Growing Muscadine Grapes in Texas

[Music] hey everybody i'm justin shiner and i'm andrew king and we're with the department of horticultural sciences at texas a m university and today we're going to talk muscadines we're here in nacogdoches texas at the stephen f austin state university arboretum there's 30 40 50 different cultivars or varieties of muscadines yeah we're gonna taste them we're going to talk about them and we're going to tell you how you can grow your own we're going to be full let's do this [Music] muscadines what exactly are muscadines muscadines are one of our native grapes so we've got 13 native species here in texas and muscadines represents one that is native to east texas all the way up to delaware and it's been improved through reading and selection and now we have over a hundred different name varieties so if you're gonna grow a grape why wouldn't you grow something like thompson seedless if you wanted a table grape or cabernet sauvignon if you wanted a wine grape or concord if you wanted jelly here's a good example of why you may not select those grapes and why you may be better off growing a muscadine we're in east texas it's humid this especially during the growing season it's hot and it rains pretty frequently so what do they average 40 inches of rain or so here a year what does that translate into it translates into disease problems so this is a white wine grape variety called blanc de bois in texas this is our number one wine grape variety that's white produces white wine by acreage so it's very popular extremely high quality potential so you can make excellent wine with this however it is not resistant to all diseases in this particular case these vines right here they haven't been sprayed with any sort of protectant sprays any fungicides and they've got black rot and we have anthracnose here on the shoots and so in an area like this actually see some downing mildew in there as well so in this part of the state these diseases right here are not only going to affect the foliage it's going to take your crop as well so if you wanted to grow this grape you would have to get out and apply some protectant sprays now let's look at the muscadines directly across these didn't get sprayed either and if you look at the leaves they're nice and clean this was a shoot that was cut which is why it's dead but these leaves are nice and clean we don't see any blemishes we don't see anything in the way of disease the reason is because muscadines being a native have excellent disease resistance in the leaves and in the fruit so if you're going to grow these in your backyard you could get by without spraying anything to prevent pests or disease commercially you know you're going to get some losses from some fruit rots and things like that maybe great very moth so you would want to make probably some applications good news is you could grow those organic if you wanted to muscadines represent probably the best grape option for us in texas as far as growing with organic practices so let's talk a little bit more about the different muscadine varieties all right so you want to grow muscadines but what variety or varieties should you grow there's quite a few out there to choose from well there's a number of different criteria depending on what your purpose is for the muscadine if you're only going to have one single vine you only have space for one you have to make sure that it's a self-fertile variety so in the wild muscadines are diocese the plants are either male or female and that's true with our other wild grapes so a lot of the grapes that we see grown in the woods never produce any fruit because they're male vines they only produce pollen and the female vines are the ones that bear so grapes are primarily wind pollinated so the pollen blows in from the male vines and pollinates the flower there are varieties of muscadines however that pollinate themselves this variety that we're looking at is called supreme it's a female variety so if you wanted to grow this grape you need a self-fertile variety in pretty close proximity typically we're talking about 30 feet or so what's another feature that you may be looking for in a muscadine to help you select well what color do you like do you prefer bronze or do you prefer black there are also some varieties that have more of a pink reddish type of color as well this is probably more important if we're talking about selling grapes so retail sales another feature that you may consider is a wet sim scar or a dry stem scar so what are we talking about here well let's take a look so when you pick your grapes they'll either have a dry stem scar where the point where it attached to the cluster it's dry so there's no opening towards the interior of the barrier some varieties are more prone to have wet stem scars so that can either be a tear in the flesh or that could be a hole that perforates all the way through inside the berry so what does that do well that reduces the shelf life of these berries to a very short period of time in your backyard that may be perfectly okay or maybe you pick operation or something like that but if you were going to try to store these grapes that would reduce the shelf life so if you have this muscadine vine in your backyard you get 40 pounds of fruit over a fairly short period of time you want to hold on to it as long as you can how do you store it well you're going to store it in the refrigerator what i would do is i'd lay the berries out on the counter sort out all the ones that have a wet stem scar