My Tiny Plot

My Tiny Grape Vine is a bit of star in my garden. It sits in the far corner, quietly doing its thing. And then in September it produces the sweetest, tiniest black grapes you can imagine. It sounds like I don’t really have to do anything but sit here and wait for the Grapes but that’s not entirely true. Over the past year I have poured over many books and fretted over which training system to go for. Not to mention nearly having a mini-breakdown every time I have to prune it. But I think I may have turned a corner. Today, I winter pruned my Grape Vine in readiness for next year’s fruiting season.

Having already decided on the Guyot system I was all geared up to do the Winter prune with confidence. And that’s what I did. As you can see from the photo above all the leaves have dropped off the vine. This makes it much easier to see what you’re doing. The Guyot system allows for the vine to have two ‘arms’ off which the vertical fruiting branches grow. The arms must be one year old and the fruiting branches are this season’s growth - otherwise it won’t work.

So the trick is to earmark two branches from the current season’s growth to make next year’s horizontal ‘arms’. The two branches in the middle look perfect to me. Carefully bend them down so that they are horizontal. It’s a good idea to do this before you make any cuts to ensure they don’t break.

Now that I have my new horizontal arms in place I can snip off last year’s arms along with all of the vertical fruiting branches.

This will leave you with just two horizontal branches. Ideally, you’d want them both to lay flat like the one on the left but this isn’t always possible. The right hand branch will still fruit it just won’t look as pretty.

Then when you’re happy with your pruning, tie the arms in to protect them from the Winter wind. And you’re done!

Yes mtp has a Grape vine. I’m extremely lucky in that when we moved into our house the garden had not one but two established Grape vines. One of them was growing on a pergola that was in the middle of the garden so when we had our garden landscaped, unfortunately, it had to go.

The other one was conveniently situated on my south-facing wall, so that one got to stay. It was terribly overgrown. It was so big that it had grown under the roof tiles on our out-house. I had to cut it back quite severely and to be honest I had no idea what I was doing with a vine and so consequently we didn’t get any Grapes from it last year.

This is what I started with back in March this year - a fairly ragged, unpruned vine. I’m estimating that the main trunk of the vine is about 14 years old. I’m assuming it was planted when the garden was landscaped by the previous owners in 1995.

I decided to train the vine using the Guyot system of training. This relies on the fruiting branches growing from two main ‘arms’ which are replaced each year.

By May I had started to see some growth on the arms and was busy tying in new shoots as they formed. So far so good!

By July the vine had reached the top of the wall and had formed at least five or six good sized bunches of Grapes. Now, they are ripening and turning purple. Yes, it turns out that my vine is a black Grape not green. I never thought I would be eating Grapes this year!