- This dead vine right here is my table grape
and specifically it is my flame seedless grape.
Now I said table grape
and I want to quickly mention what that is.
There are table grapes and wine grapes.
Table grapes are the kind that you sit around at the table
and eat as a snack, whereas wine grapes are usually made
into juice and then wine.
So it's a kind of a different system
for both types of grapes.
But most people at home are probably growing table grapes.
So we're going to cover some kind of pruning methods
about table grapes.
I am no grape expert
but I have done some fair amount of research on it.
And this particular vine right here
is a little bit loosey-goosey
hasn't been trained in the most technically correct way.
So we're going to go over how to prune it,
if you have a grape like this
that hasn't been properly trained,
which is probably true for most of you at home.
So let's get into the garden on the other side
and I'll explain to you what's going on with the structure,
where we're going to start, and what sort of tools we need.
Here we are right next to the flame seedless grape itself.
Now quick little backstory on this grape.
It was in a pot for a while.
We tried plan to get out into the yard
outside of the protected garden fence and turns out
it got dug out by the dogs three times.
I kept putting it back in the ground, kept getting dug out.
So eventually I was like, you know what?
I'm going to just take this thing, plop it in the garden
and see if it actually grows.
And that's kind of how it ended up here.
It's not a terrible place because it is on the most
sort of eastern section of my garden.
So as the sun rises, it might catch a little bit
of that morning sun, but it's not going to severely
block out any of the light for the rest of my garden.
Most of its shadow's going to be cast that way.
So that shouldn't impede any growth in here
but it does make use of all this wonderful light
that I am getting.
So that's actually not a bad location.
But the thing that's unfortunate is that
I didn't actually properly train it.
So when you come down here at the base of the plant
and you look at the trunk itself, what most people like
to do is actually train this single trunk to grow
nice and thick and tall up to here.
And then from there they'll split it
off into multiple branches.
Now since this was kind of an afterthought, to be honest,
I didn't really pay that much attention to training it.
So we ended up with instead our three main sort of leaders.
Now we are going to probably take off one of these leaders
and then let the plant split off the rest of the way,
but we'll get into that later.
Now first off, the tools that I'm going to be using
for this job is a set of pruners.
These are the Felco 8s.
They're a little bit bigger so they should be able to handle
some of the thicker branches but if they can't cut
through it, I also have these Felco 211s,
which are essentially like a miniature lopper.
They're really quite handy to have around the garden
'cause they aren't that big and they make
cutting thicker stuff like this really quite easy.
So that's kind of the backstory of this.
Now let's kind of zoom out, take a look at the plant itself
and talk about actually cutting it back.
When you cut back your grape, you might be surprised to find
that you really want to cut back something
like 80 to 90% of the entire leftover branches.
So let's get into when to prune and how to prune.
The best time for grape pruning is when it's nice
and dormant and the buds haven't started to break or grow.
So in this case, in San Diego, that tends to be around
sort of February and maybe into March.
Right now we are in the first week of March
and it's probably getting really close to the end
of the time where it's ideal to prune it back.
Now there are some things you could do to check.
Like for example, you can come in and sort of take a knife
or a pruner, cut into one of the branches.
If you see any liquid come out,
there's a good chance that it's still active.
But if you don't see anything come out,
then you should be good to go.
So what we're going to do is, like I said
reduce 80 to 90% of this.
You can't see the full view, but from here,
wraps all the way down this fence,
all the way to the beginning of my garden.
And on this side it wraps all the way to the end
of the fence all the way over to my asparagus patch.
So it has quite a lot of mass
and we're going to take it down quite a bit.
Now there are two primary methods when it comes to pruning
in a more professional sense.
That is the cane method or the spur method.
Now the cane method is where you would actually grow up
to have something like two branches.
you can have more and you would trim them all back
until they're only about two feet sticking out
either direction.
Now that's going to work for some grapes
and what's going to happen is
all the grape production that you get is actually
off of the one year old canes.