you're going to eat those first and then the ones that have a dry stem scar you can go ahead and put those back in the refrigerator so you can either put them in a sealed bag and you're probably going to have some condensate in there which can cause some rot over the long term or you can store them in something that breeds a little bit you can leave the bag open if you've ever noticed if you look at fruit in the store like blackberries in those little clam shell packets you'll see that there are slits or opening inside of those containers to allow them to breathe and to prevent water from building up because throw these hot muscadines in the refrigerator in a bag what you're going to have is condensate form on the inside of the bag and it's going to reduce the shelf life what else are you going to look for in your muscadine variety you're going to look for size so this is supreme right here supreme is a female like we said and it is perhaps the largest fruited muscadine this is not an exceptionally large berry i just picked but they can get up to the size of about almost a ping pong ball about an inch and a half in diameter there's a handful of varieties that are pretty close to this size and there are some varieties that are substantially smaller so in the wild the berries are going to be quite a bit smaller so there's some really large muscadines another feature that you may look for when you're selecting a muscadine is flavor there's a whole range of flavors out there if you've tasted one muscadine you surely haven't tasted them all because they all taste different so some varieties like supreme have better fresh eating characteristics so pick it off the vine and eat it it tastes good maybe the skin is thinner and crunchy and edible [Music] higher sugar content things like that there are also processing varieties that are primarily used for wine and juice those varieties tend to be smaller and often they'll have tough skin or maybe the skin will have tannins in there and it'll give it some astringency so you want to make sure that you're getting a fresh eating variety if that's your intended goal and now if you're thinking about having more than one musket iron vine you've got room for a handful in your yard you can pick varieties that ripen at different timings so there are varieties that are considered to be early ripening typically we're talking about july august early august ripening period a lot of the bronze varieties tend to be fairly early there's a new variety called lane that is an early black fruiting variety and then there are varieties that are considered to be you know mid-season late season and then even very late there are some varieties like granny val that are very late and you may pick those through september even into october so if you were gonna have three or four vines in your yard you could have some red or some black you could have some bronze you could be picking them over a few month period of time there are also varieties out there that ripen synchronously so the whole vine tends to ripen at once and if you were growing them commercially and trying to harvest efficiently that's what you would want and then there are varieties that ripen very unevenly so as you can see supreme here does not ripen totally evenly you can see some of these berries are still green whereas on this cluster there are berries that are already black so you're not going to pick this fruit at one one time there's a variety called nesbit which i'm a big fan of and it ripens over about three to four week period of time so even with that one single variety you can be picking fruit for literally a month and that's great for the backyard maybe even a u-pick operation dr king you're from tina hall yeah east texas so you know muscadine grapes do most people don't yeah so most people think that they've had a muscadine uh probably 80 percent of the classes that i've had say have you had a musket on they say yes i hate those things that's always my first clue that they maybe haven't had a muscadine maybe somebody hates them i don't know but uh most the time those people have had what we know as mustang grapes these tiny or smaller than the muscadine little grapes out there in the in the wild in the forest and things that nature and they're very tart and they're just they aren't very good quite honestly at least not to eat fresh yeah and if you want to know is it a muscadine or is it a mustang grape two different species look at the leaves muscadine grape nice and green not hairy front and back not much in the way of hair whereas a mustang grape the shoot tips will be silverish the leaves will look silver especially on the undersides because they have so much pubescence or hair that is the mustang grade we see muscadine grapes in their native range most of them are going to be east of interstate 45 all the way up into delaware so east texas where rainfall is higher soils tend to be more on the acid side lower ph than further west so if you know the muscadine grape and you're from east texas you've probably seen it maybe growing up the trees maybe you've seen that little pile of grapes on the ground uh where the coons or something got in there and was eating them or he and i or us we've been known to climb a tree or shake a vine here and there so what happens with muscadine grapes is they produce small clusters of large berries and when they get fully ripe they'll actually fall off the cluster and fall to the ground and so if you're familiar with those wild muscadines good news whether