Pruning Grapes

it's a blustery spring day and I'm at Argyle winery with Allen Holstein who is the wine grower here and he is in charge of all the wine grapes here the plants you do a great job at Thank You Ryan thank you know it's my job to get the vines pruned and take care of them over the summer and balance the crop and balance the pruning and get the best possible grapes to the winery in the fall accident they have another team that takes over it sells it to us yeah so much is it uh-huh well you know I don't think it's too late to do it I mean it's the granite to me the end of March but really it's not too late you guys still have a little bit to do here yeah I know we have we purposely time it not to finish too soon because in the vineyards commercially April's pretty quiet we have terms that crews that have to eat 12 months out of the year so we try not to finish too early it's too late when you start to knock buds off you see here that's a that's a bud and it's in the cottony wooly bud stage is what they call it where you get some sort of woolly cotton --is-- type of appearance there it's not as dormant as it was but it's just coming out as that grows and you're pulling brush or manipulating vines in it and then it breaks off then it's too late okay and that's typically not till middle of April okay in Portland town at low elevations it might be first of April but up here on the hill it's middle of April we start sometimes right after Thanksgiving Wow early on a small scale again we've got 500 acres to do so you got a you got to pace yourself and so we don't do that much volume that time of year there's some downsides to pruning that early but that's the timeframe and so here I see a lot of different canes here this is what was last year was production so for me this makes it look a lot of mess almost and so do I cut everything do I cut high low where would I start cutting was first important to know that all grapes are born on one-year-old wood so this grew last year this grew last year all these canes grew last year so any fruit next year we'll be born on these and not on the trunk this is Parenthood this is one year old wood so there's a relationship between the weight of all these prunings and the amount of buds that you leave and in your audience you have different spacings and different soils and different little micro climates that it really would behoove a person that's serious is the way the pruning and leave maybe five buds five to ten buds per pound of pruning depending on what their experience has been if their grapes didn't get very sweet and they had a lot of them then that means they left too many buds okay so so this is a cord on pruned vines it's not it's a secondary style in Oregon commercial settings we're experimenting with it but look at this cordon prune vine and then we'll look at some came from vines just to show you the difference well so I go from here and so this vine here is what I want to get to yeah that's the finished product okay and we know we want to leave so many buds per acre and there's so many plants per acre here so we come into it thinking okay we want to leave twelve buds on at least twelve buds on this plant too in order to get to the number per acre that we want okay well this is cord on it so we're gonna go right across the road here and look at a different style you want to cut some first oh sure well just to show you how drastic it is it would cut that back to there there one little trick is I can always give directions better than it is you want the blade next to where you're going to cut see you nice and close so your nice clothes if you turn it so that the anvil is between the blade and what you're cutting could quite off and leave a bud that you don't want to leave so we gotta clean your cut you can do that Oh excellent okay well it's nice that you could just do really close pruning in like that you just take everything away and compost it or chip it yep and you really come to really next to nothing it looks like they're naked to the inexperience to the amount that you cut off you take off about ninety percent of the weight usually to get to the kind of quantity that we want you know for wine grapes there's an inverse relationship between quantity and quality if you leave too many buds you'll have too many grapes and if you have too many grapes they won't get sweet enough to make high quality wine and the same is true a table wine table grapes is a you'd like them sweet of it so it's just a little bit of maybe recording what you get and so that you know the next year how to improve yeah we come out a little handheld scale and bundle all the cuttings from prunings from one vine weigh it record it and we go to the same vines every year so I know with the interaction of our practices and the weather during the course of the year does it lead to more fruity waits or less pruning weights and we also look at pruney weights when we come to make decisions about whether or not to leave grass that competes with the vines for water and nutrients if there's too much growth then we'll leave more grass that provide competition in our grapes and it'll durant environment will just grow and grow and grow so it's unlike some garden species we don't fertilize these oh so for a home gardener - we don't want to water too much we don't want to fall yeah once they're established we we have drip irrigation here and if it's a dry year we'll water in August once all the moisture and the soil has been consumed will add back some amount less than what they would consume in a luxurious environment but during the early part of the season any additional water nutrients would just cause them to grow more which is what you don't right let's go take a look at this other ones then no Allan this is just a same grape but you just left two canes mhm this is called cane pruning as opposed to cordon that we looked at first okay this is a planted in 93 so it's a bigger line yeah and it's a different spacing but same variety Pinot Noir and this is how most of Oregon commercial vineyards are pruned and how I would envision most of the homeowner homeowners will do it this way through but the relationship is still the same in terms of weight and number of buds don't see those individual buds here right so it's the same relationship just a different style and so this has already been pruned obviously and the next step would be to lay this down okay and tie it with a twisty okay and you can see some yellowish paint here that's to prevent the entry of wood rotting pathogens okay so we'll put some little medicine on there on big cuts and that that's one of the differences between this style pruning and that you don't have as many big cuts on that style but that's what all that's about so we can you can see how drastic it is right and I think for your viewers it's always surprising how much you cut off the train well I think we can all take away it's not too late to do it and you can't really make a mistake at all and so you just want to leave either two canes and tie those down or you could take everything off and then just tie it up as you go mm-hmm cut more rather than less right well I think we'll have to come up back this summer and you could teach us all about summer pruning and make some wine that's mean yeah that's when the action is instantly alright well thank you very much you

Channel: Garden Time TV

Views: 122,791

Rating: 4.7305698 out of 5

Keywords: garden, time, gardentime, gardening, gardens, spring, organic, argyle, wine, winery, prune, grape, home, table, cut, plant, fruit

Id: W_ySVZRHXL0

Length: 8min 3sec (483 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 23 2012