Oh, that's very normal for cucurbits. They all seem to produce male flowers first, and then the female flowers come a week or two later. Yes, you will definitely have to hand pollinate indoors. Although I can't remember specifically on kiwanos (I grew them once, many years ago, outdoors, and they were wildly productive, but frankly, they really don't have much flavor, and are pretty much just good as garnish for dinnerparties), I'm sure they are much like other cucumbers and melons: The MALE flower will be on a longish and VERY THIN (like pencil lead) stalk (an inch or two) which protudes out of the leaf axil. The FEMALE flower will grow directly from the leaf axil, with a very noticeable young fruit attached at the base of the flower. In regular cucumbers, the fruit is about the size of a jelly bean or a good-n-plenty candy (can you tell it's almost lunch time as I write this?) when the blossom opens (depends a bit by the variety). It should be comparable in the kiwano in size. And, it will look all bumpy and spiky, just as the mature fruit will, just much, much smaller. You really shouldn't have any problem telling the difference once the plant starts producing female flowers. Dennis SE Michigan Where all it does is snow, snow, snow and stay below Zero degrees every night!

There's no perfect answer without seeing your tree and knowing where you are growing it. Can you take a pic of your BH tree? Four feet high is pretty good sized for a container if it's filled out. I don't see why it can't sustain at least a few fruit. Citrus tend to flower prolifically, but drop all the small fruitlets they can't sustain. No reason why you'd have to remove the flowers. If your plant is NOT filled out with a good amount of foliage, AND the plant is hanging on to more than a half dozen fruit, THEN you might consider removing some of the small fruit to encourage more foliar growth this season. The point is it takes a lot of energy from the tree to sustain fruit. If the plant is smaller, it will be at the expense of growing leaves. But of course the whole idea for growing citrus is to get fruit, so if you plant can sustain them, let them be.

If you're not getting much production, it could be the soil, rather than the pollination. Getting a soil test might be a good idea. I know in my garden, though, historically, some cherry varieties hardly produce (e.g. Gardener's Delight) and some are prolific (e.g. Sweet Orange Cherry). Changing the variety may help. Which cherries are you growing? Are you having issues, or just wanting to know?

Whoa. This is VERY curious. If I change my bookmarks to gardenweb.com, I now go to Gardenweb, and stay there when I select forums and threads. In fact, having done that, I no longer get flung to Houzz at all. That is, everything just changed. The flinging has stopped! Houzz must have gotten tired of all that flinging. Now being able to actually go to a Gardenweb thread, and seeing locations there is nice. But when I'm there, and look at my Settings, they are Houzz settings, and don't include a location field. In those settings, I just put my name in "First Name" and my location in "Last Name". Boy, pepper pollination is easy compared to this! Thanks for your patience.