you like them or not they have been improved dramatically through breeding and selection so what's the knock on these guys uh really thick skin thanks again and seed so in order to really eat this most people at least the older muscadines for sure are going to chomp into this thing split the skin and then need to split the flesh again to be able to spit the seed out unless you're you mentioned like your son who will actually eat the seed which is he's apparently a tough dude well there's some nutrients in the seed but the seeds are bitter and they tend to be fairly hard with muscadine grapes and for some people that is a complete deal breaker they think grapes should be seedless naturally you know that doesn't occur naturally and because muscadine grapes have only been bred for about 100 years now we are just getting our first seedless varieties and so the deal is with muscadines versus all of our other grapes is they're different so they're genetically different and their physiologically or their structure their function is different to the point where you can't really cross very easily at all a muscadine grape would say thompson seedless and then get some seedless fruit you have to cross the muscadines with muscadines for the most part and that makes the process a little bit slower but as you said muscadines have this thick skin most varieties are seeded with breeding what what we've done or they have done the breeders is they've increased the berry size to the point to about the size of a ping pong ball at the largest absolute largest varieties higher sugar content as high as any table grape you can get at the store uh we said we said seedless now the skin has gotten thinned out some varieties have a really crunchy skin i mean it's almost as crunchy so so the texture actually sort of makes up for some of the thickness if the texture is really crisp it doesn't we don't perceive it as that thick and they're just so different than the table grapes people are used to that's why some people object to them flavor's different quality is different textures some people have described them i guess as musky which i think is sort of they just have muscadine in the mind so that they're going to say that but they're delicious i feel like my dad went around anytime these things were ripe he always was eating the muscadine well and if you know there's some percentage of the population doesn't like muscadines i give them to my class most semesters and about 15 or 20 of people don't like the flavor or the seeds or something like that and they just say they don't like any of the varieties but the other 80 percent or 85 percent find a variety of varieties that they like and there's always people waiting after class because they absolutely love them and they say where do i get these things and the answer is you either find a vineyard that does you pick or sells them locally or you grow your own grow your own we don't really have a retail market much to speak of for muscadine grapes here in texas really it's concentrated in the southeast you can find them in north carolina georgia that sell them in clam shells and things like that but even there it's hard to get traction in the market because these fruit are unique but you can grow these and you can grow them with really not a lot of effort and so especially if you're in the right spot yeah if you're in east texas for sure yeah and there are other fruit like that that we can grow with uh really not a lot of effort that we don't have a commercial market here in the u.s but there's a commercial market elsewhere in the world so jujubes for example asian persimmons would be another good example pineapple guava we could probably name a few more now let's talk a little bit about that thick skin so the thick skin whether you like it or not serves as an excellent barrier you know to prevent pests and disease problems and skin is thick and if you squeeze the grape this is how some people eat them we call it a slip skin you squeeze it the pulp actually pops out and separates from the skin you can see how it separated very easily so slip skin some people eat the pulp and throw the skin down but that's a waste most of the new varieties the skin is actually quite edible there you go you know my wife tells me to grow a thicker skin all the time i wonder if this would suffice i like it all right so now it's time for the tasting tasting on the tailgate it's hot but the sun has gone down hopefully the noise in the background's not too bad this is probably when we should have started you're right you're right so what we've done here is we've picked um just about every variety we're not going to taste them all no folks we didn't taste them all but we did taste over 30 varieties of muscadines now this is a great opportunity or should i call it a great responsibility were they delicious yes should you eat that many muscadines at one time no nonetheless here are some of our more interesting findings supreme is large so spring can get up to about an inch and a half in diameter it is one of the most popular fresh eating muskegonites we hastily harvested these so this one you would basically harvest i harvest it with love and affection all right let's try this mine is not that ripe it's hard because the mustang is all ripe in slightly different times crunchy skin much more edible i thought the skin's much more edible so mine wasn't extremely ripe i think it was more ripe than yours i would guess so here we go into one of our issues is that if he gets a ripe one and i