How to Prune Grapes - Summer

Hi, I'm Tricia, a California organic gardener and today we're going to talk about summer maintenance for your table grapes. We've had an extremely wet season this year and my table grapes have gone bonkers. I'm growing four different types of table grapes here and there's a lot of vegetative growth making for a very dense canopy over the grape vines. Earlier in the spring the shoots were thinned when they were about six to twelve inches long. You should have about six to eight shoots per foot of canopy. At the same time as thinning the shoots I also cut the suckers off of the trunk and I'm going to continue to trim these suckers throughout the season as necessary. You see there's not enough sunlight getting to this little fruit cluster. The sunlight is what helps improve the flavor and the quality of the fruit. By having so much foliage around the cluster I'm also at risk of disease. The first step is to take these long shoots and tuck them into the trellising and keep them out of the fruiting zone. That helped a lot but you can see there's still a lot of hanging vines. I'm going to trim back this shoot that has no clusters on it. If you're going to trim back a shoot that has clusters be sure and leave about 15 to 17 full size leaves before you make your cut. Cut as little as possible and try to cut at the point where the leaves are half the size of the mature leaves. These smaller leaves haven't started producing food yet so the vine won't miss them as much as it would miss these larger food producing leaves. The grape vines are looking a lot better. The cutting is going to stimulate the growth so you don't want to do this too late in the season. If the fruit is beginning to ripen it's too late to cut. Now that I've tamed the vines it's time to thin the fruit. A cluster thin when the fruit has just set and before it gets too big. For good size table grapes leave one cluster per shoot. In order to improve the size of the grapes snip off the very bottom of the cluster. I'm happy to have completed my summer maintenance on my table grape vines. Now I look forward to grape jam, grape jelly, grape juice and those frozen grape treats. So enjoy your grape vines and grow organic for life.