One of my favorite things to do when I go to visit Mark's mom is to prune her grapevines.  She has four vines planted far too close together which grow up a netted wire trellis, so I can't prune them in a traditional fashion.  Instead, I play it by ear, trying to prune them so that they'll cover the whole trellis.

So I have to stick to general principles rather than following any hard and fast rules.  Except for the main trunk, a grape vine should be cut back to one year old canes since these are what will produce fruit.  A healthy plant should be cut back so that it has only 40 to 50 buds (from the 200 to 300 buds on the plant before pruning.)

The great thing about grapes is that even though I'm a rank amateur, they always seem to do fine.  The animation shows the grapevines before and after from this winter's pruning while the still photo is fruits which were on the vine this past summer after my last hack job.  I'm very curious to see how well the vines will bear this summer!

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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