Wine Grapes

So what do you do as a horticulturist when you are in an apartment, or townhouse but also have a bunch of outdoor plants?  Plant them at your parents. Me I planted grapes, one a wine grape the other a table grape.  The one catch is that you also need to to take care of them.  Of course I don't consider that a negative.

Time for winter pruning

Too many branches and needs to be thinned

There are two labor intensive activities that are needed for proper wine grape growth.  Harvesting is the first that comes to mind,  Hot August temps and humidity, sticky fingers and trying to beat the birds to the fruit.  The other important one is winter pruning.  Proper winter pruning will set you up for a good harvest for the following season.  This takes place in none other than the winter.  I usually try to get over there in early February.

Looks a lot cleaner

The process of pruning is essential because grapes grow rapidly and if not tended to will become too big in the summer.  A goodestimate of the amount to cut back is 80% of growth.  That may seem like a lot, but at a research plot I helped out with at the University of Illinois, when they were not properly pruned the winter before, the wire holding them up snapped from the weight and we found ourselves picking vines up from the ground.  Overproduction not only has the chance to damage the support structure, but could also lead to lower quality of grapes as the sugars and water a distributed among many more grapes.  Grapes will flower off of second year wood, so any bud you leave behind during winter pruning could be a bunch of grapes.  A good rule of thumb is to leave 2 nodes (or buds).  You also need to eliminate unwanted branches like those that appear lower on the vine or are too close together.  As grapes are forming in the summer you want to make sure the bunches are spaced properly to allow good air flow to reduce the risk of disease pressure.

80% removed, give or take.  

So what do you do with the left over branches....compost them??  Not likely.  You see grapes are really easy to propagate.  Every branch there has the potential to become a new vine.  So here is what you could do.  Since this is dormant wood, you can heal in the cuttings into the ground and wait for the spring to warm up the soil and you could get a pretty good success rate.  Or if you are lucky like me and have access to a greenhouse, you can put them in potting mix and force them to root more quickly.


There is a catch though.  When taking the removed vines and making them into proper cuttings you may confuse which end is up, and having the cutting situated rightside up is very important for proper development of callus tissues and adventitious roots.  It has to do with how plant hormones are distributed and produced in the plant and may also have something to do with the ever elusive gravitropism I recall so fondly from plant physiology.  That is if they haven't figured out the mechanism in the last 10 years......but I digress.  Here is how you can prevent that confusion.

When chopping up your branches into manageable sizes cut the part of the branch that was closest to the trunk at an angle and have the opposite side straight across. Seems simple enough and I am sure you won't have any issues.    I would recommend a cutting to be somewhere between 2-4 nodes long.  One of those nodes will need to be below the soil and the rest can be above.  The node below will develop into the new roots more quickly than just the bottom of the cutting.  When the vine starts to grow then you should choose the most vigorous bud and remove the rest so that you have a nice straight start to the new vine.

What I have noticed when rooting cuttings is that the buds will break first and the root will follow some time after that, so don't check on them, let the cuttings do what they will do and just make sure they are not in direct sun and are plenty moist.


So where did I get these cuttings in the first place.  Well you see many moons ago I helped out with a wine grape growth trial in at the University of Illinois in Urbana. The trial looked at grape yields of different varieties throughout the state.  http://www.illinoiswine.com/ to learn more about wine in Illinois.  We would harvest the grapes and got to use a bunch of them for the annual grape stomp on campus (more on that some other time).   Being the horticulturist I am, I just had to take cuttings and two of those varieties were Marechal Foch and Bluebell.  Those are the ones I planted at my parents house in the northern suburbs of Chicago.  Seems the Foch is just kicks some butt on vigor and resistance to Japanese Beetles.  The Bluebell on the other hand doesn't do as well up north, and the beetles love it, or at least prefer it to the Foch.   The grapes are delicious if you can get over the seeds, and you can find Foch wine some places, though I have yet to attempt wine from these vines.

Well more to come on the development of this batch of cuttings, who knows maybe it is about time I planted a larger plot.  I did want to become a viticulturist at one point.

Always at your service,
Your Horticulturist