don't i'm going to think this tastes like not good and he just tastes but when it comes to mustang some people like them more ripe me i prefer mine to the point where they're as ripe as they're going to get before they start to raise them and even if they raising a little bit that's fine i like the acid to be low because the acid decreases with ripening and sugar of course increases so i like them sweet where they taste like candy but i was much more pleasant to me the skin was pretty crispy pretty crunchy i guess is the better way to say it which makes it even if it is a little bit thick it's a lot more edible and then you get into that flesh not overly sweet but good must get on flavor i mean that's kind of silly but i think it's traditional good enough all right try airflow flavor this has got good full muscadine flavor which is fruity it's aromatic a hint of like a concord but with maybe some candy like we'll say cotton candy with something aromatic mine was similar to that to our last a little bit similar to supreme just again just bursting crisp it was refreshing right scarlett starts a little bit more oblong than the others yeah that we've had so far a little smaller it's got this reddish tint to the skin um some consumers don't like that darkening color so some varieties you know once they hang for a while and they start to darken that's a that's a problem and so they're picked before they actually will start to turn the dark color scarlett being one of them uh triumph even or tara those can darken as well like those guys on the cooking show cheers low acid in mine low acid but not really high sugar not really sweet so it's got a bit it's got a little bit of creaminess in the flesh it's almost a little bit let me think i'm crazy almost pick up a little hint of banana i would i would agree yeah this is strange there's some interesting flavors going on in that all right nesbit self-fertile ripens over a long period of time good backyard grape i've got it in my backyard it's one of my favorites my only problem and i hate to say that for you taste is the skin is kind of thick and kind of leathery there you go i have to say i might have to eat my own words no pun intended because you see on that one i chewed it and went into small pieces it was actually fairly soft yeah i didn't get much thick skin there i liked that it had a good bit of acid in there it wasn't again mine wasn't really all that sweet but it was as muscadini as fry muscadine is not a word but it is now that's fried to me and it met all my traditional muscadine needs all right so we've got the two most popular wine or processing type muscadines and as you can see they're very large so we've got noble the black for red wine and we have carlos you want to hold the carlos up i do not make sure that the camera doesn't get hit by that car right there so there's a there's a carlos not very big okay all right even smaller yes so small um ripens fairly evenly and if you're going to make wine you want to be able to come in and pick a lot of this because it's a small berry not a lot of juice so you want to pick a lot at one time for efficiency and then you go through and of course make wine and this makes a very red wine and this is the standard and on a side note muscadine wine red wine is healthy in general in moderation of glass today muscadines actually have higher phenolics in particular resveratrol which is one of the compounds associated with uh cardiovascular health muscadines have higher resveratrol than all other grapes carlos has been around a long time you can find carlos for sale all over the place a lot of people grow it and they as they're fresh eating muscadine it's a processor you can eat it fresh but the skin is i won't say shoe leather it's just this side of shoe leather okay the skin is shoe leather the flesh is a strange sort of mine was at least had some kind of mucilaginous texture because you might have some pineapple flavor maybe a little bit i wouldn't say this is great i would not encourage our viewers to run out and use carlos as a fresh i mean for one have at it that's what it's for album r which is okay again spoiler alert one of the thickest skins that we are going to see we picked this one because the skin is so thick it really stood out you want to make sure you have your dentures glued in very well when you eat this one it's light you know we said just this side of shoe leather a while ago that's the other side of shoe later not a fan all right so we've got southern home inter specific winter specific hybrid it's one of the few uh grapes muscadine grapes i should say that has been crossed with other great species difficult too most the time uh you end up with uh something that's sterile or the cross just generally is not successful it's beautiful the vine's beautiful the leaves look different than all the other mustard more load more low so you can grow it it's attractive um we actually have some musket on trials across texas and this one we have in a location in colin county the master gardeners there they have a vineyard and they were kind enough to try some different grapes their soil is alkaline 8.3 ph used in black lamb it's amended with compost compared to the other muscadines this one does much better so if you need that muscadine flavor and you're probably not in the best location this is probably your choice when it's really ripe it has a coconut flavor i don't think this stuff is really ripe let's try it i'm getting a little vanilla as far as flavor goes that's my second so it