[Gill Giese] Today, what we're going to talk about is how to train a young vine that was not trained up in his first year of growth.
In other words, if you look at this vine here, you can see that it was just left
to sprawl during its first growing season. So your task now is to begin to
train it up in its second year, or as some growers refer to its "second leaf". So let's just start in and see where we end up, and then I'll explain what I did. But
prior to starting, if you'll notice, we have this this poster board here with
six-inch square intervals. So if you take one of these shoots and lay it against
that square, you can see you can get two or three internodes within the
six inches. That's a little bit less than desirable. You would like to see these
internode lengths probably stretched out to full three, or even four inches.
But this is not bad, and it's pretty typical for New Mexico. So let's go ahead
and prune this thing down, and see where we end up. And what this process is
called is "two budding". In other words, we're going to reset the vine. The first
year was left to grow its roots. The second year, it's going to grow up and
get up on your trellis, whichever system you prefer. So what we're going to do is
select two trunks, and what we're after is vine balance. So we want these two
trunks to look as similar as possible. What we're shooting for are two trunks
when we get done. And to do that, we're going to cut it back fairly severely, and
this leave two buds on each of the two selected shoots. So we cut this one off,
and we can see where we're removing a lot of growth. That's fine. And what we're
left with now, if you look closely, you can see two distinct trunks. And we're
going to head both of those back. So now that we finished pruning it, what we have
are two trunks-- not yet but we have the buds that will give rise to the two
trunks. And if you notice, they're kind of equally opposed to one another, and
that's the beginning down the road of vine balance. We want everything to look
balanced, and at the end, we're going to balance reproductive growth with
vegetative growth. Well, we've moved on to a second vine in the
same row, but there's a couple things to note. Number one, obviously this is a
grafted vine. You can see the graft union with the leftover grafting wax. But below
there, we have different shoots coming out, and they look quite different than
the Scion or the desired top growth. This is obviously some root stock. So what we
want to do is remove that just like that. The other thing to note is this graft union is too high above the ground level. You want it down around a fist height above the soil surface. So this was planted a little bit too high.
Nonetheless, that'll work. So what we're after now, is we want to two-bud this vine as well, taking off all this weak growth. And that's defined by any shoot
that's less than a number two pencil in diameter, which is most of this. And what
we're going to do to this vine is a true two-budding of this vine. So we're going to leave two buds. We're going to try to support this year and make two trunks. We can even go right here and we can have two buds that will will form the two
trunks. This renewal spur is insurance, or we can tie our training string on to it,
or our training stake, as we trade this vine up in its second leaf or second
year of growth.
