistant tomato isn't impossible. Just unplanned. And unlikely.

* And the pallid cuckoo has called, which means winter is truly coming.

Cooking with kiwifruit

Kiwifruit recipes usually involve adding them to some other perfectly good recipe that doesn't need kiwifruit. I've tried kiwi fudge, which was good but no better for the fruit; kiwifruit, coconut and lime muffins, which were made prettier but not tastier by the addition of kiwi; a kiwifruit daiquiri, which was a waste of a good daiquiri; and date and kiwifruit cake ditto. Kiwifruit added to the traditional passionfruit and strawberries on a pavlova also add colour, without much else. This isn't to disparage the kiwifruit addition – it's not offensive but it just doesn't really matter if you forget it.

My favourite recipe is almost not one at all: sliced kiwis and strawberries sprinkled with caster sugar and drizzled with Cointreau, then served with ice cream. Or a perfect kiwifruit served in an egg cup with the top sliced off, then eaten slowly with a silver teaspoon.

This will give a pavlova with a crisp outside and gorgeously gooey inside, rather than one that is dry, firm, meringue all the way through. You need to fill and eat it the day it is made, as it could weep gently if you don't, not because it feels rejected but because the inside is moister than the outside and might leak.

4 egg whites
1 cup castor sugar
2 tbsp cornflour
2 tsp white vinegar

Beat eggs till firm and fluffy. Slowly beat in the sugar till it dissolves and is glossy, then gently beat in the cornflour and vinegar.

Pile up in a round about as big as a plate on baking paper on a baking tray, slightly indented and bowl-like in the middle. Bake about 100ºC for about two hours, till firm on top – it shouldn't brown at all. Turn off the oven and let the meringue cool totally before you take it out.

Filling:

½ cup cream
3 cups strawberries or raspberries
6 kiwifruit, peeled and chopped
pulp of 4 passionfruit
possibly a few drops of Cointreau

Just before serving, top with the cream, then the red and green fruit, and then drizzle the passionfruit over the lot. Bring whole to the table and let guests generously help themselves. Serves two greedy people, or six sedate ones.

2kg peeled chopped kiwifruit
350g sugar
300ml white wine vinegar
1 tsp finely chopped fresh ginger
1 small chilli, chopped
2 tsp allspice

Simmer till thick; stir well and often. Bottle in sterilised containers.

Lay slices of juicy kiwifruit on either side of tough thin steaks for about four hours to tenderise them. Throw away the fruit afterwards, in case it is contaminated with bacteria. Do not, under any circumstances, reuse it on the pavlova or even feed it to the chooks.