got ripped out southern home i mean for me it doesn't have great texture but it has an incredible flavor i think it's spot is those those people that probably their soil is probably not great for muscadines your ph is maybe seven maybe seven five um probably still need to throw some compost in there and amend it but southern homes probably your best bet all right so we're gonna move on to a couple of new releases new ish i should say oh fairly large not huge but right there on the would you say moderate large yeah 2014 release is self-fertile obviously it's a bronze we've got lane here a 2012 release it's self-fertile and it is an early black fruiting variety all right what are we going with all right lane first right off the bat the initial flavor i really like some pleasant sweetness a little bit of freshness the fruit flavors very good yeah i'm not picking up any the pulp the pulp has a it's not as quite soft it's kind of medium it's kind of meaty yeah but that's not a bad thing no in fact it makes it easier to get the seeds out so i'm i'll give that one a thumbs up i'm hiding a little bit that was lame and it's early like you said so i mean almost all of the lane over here are right we're close to right yeah as opposed to the other blacks that are not so it's it's ripe um things like uh triumph and terror are ripe right now as well bronze in general most of the time uh there are a lot more bronze ripe early than there are black fruit all right hull i just got some floral characteristics like some riesling wine so i tasted passion fruit that's my favorite of everything we tasted so far that's crazy okay because okay spoiler alert we ate a lot of muscadines over here so much that they all ran together but now that we're kind of seeing them separate all is up on top as far as the flavors excellent very good good aromatics and i still have it i still have those yeah yeah a lot of them disappear quickly yeah i agree interesting i'm gonna be including okay he's recording let's do this let's do this this is my little boy aubry he's gonna try his first muscadine here just bite right into it this shirt again tell us what you think does it taste good or does it taste bad can you try it let's see give it a good bite there you have it folks is it good or not all right apparently there's an age so how much fruit can a musket iron produce or you know how many vines do you need in your backyard well this muscadine variety right here this is jane bell it's a self-fertile variety so it pollenizes itself you could only have one vine and you would still get fruit and it has a pretty large crop on it so a muscadine vine and this is very dependent upon the spacing but you know a typical situation we'll say 10 16 foot spacing you can produce 40 50 60 pounds on a vine and so if we're talking commercial production on a per acre basis 8 10 up to maybe 12 tons an acre yield potential so if you did have room for only one vine you could get quite a bit of fruit off of it and in fact this vine may even be producing too much fruit there are a few varieties out there that you have to worry about over cropping so they produce more fruit that they can fully ripen okay so this friday jane bell is an older variety it's berries are medium to really on the small side it's a bronze fruited variety so when the fruit is ripe it'll have the skin will have a bronze color and it's got pretty good flavor but it has a thick skin a lot of the older varieties have thick skin or have a really astringent skin so when i say astringent i mean if you eat it it's going to taste bitter it's going to leave you with a rough drying puckering sensation in your mouth like strong tea or black coffee a lot of the newer varieties they don't have that the skin is thinner maybe it's crunchier and it doesn't have the bitterness so when you're selecting varieties i would suggest that you go with something that's on the newer side so released in the past couple of decades or maybe 25 years or so those varieties tend to have much better flavor characteristics than the older varieties of muscadines all right so you've got these muscadines or maybe your neighbor has some muscadines and you really like them but you can't find them perhaps or maybe you're just in the spot that you're just really interested in having a backyard project let's propagate some all right so muscadines are typically propagated by way of soft wood cuttings you say what's a soft wood cutting well most of the time if i see a stem that is green all right that is my first clue but then i'll take the actual stem itself and i'll begin to bend it some if it bends a little at least and will return back to its original state i consider that to be a soft wood cutting you can kind of notice on this stem right here you've got a lot of that soft wood maybe 18 inches of it or so and then you'll notice as you move into it the stem a little bit more toward the canopy you begin to see a whole lot of this tan color all right a lot more of the lenses on the actual bark that are showing i would consider this to be semi-hardwood all right and actually i would consider this entire stem to be semi-hardwood all right so semi hardwood and softwood and hardwood are all sort of relative terms uh they all do a fairly good job of describing what they are so softwood is truly the softest material but semi-hardwood is a piece of the stem that is relatively new growth typically less than a year but it's been through enough it may be it could be two seasons old but it's been through enough of the uh