Seven years ago,
we moved to what I affectionately call our “rundown ranch” house. It is my goal to see how many fruits and
vegetables we can produce on our one-third acre lot. Almost immediately we tore out an old flower
bed and, in its place, Charming built an arbor where we planted a grapevine at the
base. The grapevine is now six years old
and the trunk of the vine is about two inches thick.
In its third
year, the grape harvest in September was plentiful. I made pints and pints of wonderful tasting
grape jam. The following year, the
months of April, May, and June were warm and rainy. My grapes developed small black spots that
turned into big black spots and then the grapes just shriveled altogether. Not knowing what the problem was, I phoned
our local Cooperative Extension Office.
I described the spots to the Extension Agent and he immediately
diagnosed the problem. It was a fungus
called “black rot” that often occurs during years that are warm, humid, and
rainy. The Agent told me that most
people would dig up the vines and start over.
I don’t give up easily on plants, so I asked if there were any other
possibilities. He said the only other
alternative was to prune the vine really hard and throw the discarded shoots in
the trash. (It’s not a good idea to try
to compost the vines because the fungus will not die during the composting
process and, if the compost was used on other plants, the fungus could spread.)
So with determination
and my trusty loppers in hand, I cut most of the shoots off the grapevine and
even chopped off a couple of yards of the vine’s trunk. All of the debris went into the trash. Then I waited for the next year, hoping that
the vine would revive.
Wonder of wonders,
the next spring the vine’s buds began to swell and leaves, then flowers, and
then grapes burst forth on the vine. The
yield that year was not much, but at least the grapes were edible and without
spots. I’m hoping to eventually get back
a bountiful harvest.
This weekend, I’m
going to give the grapevine its annual hair cut. I will get rid of any dead wood and cut off new
shoots that grew on the underside of the vine.
I’ll trim back the viable shoots that have grown on top; back down to
the two or three buds where the new growth will form (the pruned shoot usually measures
around 6 inches or so). The object is to
keep as much sunshine and air moving through the vines as possible to prevent
black rot. Shortly after the fruit sets
in the spring, I will go back and snip off any excess clusters of grapes from
the shoots. It is best to have only one
cluster of grapes per shoot. This
ensures that those grapes get all of the nutrition provided by the shoot and
the grapes will be tastier and bigger than if you leave the many clusters on
one shoot.
After pruning, I
normally fashion the snipped vines into wreaths. This can be done by simply bending each
pruned vine into a circle. The vines
will usually only be five or six feet long, so the ends will need to be tucked
within the circle, in between other lengths of the vine. This way, there is no need to wire or tie the
vines together to hold the shape. Wreaths
can be made into different sizes and shapes, based on how much excess vine you
have to work with and how much imagination you have. Next week, I will post pictures of my newly
manicured grapevine as well as the resulting wreaths.
Below is how the
grapevine currently looks. Please ignore
my un-groomed herb garden in the bed below the grapevine, that’ll be material for a later blog post.
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| My long-haired grapevine badly in need of a pruning. |
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