So when you're pruning back in a cane method,
you're pruning your grape back down to have only
two vines left that are one years old.
Now, you can generally tell when something's younger
versus older by looking at the bark itself.
Like for example, this has a really shaggy bark.
That's an old growth.
It's not from last year.
Whereas all these canes
they have sort of the smooth exterior
without any of that bark really developing.
Those are going to be your one year old canes
and that is where the grapes are going to be growing.
So we are going to have to trim back a lot of this.
And to begin with,
I'm going to kind of take an assessment of it.
I have three main leaders coming up that are quite old.
They have the shaggy bark and I want to cut it down to two.
So I like this one here 'cause it's nice and low.
It's very thick and it has a nice structure up here
where I can branch off of.
Now between these two over here
I'm a little bit unsure about which one I want to keep.
I have this one that's kind of crossing back over
and then when it gets to this point, it's actually splitting
off into two separate other branches
and I think that's going to be too messy
to actually deal with.
So I'm going to opt to remove this entire branch fully
and I'm going to leave this one and this one here
because this one goes up to here before it splits off.
And that's much more manageable to control.
I like the fact that it only has two junctions here.
It's going to make it very easy to maintain
and continue to grow off of.
So I'm going to start by going on the outside, pruning off
anything that's pretty much sticking over past this pole
and past this pole, which is my trellis support structure.
That way I have a simpler kind of overview to look at
and then I can come back through and then clean off
this interior section.
(trimmers snipping)
That's this side of the pole clean off.
Now I need to go on that side and clean off that pole.
All right, now to clean off this,
(trimmers snip)
Oops, something back here.
Ooh, it's really gripped on there.
So now we have everything separated between these poles.
Now we can come in and clean up the center.
Before you prune a grape in particular,
really want to sanitize your equipment.
I've already done that by actually rubbing some
of the 70% isopropyl alcohol
onto the cutting surface of both of my blades.
This should reduce any chance
of spreading disease from other plants onto your grapes
because grapes can be quite susceptible
to some particular fungal diseases.
So we want to try to keep it as clean as possible.
Now I'm going to go in and go for this really painful cut
that I mentioned
which is taking off this big branch down here.
I'm going to get my 211s and what I want to do
is I'm going to cut off, there's a little dead stick
right there, but I want to get as close as I can
to the trunk to give it a nice chance of healing well.
So right about there, I'm going to just lop it.
Ugh.
So it is painful 'cause that is a big branch to cut.
But the hope is that by doing this we will concentrate
all of its growth into these two main vines.
And if you have too many vines
and the plant can't actually support them,
what you'll end up with is a bunch of grapes
that end up really small and actually not that sweet.
So you might think, "Oh wow,
"I'm getting so many grapes by leaving everything on there,"
but the flavor of them is going to be diminished.
So we want to concentrate that flavor
into fewer clusters to get a better harvest.
Now that I cut this free branch, I'm going to chop it up
so I could try to remove it so it doesn't get
in my way visually while I clean up the rest.
(gentle acoustic guitar music plays)
Now that we've selected our two primary actual canes
to prune off of, we are going to start shaping these up.
Now generally with a table grape
you want to have something like 10 to 15 nodes per cane.
So in this case a node is every one
of these little bumps that you see
and that's where the new growth comes out of.
So that's one, two, three, four, five, six,
seven, eight, 9, 10.
But since this one's up here, 11, 12,
I'm actually going to stop it there at 12
because I want to be close to the wire
to make it easy to support later.
So we're going to go ahead and remove this.
Now we have one branch, so this one's going to grow this way
and then we'll deal with this guy later.
So I'm going to prune off any of these extra
little dead branches as well just to give it
a little bit of a cleanup.
Now as we get over to this side, I have to make my choice
as to whether I want to leave one, two, or three leaders.
I'm going to opt to leave two.
So what I'm going to do instead is I'm going to leave
this one here for lower growth along the fence line
and I'm going to remove this one in order to save this guy
up here which is coming off the other cane.
