How to Prune a Grape Vine
Hi, I’m Ken Smith for Furney’s Nursery. We’re out here this morning. We’re gonna prune some grape plants. I’ve got an old grape plant that I’ve had for about 30 years. You can see it’s pretty big and luscious, believe it or not, I prune it every year. The main thing you need to do, get a good pair of sharp pruners, you wanna go through and remove all of the small branches, any damaged branches that you find anything that is dead from winter damaged, like for instance down here, this is pretty black, so I’m gonna get rid of all of that. I also wanna open it up so air can get into it, it’s really important to get good air circulation in grapes. You take this long structures like this and I like to prune them back to maybe two or three buds, and you can see right there, there’s a couple of buds, prune just right above that. What we wanna do when we’re pruning the grapes is we wanna select certain shoots and we wanna cut them back to two sets of buds above the main stem. You can see this is old wood, this is structure, I’m gonna go up one set of buds, second set of buds, I’m gonna cut it off there. That’s just gonna focus more energy into a smaller area, it’s gonna give you bigger lusher grapes. You don’t have to, you could go three, it wouldn’t matter, but I like to do two and a lot of the old timers do two. Also, like to prunge this out a little bit, leave a little bit of space between those buds, so, I’m over here, one, two, from this main structure branch I’m gonna cut that off there. And I’ll do the same thing here, I think this is, this is gonna be my second one here. So you can see, we’re just work along and we try to leave some good space between them, just like that. You also like to thin it out, you wanna have about 18 inches pruning buds and branches. There’s another dead one, I’m just gonna get rid of that, and another one here, you can see they’re awfully crowded. Also get rid of any smaller weak wood, so like these little guys here, they’re not gonna amount to much in a long time, and I’ve got plenty of structure here. So we just go in and just start cleaning it up. I can't seem to go from one end to the other, so I work back and forth all the time. Like I said, you wanna go in and get rid of all the dead branches, anything that’s damaged or broken from winter storms or whatever, just clean it up. Anything you decide to keep, remember, two buds, leave two buds on them. Just too close together so I’m gonna take that out, just too close, so I’m gonna take it out, two buds right there. This is dead damaged, the ones that are growing down don’t produce a lot of grapes, so I’m gonna get rid of those to, I’m gonna get rid of any crowding. Here’s some new wood, last year’s wood, two sets of buds, one there, one there. This is Ken from Furney’s, we’re just finishing up pruning a grape plant, just got a couple of details, I’m just completing up the little pieces and that’s all there it is to it.