uh weathering process where it becomes lignified all right and that's sort of um shown by this tan color and then again it's much harder than than the soft wood material is now after this goes through a winter all of this material that is uh still here next year will be considered hardwood material and if you were growing or propagating table grapes or wine grapes you typically propagate them by way of hardwood cuttings and there's reasons for that because that's typically when they're pruned table grapes and wine grapes also propagate fairly well from software cuttings but for muscadines that's not an issue we have a lot of softwood materials if you've got a neighbor make sure you ask them first but and if they'll give you some cuttings you can easily do this what i would do is i would take not the very freshest material that's a bit too green all right too soft if you will but i would take material like this right here all right so you've got a node here a node here a node is where the leaf meets the stem but you already know that i'm sure uh all right so you take one of these the the basil leaf off the leaf that's the closest to the bottom of the cutting all right and then i would cut this at an angle all right and that thing is ready to go you can use some rooting hormone some auxin if you'd like to typically find that at a hardware store or nursery if you want to i cut the tendrils off because it's just a modified leaf and it's going to sit there and just kind of get in the way so three to four inches long put this in a nice uh if you've got perlite it can be that can be peat it can be it can be saw from your backyard technically as long as it's clean the issue with that is is that you could easily get into some diseases and things so if you at all have the ability to go to your nursery go to your local hardware store and buy some peat or some peat based soilless substrate and stick this in there put a if you've got a little greenhouse that's great but if you don't make your own take a 2 liter coco coke bottle or whatever your favorite soft drink is and cut the very bottom of it out put it over these cuttings and that will keep it nice and humid probably spritz it with water every day or two if especially if it's up in a kitchen window and you'll have roots on this thing in what three three four weeks something like that that plant will be ready to go the only thing you have to be careful about when you're propagating your own material is that the material is legally something you can propagate that's the way that the breeder and the patenting company typically make some money off of the thing and you can't blame them for that so with that being said make sure that the material you're wanting to propagate is something you can legally propagate and you'll be in good shape okay so we're looking at muscadines and uh you know we happened upon this this fine specimen right here as you can see it started to grow in the spring had a canopy and then it collapsed all of a sudden so this tells me there's a trunk or a root problem and if we really inspected this what we would see this one has vertical cracks all down the trunk and so this one probably was injured during the winter time and so muscadines they're cold hardy typically we think about zone seven and you can get damage when you start to get often down into the teens but it really depends on the weather that you had beforehand so if you're in the northern northeastern part of texas and you want to grow muscadines you need to do your homework and see if that variety is particularly cold tender or not you're going to want to go for some of the varieties that have a little better cold resistance and that information is out there okay so we're looking at a bronze variety here this happens to be uh triumph and what i wanted to point out here is that some of these berries have rot like this barrier right here this is gonna rot and it's gonna fall off we've got a rotten berry right here it already just slipped off you can see here's another one right here that just fell off as well so muscadines aren't totally bulletproof and what we'll see is that there is variability in disease susceptibility across the different varieties so in other words some varieties tend to be a little more prone to rot than others and that information's out there so if you wanted one that had excellent disease resistance you can you can do a little homework before you pick the variety and make sure bronze varieties show blemishes uh obviously a lot more than the black varieties because that black skin will hide some of those blemishes also there's something called grape berry moth that infests all grapes muscadines and our other wild species and our domesticated grapes as well and this particular moth lays its eggs on the outside of the berry little larvae little caterpillar emerges burrows into the berry and rots the berry and so this is pretty easily controlled with something like bt or some other sort of some other insecticide all right so you want to grow muscadines in your backyard uh pretty simple so as far as growing requirements go for muscadines it's going to be very similar to other fruit trees where you want full sun when i say full i'm talking six to eight hours a day uh you know best case scenario would be a mustang out in the middle of an open field where it gets sun all day long you see them growing in the woods they'll grow like that you're gonna get far more fruit out in the full sun number two you want well-drained soil what does that