Grape Pruning Made Simple(r)
I promise it is not as hard as it sounds.
Does grape pruning literature make your head spin?
It did for me. When I first tried to educate myself on this topic, I walked away thinking: what the what?! But I kept at it, and finally things started to make sense.
I think the reason pruning grapes seems so confusing is that with most woody, shrubby type plants, what you need to know about pruning is pretty simple: figure out if the plant flower on last season’s wood, or current season’s growth.
The plants that flower on current season growth can be cut down to the ground in the winter and let re-grow without losing flowering potential.
With plants that flower on the previous season’s growth, you can’t do that, because you will lose all of your flowers. To keep the plant within bounds, you must prune soon after the plant has flowered, so that it has time to set up buds for next year’s flowering.
But with grapes, they don’t fit neatly into either category. They’re a tad more complex.
Terms to get familiar with: (image links attached)
Shoot: soft green growth that grows from a cane in spring. This is where fruits form.
Cane: the shoot turns into a cane after 1 year of growth.
Node: is the thickened spot on a cane where a shoot will grow from.
Bud: in this context, bud is another term for node.
Concepts to wrap your brain around:
After getting these two concepts down, the grape pruning literature will make a whole lot more sense and you should be able to understand what the authors are saying. At least, it did for me.
Grapes fruit on the green shoots (the newest growth) that grow off of one year old canes. That’s a mouthful, but getting a handle on this idea will help you get what to do. If you cut back into wood older than 1 year, you lose fruiting potential until it grows back.
If you make the mistake of letting your vine grow uncontrollably, you’ll have a whole mess of long tangled trunks and vines, most of which will be non-fruiting wood.
You also do not want to leave too many fruiting canes, because the plant may not have enough energy to produce quality, tasty grape clusters.
The difference of spur versus cane pruning:
-The reason why you’d choose one system over the other is in knowing which system your cultivar fruits better from.
-According to the Home Orchard Education Center, all cultivars can be pruned to a cane system (but not vice versa), which is simpler for most gardeners to handle. When in doubt, choose cane pruning.
-If you don’t know what pruning system your variety requires, Oregon State University’s website and Ron Lombaugh’s websites are good resources for this.
-For an image reference on cane versus spur pruning types, please refer to OSU’s website, image 5G for cane pruning, and 5E for spur pruning. The blue areas are everything that is kept, the gray is pruned off.
-For training young plants, please refer to Oregon State University’s depictions.
What to do if you didn’t train your canes to either system after you planted:
Option 1: whack it back to the ground. It will respond vigorously and then you can train it. Refer to OSU’s advice on training. The bummer with this option is that you’d lose this season’s fruit.
Option 2: improvise. Knowing where the vine is going to be most productive will help guide you. If that fails, go for option 1.
Take a class if you can!
The other easy way that this information can become clearer to you is by taking a class. I recently took the class offered by HOEC (Home Orchard Education Center). I learned a ton. And I got to take home cuttings to start, which are incredibly easy. This aspect alone is the worth the nominal price of the class in itself. Free plants!!
Stay tuned for a post on table grape variety selection for our climate.
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