This is a 'Bio Hack' in the truest sense. Last fall was the first time we attempted to prune our Grape vines. The vines are 5 years old, and 2 years old, and we had just let them grow and get established.As you can see, they were doing pretty well, too!
The older vines had alot of grapes, but they were very small.
So... we whacked them back pretty significantly. There are alot of inputs on the web about how to prune them, so we won't detail that here. We cut all vines off the main vine, leaving only one or two sub-vines off the main one. As you can see on our old trellis, we grew our vines tall and long - each is 10-12 feet long and 8 feet high.I was alittle worried. I fret over my vines more than over my kids...
Here is the harvest off one of the vines last year - before the pruning.
Well, here are the older 2 vines this year, after the pruning. As you can see - they are doing GREAT! Not only are they vigorous, they are putting out TONS of grapes... 2-3x what they did last year.
The grape clusters are also much longer than last year - it appears that the grapes are 'preparing' to be bigger this year. .. hope so!
Look at them all! Last year, 2 vines gave us 85 quarts of juice. We gave the rest away. This year I'm planning to make much more of my grape pie... it was FANTASTIC, and the kids are already drooling over it. We'll post more about that in the fall!
