Great Grapes: Grow the Best Ever by Annie Proulx

Author:Annie Proulx
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Storey Publishing, LLC
Published: 1980-09-21T16:00:00+00:00

Pruning

Once the young vines are porperly shaped on the trellis to the system you want and begin producing, they are mature vines and must be maintained by heavy annual pruning. Many beginning grape gardeners are timid about pruning and hesitate to slash away healthy growth. But grape growers must learn to be ruthless, for the vines cannot give a decent crop without thorough pruning. There is a limit, however; too much pruning will discourage the vines.

Pruning grapevines is a fairly simple operation. There are no ladders to climb, no “wrong” cutting angles to worry about, no special tools are required. Most grape pruning jobs can be done with hand pruners.

Vines should be dormant when they are pruned. Where the winters are mild, pruning can be done at leisure throughout the winter. But never prune or handle frozen canes; they are brittle and snap off easily. If your winter temperatures are severe, and you expect a certain percentage of canes will be killed by the cold, hold off on pruning until the early spring when you can see which canes have made it through the winter.

It is possible to prune late in the spring. The vines will leak sap rather alarmingly, but the practice does not seem to injure them. But late pruning and handling after the spring growth has begun will almost certainly injure many tender buds.

How much to cut off? This is the burning question for the beginning grape-grower. The answer varies with the cultivar. The different grape varieties are divided into “long cane,” “medium cane,” and “short cane” vines, and different handling is recommended for each.

Long cane: These vines should keep between thirty and sixty buds on each plant after they are pruned. Serious vine growers weigh the pruned wood on a balance scale. They leave a basic thirty buds on the vine, plus ten more buds for each pound of year-old wood pruned out.

Medium cane: Leave twenty-five basic buds plus an additional ten for each pound of wood pruned out.

Short cane: These cultivars bear large clusters of grapes and should be severely nipped back. For the first pound of cuttings taken off, only four to six buds are allowed to remain. A scant two buds are granted for each additional pound of wood removed.

Just as artists begin a painting by “roughing out” a sketch, experienced pruners begin by roughing out the whole vine to conform to its particular training system. They leave plenty of extra buds as a margin, weigh the cuttings, then “fine prune” the vine to its proper balance. After a few seasons the eye and the hand are all that’s necessary to tell how much to take off.

Long Cane Medium Cane Short Cane

Beta

Caco

Campbell Early

Concord

Fredonia

Foch

Niagara

Worden Blue Lake

Catawba

Concord Seedless

Delaware

Ellen Scott

Golden Muscat

Himrod

Interlaken Seedless

Landot 244 (Landal)

Moore Early

Seibel 5279 (Aurore)

Seibel 13053 (Cascade)

Seneca

Steuben

Stover

Vidal 256 Seibel 9110 (Verdelet)

Seyve-Villard 5-276 (Seyval Blanc)

Seyve-Villard 12-375 (Villard Blanc)

Seyve-Villard 18-315 (Villard Noir)

New Trunks for Old. It is not unusual for vine trunks to grow feeble through disease or damage and falter after some years. It is

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