So what I'm going to do is get close to the main branch,
(trimmers snip)
snip that off and remove it.
So now I have one leader there that has about 10 nodes.
So now we need to clean up this one.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, 9, 10.
That's right before it branches again, which is perfect.
So we'll remove that.
(trimmers snip)
Now we have this leader here and this leader here.
Now let's tackle this crazy one over here.
Again, we have to make a decision on how many
of these branches or canes we want to actually leave behind.
So I'm looking at this one here
which grows up and crosses back over to this one.
Now since this cane is thicker
I'd rather save that one because it's going
to have better potential to produce more fruit.
So I'm going to go in here and remove this one first.
(trimmers snip)
I'm also going to take the chance to cut off
any little branches I left on the other ones
before I forget.
All right, so now this one's gone
and we are down to one, two, three.
This guy is just going straight up
and it's not really looking very good to me.
I don't like that it crosses all
through the fence like that.
I think it's going to lead to issues long term.
So I'm going to go ahead and make the decision
to get rid of that one first.
(branches hitting fence)
Okay, now we are down to two, so we need to clean it up,
remove any of these extra branches,
and then we're also going to prune it back
so that there's only 10 nodes for each one of these.
So I have one, two, three, four, five, six,
seven, eight, 9, 10.
So right where I cut it is exactly 10.
So now I just need to clean up any of these extra offshoots.
(trimmers snipping)
Okay, that one's good to go.
And then now we need to do this guy.
So one, two, three, four,
five, six, seven, eight, 9, 10, 11,
12, 13, 14, 15.
I'm going to keep that one at 15
because I like that it's up here
and I'll explain exactly what I expect this grape to do
now that the pruning is done.
(trimmers snip)
All right, well we could put the pruners away
because we've done the painful part of our job
which was removing about 80% of this plant.
Remember, you need to remove a lot in order to focus
all of its energy to produce tasty, juicy, big clusters
rather than a bunch of little clusters
that don't have any flavor.
You don't want to waste your time growing a grape.
You want those delicious grapes
that you can't get at the store.
So let's talk about what's left here
and how I expect this to grow.
So I have two main leaders
or what's normally called a cordon.
That's like the main kind of branch off point
that the rest of the growth is going to come off of.
So I have one going here and one going here.
And they're both branching off
into two separate leaders or canes.
So this one here is going to grow this way along the fence.
I hope it'll wrap all the way around
and then it'll produce grapes on that side.
This other one is a little bit weird.
It's crossing a branch of the other cane
but it's going to go up this way, run down this wire,
and across my garden to produce grapes that way.
So those are those two leaders.
They'll grow both upwards and downwards
depending on how I control them.
We go over to this branch here, it has again, two leaders.
This one's going to go up.
It crosses that branch I mentioned
and it'll grow on the upper portion of this trellis.
So that's where it'll set its fruit.
And then this one here will run on the lower end
of the fence and produce grapes there.
So what I created here is a two level system.
I have two leaders along the fence to produce grapes,
that'll capture the sun that's lower down.
And I have two leaders up here
that'll capture this more significant sun up high.
But the most important thing overall
is that this is a flat kind of plane in the way
that the grape can grow, which means it'll have
a lot of airflow, it'll have sun on both sides,
and it's going to lead to a very healthy grape.
So we'll follow along the journey of this grape
that's been very poorly managed and pruned by myself.
And we'll see if these recovery cuts that I made this season
will pay off big dividends in the summer.
'Cause I'm really excited to get some delicious grapes.
We got quite a few clusters off here
but I didn't do any controlling or pruning last year.
So they ended up growing very small.
They had decent flavor, they weren't stunning,
and it was overall too crowded
and I ended up getting powdery mildew.
So I'll try to do a more comprehensive grape care
as I tracked the growth of this plant this season.
But let me know if you guys want to see any other videos
on grapes or grape care and if you have any questions
drop 'em in the comments below.
(gentle music plays)