How I Easily Grew Juicy Grapes in 2 Years. Step by Step

In this video I'm showing you how I successfully grew grapes right here in my own backyard. It was so easy and you can do it too. So stick around and check out how I've done this. G'day everybody, welcome to my Aussie Garden and Kitchen Garden Edition. If it's your first time here my name's Darren but please call me Daz and yep here I am right in front of my grapes and this is a follow up about a two-year follow-up to my video where I showed you how I planted grapes. That video did pretty well and you know what, it's been two years. I thought it's about time that I actually showed you how I went and how successful I've been. How successful have I been? Check it out, I've got bunches and bunches of grapes. It is awesome. So it was a couple of years ago now that I planted two grape vines. They're both a seedless red grape and I had this idea that I'd have grapes down one side of a walkway and thornless blackberries sort of propagated down the other side and here I am a couple of years later and it's absolutely successful. I've got an abundance of blackberries, thornless blackberries growing down one side and I've got my grapes here down the other. So yeah, let's have a look at what I've done and how I've gone about it and how you can do it. So the first thing I had to do and what you would have to do too is work out what variety you want. Now do you want something that's a table grape, a wine grape, will it grow in your area, that sort of thing and I decided on the two seedless red grapes, a flame and a crimson I believe they're called and the reason I went for those is because I've got kids who aren't fans of seeds and grapes, neither am I, so it just made perfect sense. We wanted a table grape, something that we can eat and away we went. I got stuck in, planted them and here I am today. You might be able to hear the chickens just beside me so sorry about that but I've got the grapes down here next to me and they just want to have a good fill of grapes. I think in the next couple of days instead of eggs I'm going to be getting grapes out of these guys or these girls I should say. Here you go, yeah, there you go, chick, chick, chick, enjoy. They're awesome. One thing I had to consider and you'll need to consider too is the location for the grapes because grapes are going to need a good 60 hours of sunlight every day. So in my case I've put them here where they're going to get sunlight. Now what I should have done is actually swapped my blackberries and grapes around so the grapes actually get more sunlight than the blackberries but it's fine. They're getting enough sunlight here. They get very early morning sunlight all the way up to midday where they go over the top and they're still getting sunlight during the day. The sun still hangs around obviously until the afternoon before it drops down low so I'm not seeing any bad effects of that. So thumbs up, it seems to be a good location. So definitely think about your location where you're going to put yours because you do want that sunlight on your grape vines. So once I had my location sorted out I had to look at the soil and I was quite lucky because here I'm on an inland island and my soil is a very sandy loamy soil. So when it came to planting I had a nice soil that was going to drain well. You don't want the roots of the grapes to be down in a muddy clay soil. That's just not going to be good for them. So when you're planting yours consider something that's going to be a nice free draining soil. If you've got a container make sure it's in a container, a big container that's got drainage holes so all that excess moisture can get out of the container. And if you want to know more about planting your grapes I do recommend my video where I show you the whole process of where I planted mine and of course you can go back and see how I started and then come back again here and see how it looks two years later. As far as feeding and watering goes, grapes like to be watered but not drenched. You don't want those roots wet as I said earlier. But I guess when it comes to hot weather it's common sense that you're going to have to use more water in the hot weather weather especially summer. While they're producing in spring you're going to want to make sure they get enough water and at the start of spring and actually during spring I like to give them some food just so when they're developing fruit they've got that nutrition that's going to help them out. And when it comes to food I just use a general purpose fertilizer, fish emulsion, seaweed mixes, stuff like that. That's all I use on these. I pretty much feed them once they've woken up and started to have leaves growing on them in spring and then as they're starting to fruit I'll give them another feed just to help along as I said earlier with the process of growing the fruit and make sure they've got that nutrition that they're really looking for. Just to note when watering I always try to water down low on the ground. I try not to get the foliage wet at all because I don't want to introduce fungal diseases and things like that. So especially if I'm watering in the afternoon or the evening I'm going to be watering down at the base and not up on the foliage because I just don't want any chances of things happening with mildew and stuff like that. So when it comes to fruiting you're looking at the size and the color and even taking a few every now and then and trying them for sweetness and you pick them at the desired sweetness you know the level that you think that you're going to enjoy them at. It's all about you enjoying your fruit so you really need to get out there and taste them yourself and decide when you think you should take them off the vine and eat them yourself. These ones here they're a little bit small but they're absolutely delicious. They really pop inside your mouth with a fresh crunch and a burst of sweetness and I absolutely love these and as you can see my chickens love them too. Now grapes are going to need pruning and I prune mine in winter because at that stage the leaves are falling off and you can see the canes quite clearly and you're able to get in there and look at what sort of shape you're looking at which branches need to be cut back that sort of thing. I've got the two plants here. I planted them about say eight feet apart from each other to give space and then when it came to pruning I just pruned it so each one grew up and then out to the left and right and then when it comes to actual leaves growing and eventually having fruit the new foliage comes from those canes that I've pruned and then the fruit actually grows on the brand new growth. So you really want to get out there and prune for shape but you also want to prune so you've got brand new growth it's going to come out in spring and give you the most delicious fruit on that brand new growth and there's really not much effort. The biggest effort you're probably going to have is the pruning and I didn't find that to be a big deal at all. I think I probably took about 15 minutes per grape vine of the two vines I've got here say 15 minutes each and I cut those back didn't take long at all. I think I cut them back so there was maybe about eight spurs or eight stems coming off each branch either side and away I went and as you can see behind me and in other pictures I've been showing you I've had great success growing grapes here in my own backyard and you can certainly do it to yourself. I have an abundance of birds here that visit my yard and of course they like fresh fruit so I do recommend that you net your grape vine especially well in fruiting season to stop the birds from eating your fruit because in my case I would have no fruit there's so many birds here. So I made this structure here and it works well I used pipes just plastic pipes as a frame they're okay they're doing the job the job I did it on the cheap but I think in hindsight I might look at maybe doing some sort of wood frame and making it taller because I can get in there and I walk and I can take grapes and berries from one side to the other it's fantastic but I wouldn't mind a bit more headroom and as you can see here the grapes really do grow and grow and grow well the vines do and they're pushing on the net on the net they're pushing through the net so yep I think next season if you come back and see more videos this is probably going to be a taller frame just gives me a bit more room as well as the grapes. I do recommend you watch my video where I planted these and you can see where it all started just click in this video right here it'll take you to that video thank you so much for being here and hopefully I'll see you in the next video bye for now