How to Prune Grapes The Right Way (COMPLETE GUIDE)).mp4

In all my years of gardening, nothing has confused me quite as much as learning how to prune my grapevines. And if that's where you're at right now, then this video is for you. Both Jacques and myself just spent many hours deep in viticulture history, understanding the anatomy of the grapevine, how to prune it based on the variety you have, the different pruning methods, cane versus spur, as well as how to fix a bad grapevine and start a new one. But before I show you how to reset this atrocious grapevine behind me, we do have to understand the anatomy of the vine itself. By the way, this video is sponsored by Shopify, but more on that later. So first you start off with the most basic part of the grape. Here's the soil line and the grape is going to come out of the ground as what we'll call the trunk. Then there's going to be a section called sort of the head of the grapevine and that's where it starts to branch off. As it branches off, these shoots that are developed are called canes. Now here's where it starts to get tricky. If this cane is left for over a year, it becomes something called a cordon. I'm just going to call that an old cane. Off of any cane, you can have what's called a bud, which we all know from our plant world. That's going to be a section where a shoot can develop from. So out of a bud, you'll get what's called a shoot. When that shoot grows further, surprise surprise, that is called a cane. And if that cane is then pruned back down to a couple bud sites, that is called a spur. So the grape is kind of confusing because a trunk in a way is sort of cane-like in its structure, but it branches off into what are called canes or cordons if they're a little bit older. And any of those canes can produce buds, which produce shoots, which turn into canes, which if cut down, are called spurs. But fundamentally they're all sort of the same thing. So here we have a first year grape. This is something you might find at any standard nursery. Now if you look at the bottom, you've got the trunk. Just this much, technically, is the trunk, at least right now because you can see that woody growth. This is older than a year. Now, this browner wood right here is a cane. It's probably developed in the last year or so, meaning it hasn't really fully lignified or turned into a more woody structure. And that's fine because what we need this to do is go straight up and develop what we'll call our complete trunk. So all the way straight up is going to be our trunk. Anything that's branching off in that first year, this right here, this right here, these are going to be canes. Now, if we had left this for another year and it started to get woody like this, you would then, for some reason, call that a cordon. Don't ask me why. Blame the people who make fancy wine. Now, when you look at the cane structure, you can see this is the sprouting tip of that cane. And every single one of these canes has multiple budding sites. So you can see right here where this sprout has come out, there's a budding site there. There's a very small one right there. Basically every few inches you have a budding site. And that's the same for this vertical cane that we're going to be developing into the trunk. And so what you would do is you'd have them coming off to the left and the right, growing up a little bit and coming off to the left and the right. And that brings us to how to actually get a grape on the wall so that you can even prune it. So what you've got here is braided steel wire running horizontally along this wall. We have three. You really only need two. And there's a lot of ways you can do this. If you're not growing your grapes up against a wall, you can throw some posts in the ground and throw wire across. It's called a two-wire trellis. It's a really simple and effective way to grow grapes. Now, what we need to do, remembering our anatomy, here is our grape that we want to convert to work on this trellis here. So what do we have? We've got the trunk. This is really just a cane that's going to develop into a trunk, but regardless, that's what we have. We need one trunk going vertically up to about head height or so. So what I need to do right now is thread this under so I can tie it to my trellis. In this example, my grape is a little bit overgrown. You're probably going to get a grape that's a touch smaller. That makes the job easier because you'll be able to grow it directly up through here and tie it to the trellis as it grows. So now I have what's going to become my trunk trained up through my wires. I'm just going to tie it off here at the top. I do not need to let it grow any higher than this. What that means is I can actually snip the top of this off. I may leave a little bit extra just in case I need canes to run horizontally, but we'll address that in a minute. So I'm going to take this top off and you can see what we're left with here. So we've topped our vine off here. We're going to have this beautiful trunk and now you've got to get into the two different types of systems for growing grapes. You've got something called cane pruning. We know what that is. That's these longer stems coming out this way. We know what a spur is. That's going to be cutting a cane down to about two buds. So how do you set a grape vine up for success regardless of which pruning method you're using? In the first year, it's the exact same. You're trying to get that trunk up and spread some canes out across these wires. So what I'm doing now is I'm going to try to locate some canes that I can tie out across this way. First of all, we're going to remove this one because I don't want to use the middle line here. I'm just gonna use the top and the bottom. I see one