Having a small vineyard in your yardscape is not only beautiful, but a delightful food source! With only a moderate amount of effort and upkeep, you can enjoy beautiful foliage and bountiful amounts of grapes for table use, raisins, juice or wine!
A key fact to keep in mind about grapes is that the plant ONLY fruits on same season wood. That means that any stems or cordons left from a previous season will not directly bear fruit themselves, but only on new stems that form on them. So, ongoing vigorous pruning is required to assure plant health, compactness and fruitfulness.
We’ll show you how we use the Kniffen system and the first-hand the results of pruning to create 4 lateral branches (cordons) per vine, along with a pair of renewal spurs for each cordon. The beautiful flush of growth in the spring, along with “baby” grapes forming on new growth is a real thing of beauty.
This is the second episode we’ve produced on this subject, and was filmed in later spring when growth was coming on and the finished results and growth is evident. The first episode, “Pruning Grapes for High Productivity”, was produced in very late winter and shows step by step the process of selection of canes for retention and removal. View the first episode by visiting https://youtu.be/0m5KWAXYH9Y
You’ll approach your vineyard and pruning much more confidently and effectively after enjoying these videos!
Hey, Dirt Farmer Jay here from DirtFarmerJay.com. You probably love grapes as much as Dirt Farmer
Maggie and I do. It's one of the favorite things to grow around here, but you've got to know how
to prune them. We've already done a video before showing the basics of it, but now we're going to
do an early spring one to show you what the results are of a good pruning job for productivity
and for structure. Stay tuned. Hey, Dirt Farmer Jay here from DirtFarmerJay.com. Grapes are a
beautiful addition for the property. Not only are they beautiful to look at, but they're also
highly productive and put out great fruit that is great for raisins, for juice, for fresh eating,
or if you're a wine grape connoisseur, you can certainly grow them as well. I'm going to show
you a little about the Kniffen system, the K-N-I-F-F-E-N system that works particularly well in a small
home vineyard like what we have here. Now in our earlier episode, which by the way I placed a link
in the description down below that you can go and visit, and we'll also put it in the end card in
case you haven't seen it before and you can simply click there, but in that earlier version we simply
showed you what it looks like when you begin to trim back and it's kind of an unruly mess because
grapes are extremely prolific growers. And then we bring it back to a basic system, but this is a
helpful view right now because you can see the end result of the pruning and how the plant is
responding to it. So a little bit of a primer or review of what we did earlier. When you prune a
vine like this on the Kniffen system, you'll see that what we've done is use a three wire system.
Down here this wire is not to grow anything on though, it's simply to place the irrigation system
that keeps it high and out of the way of the weeds, makes it easy to cultivate without damaging
or getting in the way of my cultivation tools. The second wire which you can see right here is about
oh 32 to 40 inches, something like that, is where the first cordons are applied and then up higher
and that's about five foot two, five foot four, something like that, is the top wire. Well let's
look and see the results here. When you go to prune in the early spring before the growth comes on,
you're simply going to end up with one branch off on each side of the wire. So that's your basic form
and you've got to work with whatever the grape vine gives you. So you're working as close as
possible, and this is a pretty good example, to get a left and right 10 bud cordon on this wire
and the same matching set on the top. Now notice that grapes only produce fruit on same year wood,
it's not even first year wood depending on how you count it, but it's same year. And to demonstrate
that look here, these are only a couple months old, look at the fruit right there on that new
growth that's emanating from one of the cordons that we left intact early spring. Here's another
example right there, setting very early, extremely prolific plant where it not only puts out great
fruit but also the stem in which it's going to hang on at the very same time. So here you have
a 10 bud cordon, 10 bud cordon, 10 bud cordon, 10 bud cordon. Now at the end of the season or early
next spring, we're going to end up cutting that off because now it's old wood and it won't fruit
like this. So where do we get next year's cordon after we cut this one off? Well that comes from
renewal spurs that you leave intact in the growth areas, and if you look down here you can see I
have renewal spurs down here as well that are budding out. We've got some extra here, here's a
nice one that's coming out that when this gets cut off next year, this long one will replace this.
We'll look for two more renewal spurs and we'll start the fun all over. So the basic formula is
clean center vine, a pair of cordons, two renewal spurs on each side up to the top,
two 10 bud cordons, a pair of renewal spurs, let the plant fruit, and then step and repeat for the
following year. Now that you've seen it like this and see how the plant responds, perhaps it'll give
you a little bit more confidence to take this approach in your own vineyard. So you need to
prune your vines vigorously because they are vigorous growers, otherwise you're going to end
up with ornamental grapevines and ain't nobody got time for that. You really want to have productive
pruning vines so you can enjoy literally the fruit of your labor. Hey, if you've got some insights
that you'd like to share with our other viewers about how you approach this important task of
pruning, won't you put it in the comment section below? And if you found this video to be helpful
to you, jump up your skill set in this, won't you please like it? And better yet, won't you like our
channel? Hey, we hope this has been helpful to you. Until the next time, this is Dirt Farmer Jay
from DirtFarmerJay.com