mean well it's easier to say what it's not well-drained soils uh don't stand in water so if you have a soil that you get a heavy rain and you see water on the surface for a few days that's poor internal drainage the water isn't drained through the soil well very few fruit trees and fruit crops will tolerate those conditions the roots will rot and they'll die you can also have slow internal drainage where say you know you dig a hole one one foot two foot down and what you do is you hit standing water well the roots aren't going to grow any deeper than that as well so just about all of our fruit crops require well-drained soil what do you do if you're in that scenario you've got really heavy clay drains really slow the best thing you can do is burn it up so you raise the soil where you plant the vine it's very similar to a garden row where if you elevate the soil it encourages drainage so if you had really poor drainage you may want to elevate the soil a foot maybe even two feet up off the ground come in there with a couple of loads you know with something like a wheelbarrow dump it form a nice planting bed you can see that here where the soil has been raised to encourage drainage so we want full sun we want well-drained soils what kind of soils do muscadines grow in they'll grow in a pretty wide range of soil types so long as the ph is below seven so we're talking about acidic soils that's what they like what happens if you grow them in higher ph soils well you're gonna get some nutrient deficiencies so we we can look right here these vines have iron deficiency these are growing in our vineyard in college station texas where the soil ph is 8.2 iron deficiency shows up as yellowing in the chute tips and then it extends down the chute so that's iron deficiency that is a product of having soil that with the ph that's too high you'll see that in some other fruit crops as well so that's the main issue when it comes to muscadines is we want acidic soils we want full sun and we want the soils to be well drained all right so if you want to start a muscadine vineyard you know what are your steps the first step is to evaluate your potential site you're going to want to test the soil you're you're going to want to take some soil samples that are representative of the entire planting area send them into one of our reputable labs and they will give you uh information on the soil characteristics you can get things like texture sand soap clay you can get information on the chemical characteristics which is extremely important muscadines prefer acid soil so we want a ph of below seven the ideal soil for muscadines is going to be in the five and a half to six and a half ph range you can also find out if your soil is deficient of any nutrients and you may be able to amend or add that before planting number two is you're going to look for your irrigation source are you going to use well water or perhaps surface water even though we're in east texas right now and it rains about 40 inches a year it doesn't rain necessary at the right time so you're going to want to have irrigation for your vines they may survive the summer without irrigation but your production is going to be lower and the berry size is going to be smaller so figure out your irrigation source take a water sample and send it into a reputable lab and they will give you a chemical composition of your water and so there are things to look for like salts and even boron that can be a problem for vineyards grapes are moderately salt tolerant but we want to know that in advance because there are some sub-aquifers in texas that are saline so the water is too salty to use for irrigations and it's going to cause problems down the road okay next you're going to figure out what varieties you want to grow are you growing these grapes for wine you know do you have a winery well then you're probably going to select varieties that have better wine making characteristics are you going to do a u-pick operation well things like timing of harvest are going to be important you may want to extend that harvest season as much as possible or maybe you're going to do the fresh market and in that case you may also want to extend the market or you may want to time it to hit some part of the market or maybe uh some sort of sale that you're going to go to like a farmer's market so there's a pretty wide range in the ripening dates for varieties you're going to of course secure your plants muscadines are propagated from soft wood cuttings which means they're really not quite as easy to propagate as a lot of the other grapes and often the plants tend to be a little more expensive so you're going to order these plants and they make they'll probably come in as a dormant bare root grapevine you can also get potted vines with green leaves either way you're going to plant these early in the spring before it starts to get hot and starts to get dry so you're going to make plans for your vineyard a solid year in advance so that you can get your site prepared you can get your vines ordered and so that your vineyard will be ready to plant in spring all right well we hope you learned something about muscadines today uh it's getting dark we still have a lot of muscadines to eat so we'll see you next time [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Aggie Horticulture

Views: 117,339

Keywords: muscadine grapes, grapes, Texas Grapes, Texas vineyards, wine, muscadine

Id: l7R-989AHP4

Length: 43min 3sec (2583 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 09 2020