right here that I can bring out this way. That's looking really good. Eventually next year, I'm probably going to have to steal a shoot from here and train it out this way. But that's fine. With grapes, it's all about patience. Once you set it up right, you're going to get production like crazy. If it's easier, you can wrap it around the wire. But since this one's just a touch longer, I'm going to tie it and then do a quick wrap. Grapes do have tendrils, so they will eventually spiral their way down. Now, when we look up here, we want one going to the left, one going to the right. Looks like I have this one that wants to go to the left, but I'm going to make it go to the right. So I'm going to train this one out this way and this one out this way. So I'm really only missing one cane this year and that's totally fine. There'll be a way to create a new one in the seasons to come. So here we have the basic structure of getting a first year grape up. You'll have a trunk coming up, you'll have left, right, left, right. That's probably the most classic way to do it. The only thing you'll want to do at this point is just kind of trim off any extra debris and definitely trim off what are called the water sprouts or some of those lower shoots that are below the first cane split. You want to take those off. So I see one down here. If I let this go, it would become a real problem in just a season or so. And it would start to get really confusing what is going on with my grapevine. And speaking of, now I'm going to show you how the different pruning methods of grapes differ because honestly it is confusing. While pruning grapes can be a little tricky, the sponsor of today's video, Shopify is big on simplicity. The best way to think about Shopify is as a powerful set of tools that helps you start or manage a business. In my case, it's helped me do both. 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And in our case, Shopify's point of sale tools, which help you in person make and track your sales were super helpful during the Northwest Flower and Garden Show where we had our very first booth. So whether you're in person or online, you're just starting out or you're scaling up, Shopify is dramatically the most important tool that we use here at Epic Gardening to power our business. And you can get a free trial at Shopify.com forward slash Epic Gardening. That's Shopify.com forward slash Epic Gardening. And now let's get back to grape pruning. So we're going to start off with the easier one to understand, but it is a little bit less common, which would be spur pruning. With spur pruning, what you're doing is pretty much what you just saw us do. You have your soil, you have a trunk coming up. And the goal at the start is really get that trunk up to the top wire, just like this. There'll be a little bit of trunk hanging out right here. So I'll just label that trunk. That's mission one. Mission two is when that trunk starts to throw out sprouts or shoots that then become canes, you're going to run one horizontally to the right and one horizontally to the left. So again, we've got our trunk here and these are now going to be canes right here and right here. These canes of course are going to have buds on them, but those won't have done any sprouting yet. So this is year zero, just establishment. This would be probably year one when you've really gotten those canes out. And this would be end of year one over here. What's going to happen is this is grape year one. You're actually going to get something off of this, which is fantastic. So we have our wire trellis up top and what those canes will have done is out of every single one of these buds, they will produce another cane. For simplicity's sake, we'll have these canes kind of dropping down and I'll draw about five of them. So now what we have are five to 10 canes kind of dropping down. This is where you will have gotten your grapes from that past season. So hopefully you got a couple of little nice chunks of grapes. We'll represent that with this. So now you have last year's canes producing new shoots, which produce canes, which then of course produce your grapes. This is where your fruit is going to come from. But with spur pruning, if we remember that every cane, when it's cut down to about two buds or so, that's called a spur now. So what you're going to do is actually leave these horizontal canes, which are now called cordons. Don't ask me why again. It's just when they're older, that's just what they're called. So the horizontal ones are cordons. The fruiting canes are the ones that drop down. But with spur pruning, you leave these horizontal cordons and you actually cut every single fruiting cane down to a spur. So what that ends up looking like in a zoomed in view, if the trunk is coming up this way, you'll have a spur like that and a spur like that. And it kind of just keeps going on down. So this again is your cordon. And then you'd have two buds on each of these spurs. So because that can get a little confusing, this is what it needs to look like afterwards when you're setting it up for the next year's growth. You'll have your trunk, you'll have the cordons coming out of the top, just like this, running horizontally. And then you're really just going to have some spurs hanging out like this. And you want to max this to 10. It doesn't really want more than 10. So this is the after as you go into the next season's growth. And what's going to happen here because there are two buds per spur, one of them is going to become the cane for that year growing downwards or upwards, however it wants to grow. And this next one is going to grow out and get cut back to become the spur for the next year. So let's get into cane pruning. If you're confused, use