Pruning Grapes
The Fine Art of Pruning Grapes
Pruning grapes for your own garden is as easy as one, two, three and four. You can now fulfill your lifelong dream of having fresh grapes and maybe even producing your own homemade wine just waiting for you in your own wine cellar every year. And if you follow the steps a lay out here, your grapes should come out wonderfully. Here’s how to do it:
The First Year
Spare your infant grape bush the pruning clippers in its first year. This is the time to let nature run its course and your grape bush sprawl out on its own. This untrimmed bush is a lovely sight and promises nice full grapes in the future. So with the instrumental chorus of that old Christmas song as background just sing, Let it grow! Let it grow! Let it grow!
When Father Winter has blown his icy breath over the earth go out to you grape vine and examine it carefully. This is one of the biggest decisions you will make when it come to your grapevine. Find the fullest, most hearty looking stem, the one that you think will be the survivor of the bunch. Lace that stem through a support structure like a wooden trellis and let the slaughter begin: all the other stems must go or they will hamper the growth of your candidate. So go ahead, get medieval with those other stems. Don’t let one of them escape your deadly clippers.
The Second Year
With the carnage of the previous year behind you, you are ready for the next phase of pruning. In the spring, cut all but a pair of the branches emerging from you main vine so that the remaining vines looks like a capital Y from the front view.
Half way through summer, your grape trellis should be filled out enough where you can begin shaping your vine. Like Michelangelo looking at a slate of stone, you should begin seeing the shape of your final growth within the growth of vines. Take you clippers to it—clip-clip-clip here, clip-clip-clip there, cutting the ends off the vines you want to grow further and taking out the weak, ugly or inconvenient upstarts altogether. Things should really be starting to take shape at this point!
Repeat this process when Father Winter pays his second visit, letting only the heartiest and best of the off shouts see their third year of existence.
The Third Year
As you know patience is a virtue, so now is the time to exercise it. Here comes that annoying song again: Let it grow! Let it grow! Let it grow! During the spring and summer of this year, you want to mostly leave your vine design alone. Trim anything that grows from the lower trunk but just let nature take its course with the rest during this first part of the year.
This winter’s pruning will be the most fruitful—literally, since you will finally be able to reap the results in less than a year’s time form this point. At this time, you should clip-clip-clip the outgrowths so that your vine will look like an elaborate candelabrum. You want to cut the bulbs carefully since they will be the ones that grow into the actual grapes.
The Fourth Year and Beyond
In the winter, trim the buds so that they will grow in the summer. In the summer, reap what you have sown. In the spring and autumn you want to keep the outgrowths well trimmed an in controlled so that you don’t develop a monster plant that is completely out of control.
Repeat this fourth year process indefinitely and you will always have great grapes on your summer table. Happy clipping and pruning, viticulturalists!