Taming the Grapes
Hello friends!
This weekend I’m going to share with you how we are working on training, taming, and expanding the grape vines in our backyard. To be honest, we did this over a month ago now—But we still thought you’d like an update!
In mid March, before our final snow storm, Andrew and I spent a few hours in our backyard working with our grape vine. We started with the volunteer grapes that have begun growing on our back fence. In the past, I took out all the vines that weren’t grape there and last year we cut back all the raspberry and other random plants trying to grow along the base of the fence. Also last year, we decided to just encourage the new grape vine to take root and grow basically however it wanted. This year, it was time to start training the grapes back there. Together, Andrew and I chose which vines coming out of the main root and stem we were going to keep and encourage to be our main vines. We have one going along the side fence and one going along the back fence. After removing and untangling the other vines from the fence and pruning them off, we were happy with our decisions. But boy did that take a long time, since we had just been letting everything grow and intertwine throughout the fence in that back corner. Once we had our main vines, we did the typical first year of pruning, counting out bud spots on the spurs and choosing which offshoots to keep so we could have the vine focus on producing grapes rather than expanding everywhere.
Next up was the other back corner— the small space between our garage and our neighbor’s garage. We tried something new this year, cutting out a TON again. Last year, I started the process of trying to reclaim that back corner, since it’s cozy and has pavers back there. I thought I was going to kill the grape vines on accident in the process, but it actually helped them flourish! Andrew and I went crazy back there again pruning a lot of the overgrown vines out from the main stem/cordons. Then we tried something new— we took a vine we had started to train to go onto the trellis on the side of the garage and moved it to the fence along the other side of our property. We are hoping it continues to thrive in this new area, which should get a different amount of light but provides it a lot of space to itself. That took a bit of effort as well, since we had to de-tangle it from the garage grape vines and trellis and move it over to the fence. This vine cordon is long guys, but it’s going to be amazing this year, I can just feel it.
After moving that large vine and thinning out a bunch of newer vines from the corner, we moved on to the easier job of training and pruning along the garage. I should give a big shoutout to the University of Minnesota Extension and their grape guides and videos, because we rely on them every spring now for a refresher before we get out there. The vines on the garage are pretty easy to work with, since we’ve been training them for a few years now. Mostly, we just have to prune out the vines that are trying to grow into the crabapple tree or straight into our yard and then follow the guide of counting shoots and spurs and bud locations to trim for the best possible grape vine health. We still have one vine that has outgrown our trellis situation and goes above the door to the garage and around the corner, but we’ve trimmed that situation way back (in part because one of the vines that was going that way is what we moved onto the fence).
Now that all the hard work of training, taming, and teaching the grape vines is done for the year, we get to sit back and wait to see the leaves and grapes start to form. We are already seeing the bud areas start to swell and show signs of waking up for the year, and I can’t wait to watch them grow this season!
~Natalie
