Pruning Grapes is Essential for Strong Vine Growth

Growing grapes in order to produce wine has been done for thousands of years, with people engaging in viticulture on a large scale as well as in their own home gardens. There is a lot of work and a lot of patience required to grow your own grapes – they take up to three years to begin fruiting and like any other plant, they will need weeding, pest control and other tending to produce. Pruning grapes is an important part of caring for your vines and will encourage them to grow.

You’ll need to train your grapevines in order to get them to grow into the proper shape and size. Part of this process is pruning grapes; you’ll want to prune back your vines to the strongest shoot in the first year, with all others being clipped. The strongest shoot will be tied to your trellis and the process repeated the following year. This will form the “arms” of your grapevines. You will also need to continue pruning grapes while they are dormant in the winter; this will keep your grapes growing well and ensuring productivity. How you perform the task of pruning grapes will depend in the type of grapes you are growing. There are hybrids which are more disease and cold resistant; these varieties also produce fewer leaves than other varieties of grapevine. When pruning grapes, you’ll need to remove the fruiting canes from the previous year, since your vines will only produce fruit on year old canes.

You can reduce the yield of your vines by pruning fruiting buds from your grapevines. Controlling production can be achieved by pruning grapes to the desired production level. If you prune too zealously, you’ll end up producing more leaves and less fruit – the additional foliage will shade the rest of your vines, making ripening slower.

Pruning grapes is generally done with hand tools, including handsaws, loppers and pruning shears. Prune gently to avoid injury to your plants. You can usually use small pruning shears to take care of pruning on young shoots, being fairly easy to remove one year old canes. However, if you have older, denser wood to remove, then you’ll want to use a hand saw or a lopper instead.

Growing grapes is at its core like growing any other sort of crop; you need to dig holes and plant your crop. Pruning of course is something which not every sort of gardening requires, but it is a simple and more or less intuitive process which most novice viticulturists catch on to quickly. Pruning grapes effectively will ensure larger and healthier vines and a bountiful yield.