this method. Just forget what I said about spur pruning because this is the more common method. And frankly, to me, a little bit easier to understand. So year one is the exact same. You have your soil level, you have your trunk and you either have one or two wires. We'll just do one for the sake of example here. And you're just trying to get to the top of that wire with your trunk. That's it. Nothing more fancy than that. In year two, your trunk is going to throw out some canes across the top of that wire. So you're really just trying to train out that horizontal. And that's really all you're trying to do. This can take a little bit of time. As those grow out, of course, as the season progresses, they're going to produce shoots and canes much like they would have with the spur method. So this is where you're going to get your grapes, just like the spur method. But then this is where this method really differs. And in my opinion becomes a little bit simpler to deal with. So unlike the spur method where you would cut every single one of these canes down into spurs and just leave the top canes then becoming cordons, you're going to cut at this point. So it's called cane pruning because you are pretty much removing the entire cane. So then you might be thinking, well, what's going to be on this horizontal? It's actually going to be one of the canes that you left. That becomes the new horizontal cane coming out like this and coming out like this. And now your question might be, well, what, why did I have two on each side then? Well, because you need enough bud growth at this trunk layer to produce an endless amount of next year's fruiting cane. So what you'll do is you'll cut this one down to a spur and that will be sticking out kind of like this and kind of like this with probably two bud sites per. And then every year you're going to cut this one off and replace it with one of the buds from this one. And then this one will become the next what's called renewal spur right here. So as we come out here to my haggard looking grapevine, let's troubleshoot it with what we just learned. As you can tell, I have my trunk here. And after that, it starts to look like a bit of a mess. Anything that has this sort of white woody structure is technically a second year cane or what's called a cordon. And I have at least one, two, three, four, five, six, it's all over the place. So the very first thing I'm going to do is control the vertical height of the grapevine. I have a vine going crazily high above that I'm not using whatsoever. It's just getting in the way. In fact, it's in my neighbor's apple tree. That's crazy. So what we're going to do is clip that off right at the top. So all of this was wasted energy. The grape was producing all this growth over the apple tree and not juicy grapes for me. Next, I have to decide what pruning method I'm using. Like I mentioned, I'm going to be cane pruning whenever possible. It's the simplest one to understand, but the grape's not really set up for it anymore. So I need to make some pruning cuts. So when I'm looking at this, I go, I want to do cane pruning, which means I want a cane coming out to the left and the right and then up here to the left and the right. So I'm going to remove anything that's not conforming to that straight out of the gate. Namely this one right here. I'm not using this middle wire. I'm just using a top and bottom. This whole thing can go. The only thing I'll say is I will leave myself a bud or two just in case I need to train something up or down. Next, I have this crazy horizontal cordon coming out that's in the middle. I don't need this one, but again, leaving a couple buds just in case. Next, I have a bit of a gift because going left, I want a cane. I actually have a cane right here with another cane shooting off that I can cut down to what's called that renewal spur. And then what I'm going to do on this cane is count out the buds. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10. I'm going to give myself a couple extra just in case, but you want to get to about 10 buds. And then I'm going to tie that to the trellis. Next year, canes are going to come out of all of these buds and that's where the fruit will be. Another pruning cut here. Self-explanatory, just cleaning up that structure. So next I've solved this left bottom side. What about this right side? There's a huge cordon coming out. Since I don't really have it set up properly for cane pruning, I'm just going to do a hard reset and bring this back to a bud site or two. And then I'll use that bud site to get my next year's cane. Up here, basically the same thing. Now in a perfect world, I would have that cane that I can kind of flip up and make it next year's cane. I just don't have it. So I'm going to cut this down to two buds. I'll give myself a little wiggle room. And as the next year comes out, I'll be able to fill this out and we'll have a great cane pruning setup. So I've got my trunk right here. I've got next year's cane coming out right here. I've left myself a renewal spur. And because I didn't have canes, like I said, on the other sides, I basically just left myself a renewal spur for the next year to kind of reset this grape. Where most grape growers go wrong is that confidence in the prune. Whether you're using the spur pruning method or the cane pruning method, which of course is our recommended method for most grapes, you do need to cut this plant down quite a bit. And of course, do it at the end of the season when the leaves have fallen off and you can shape it for that next season. If you want some grape growing basics, check out this video right here and stay tuned because in spring we'll do a follow-up. Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.