Hey, its’ Ed Laivo with Dave Wilson Nursery and here we are at the Fair Oaks Horticulture Center and we’re with Chuck Ingels today to continue our discussion on pruning grapes.
Hi my name is Chuck Ingels. I’m with UC Cooperative Extension in Sacramento County and I like to talk to you before we actually do some pruning. I’d like to talk to you about winter pruning.
The dormant season is the time to prune and if possible, prune later in the dormant season if rains occur during the winter. A lot of times fungal spores will land on those pruning months and that will infect the vine so it’s best to prune later in the dormant season if possible.
Now, there are a couple of things related to pruning; different varieties have different ways of pruning. One is cane pruning and Thompson seedless is a notorious cane pruned variety. And the reason it’s cane pruned is if you create little spurs, short canes, short shoots, you’re going to not have very much fruit because the shoots that grow won’t produce very much fruit. You have to leave long canes.
The other type of variety is a spur pruned variety in which you’re creating spurs out of the canes and we’ll be talking about that. You can find white varieties that are cane pruned and white varieties are spur pruned by looking in various sources including the Sunset Western Garden Book and various local sources and so it will say for every given variety, for instance Flame seedless, it will be spur pruned. There are some that will be either spur pruned or caned pruned but you want to pay attention to which is which, to ge the best yield and to get the best crop.
So this is what a spur pruned vine looks like when it’s ready to prune and it’s been pruned. Well, last year we created these spurs, individual spurs and the shoots grew and they grow like crazy. They produce a lot of growth and we put these trellis on with a cross arm and the wire out here and there’s another one on the other side and I see shoots grow up.
We’re directing them if they don’t do it naturally, we direct them out and over, so all these shoots, these canes, have been directed outward and at one point in the summer then, once they reach the ground, they keep growing along the ground. We’ll prune them off once or maybe twice during the summer. And that doesn’t hurt them at all. A lot people get timid and don’t do their pruning in the summer that they should. But, cut these off, don’t cut them too shortly; with 3 or 4 feet should be fine but if they start getting 15 or 20 feet long then there’s no need for that.
I want to talk about where grapes grow. Last year this was a new shoot, they grow in the spring and on this shoot a cluster formed. And this is where you get your fruit on current season’s shoots and it usually it has about 3 or 4 buds. This variety we didn’t end up picking up very much of so that’s why we have some clusters left. But, you’ll never see clusters on older wood; always on the 1 year old wood. So, the 1 year old wood or canes is what we’re always after in pruning grapes.
So, this is spur pruning and here is a spur from last year. This is now two years old. We created a 2-bud spur; one here, and one here and both of those buds grow into shoots that produce fruit. So what we always try to do is create spurs that grow lower down, otherwise we extend this and extend it every year. So we’re going to select this one and cut off this one. But before we do, I want to point out what happens over a few years. This becomes thickened and older and we call it an arm. So, the arm gets older and usually longer and then the spurs are on top of the arm.
And then here’s the cordon. It’s the main arm of the vine. So what we’re looking for is the spurs to be about six inches apart. If we have a vine that’s seven feet between vines; so it’s three and a half feet on either side. So, seven foot spacing of the vines, three and a half foot long, half cordon. We want about seven spurs along here; space on average is about 6 inches apart. So, we’re going to try to create spurs that are closer to the cordon as much as possible.
Let’s start out here on the end. We have a nice cane that grows here at the base and then we have those longer extensions. We’ll just cut that off and cut this one going outward off and then we have one bud and two buds, and then we cut it right there. And then moving along, we’ve cut the older one; the top one off and leaving the bottom one with one bud and two buds. Those two buds, we’ll cut it off.
Same here, there’s one bud, and two buds that’s going to be a little bit longer and we’ll cut that off. These are close together here and that’s not ideal, but we kind of don’t have a choice because we need our seven spurs. It’s always best to try to leave more spurs than you think you’ll need and then come back after you finished and leave them six inches apart or leave about seven on one-half of a cordon.
Ideally, we want the spur to grow up; and this one grows up but out and that’s okay because it fills the space that’s not very filled right now so I’m just going to take the lower one and there’s one bud right there. If it’s more than a quarter of an inch away from the base of the cane, then we’ll count it as a bud. If it’s less than a quarter inch like it’s right down there, we won’t count it. We’ll count that as one and then two. Two bud spur, same over here.
In here, there’s a cluster of shoots and we only want maybe a couple of them since there’s not many spurs very close, so we’ll choose this one going out this way, take that one off, and then we’ll choose this one here and there’s a bud in back that you can’t see here, and that bud there.
And then we’ll get rid of this long one. Okay, that’s the entire half of that cordon. Let’s count the spurs, there are seven spurs. Even though they’re not spaced how we’d like them to be, you don’t have a choice and so you go with those seven spurs right there.
And they’ll drip water, sap, and that’s okay, it doesn’t hurt a thing. Okay, that half of the vine is finished.
So, I’m going to leave this one and then cut this one off because there’s already one right there. We’ll leave these two buds and that bud is right there, and then we’ll cut that one off. And then it’s your choice between these that are growing fairly incorrectly. We’ll get rid of this one because it’s growing way out here and we’ll leave that as a two bud spur and then here you have a choice between one that’s growing taller and one that’s growing outward. We’ll go with the one that’s growing more in the center of these two spurs.
I don’t know if we’ll need this one but we’ll go ahead and create a spur and choose to take it out later or leave it. There’s a bud that is more than a quarter of an inch away from the base, so we’re going to call that as bud with two buds there now. And the same here, we’ll just choose the lower one and create a two bud spur out of it.
Now, here’s one that keeps growing higher and higher. We would like to avoid that and bring it down here, but right here we don’t have a choice. So, let’s for now choose the lower one and we probably will be getting rid of it all together. And then we have this one growing out here to the side which there’s plenty of space for, so for now let’s leave it.
So now, we want to make sure that we have our desired number of spurs and that’s why it’s good to leave more than you think you’ll need. So right here we have nine spurs on this half, and we actually have eight spurs on this side, so we have a total of seventeen.
Let’s get down to 14 over here, and since this guy is high over here, I’m just going to cut him off and then I wanted to kind of thin one of these out and let’s just thin out the bigger one.
So now, we have seven spurs over here, fairly well-spaced and we have seven and there’s actually one more over here. So, let’s get rid of one of these crowded ones, and let’s get rid of this one and that opens it up very nicely, fairly good spacing.
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