So today we're pruning these petite pearl vines. These are three year old vines and
they're going to be trained as a high cordon training system. What we are going to do today
is decide on the final cordons. And so what I wanted to show you is what we did last year.
You can see here there are multiple cordons in this vine. There's one, two, three, four cordons.
And the reason why we leave so many cordons and we always encourage this to our growers
in the midwest, is because of cold damage. If we have one of these cordons that suffers a lot of
cold damage and it dies, it's very easy to replace this one by laying a cane that is coming from your
alternative trunk. So leaving at least two trunks is ideal for growing grapes in cold climates.
The other thing that I want to show you, and it looks very messy, but last year we decided to
put two coordinates per side. So this vine has four cordons. You can see here one, two, three,
and four. So what I want to do today, is I want to pick only two, because those are going to be the
final coordinates that we're going to leave for the the life span of this vine. What I'm going to
show you is how I make a decision about what's the best cordon and how to start pruning it.
The ideal way of starting pruning it is to start pruning and spurring the canes that grew last year
from the distal part of the cordon all the way towards the center. The reason why we want to
do that is because if you start pruning and spurring these canes that are up here first,
if you have any dead material down here, you're not going to have any material to lay down as a
new cordon. But if you start pruning from here, and you start spurring these canes,
and you come up to this middle part of the cordon, and you realize "well you know i'm
missing a lot of spurs or there's a lot of like dead material here", you can still use some of
these canes that are on this side to just lay down as a replacement. So that's why we always start
on the distal part. It's much easier. So that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to start pruning
and I'm going to show you the two cordons that I left, and how i'm going to pick one of them.
So in this spur, I'm actually leaving two buds per spur,
and so there's one on this side, you probably can't see with the camera, and the other one here.
These are going to provide the two shoots for the following year that are going to carry the cluster
so there's going to be four clusters here of fruit and the same here these vines hybrid vines
have basal buds that are for fruitful that means that those very compressed buds that are just in
the union between the cane and the spur here are going to break and they're going to carry fruit so
many times growers will actually leave only one butt here plus the basal bud in this case just
because we are training them for the first time we just want to see what's going to happen and
we're going to leave those two visible butts here but you can just prune them only to one
so in this case we could prune off this one there's this part there and i know that there's
going to be a basil one that is going to break and it's going to have also fruit all right so
we've cleaned up all of the canes and now we have all our spurs with two buds per spur and
now we have to make a decision whether we want to keep this cornering or this other corner
so if you look at the coordinates they both of them look really good and healthy
the only difference is that this corner on this side is missing a spur position right here
something happened here with with the bud it didn't break and so we didn't get a shoot
last year so we're missing a position there but if we were to count all the the growth
centers that are going to produce new shoots with fruit we have one two three four five
six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen we have 13 spurs if each one of these spurs
produce uh two shoots we're gonna have 26 shoots and then we're gonna have about you know
maybe around we could potentially carry like 50 clusters on this side so that's a lot of fruit
but what we want to make sure is that these are going to be our centers of growth
for a very long time so we want to make sure that these spurs are in good positions this one
that you can see is going down is great for high corn because the shoots are going to come down
in this case this is going up so we're going to have to you know let those shoots flop down
during the growing season these positions underneath are ideal because then we don't
have to do anything with the shoots but this cordon is great has a lot of centers of growth
this one as well if we count here we have one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven
twelve so this one has twelve and the other one has thirteen the only good thing about this one
on this side is that uh it has no dead space well this one is missing one right here so this area
here is not going to be productive the other thing before we decide which one we're going to do is to
look at where's the origin of these different k different uh coordinates so this one here is
one of the trunks that is coming up from here well this one this other one is coming from
this other trunk on the other side that has one two three and so since we're probably
going to um choose one of the other two canes to produce this coordinate on this side
i'm gonna be more inclined to keep this one because it's an independent
corn and so i'm going to remove this here and i'm just going to keep this corn
as my final corn for this particular vine so i'm going to detach it from the wire,
take it down, and then i'm going to bring my loppers... I'm just gonna make a clean cut
right here, if
i can get the loppers in
and remove it. And now we have here our final cordons for this vine.