Pruning grape vines can be an obstacle for grape growers. It doesn’t have to be like this. You’re about to discover the benefits of pruning in a nutshell. Pruning grape vines is a basic principle that any grower, regardless of experience must understand.  Whenever you leave a vine unpruned, the first year you’ll have a massive big crop. Novice growers can feel delighted with their success and wonder what all the pruning fuss is about. ... http://www.squidoo.com/pruning-grape-vines Sat, 26 Jul 2008 02:07:28 -0600 FeedCreator 1.7.2 Wed, 08 Aug 2007 07:04:16 -0600 http://www.squidoo.com/pruning-grape-vines Pruning grape vines can be an obstacle for grape growers. It doesn’t have to be like this. You’re about to discover the benefits of pruning in a nutshell. Pruning grape vines is a basic principle that any grower, regardless of experience must understand.  Whenever you leave a vine unpruned, the first year you’ll have a massive big crop. Novice growers can feel delighted with their success and wonder what all the pruning fuss is about. There’s a flipside to this. The vine will produce more fruit than it knows what to do with because when you actually prune a vine correctly, you remove as much as 95 to 98% of the previous season’s growth.  If you leave all of that growth from the previous year it will have buds on it, which means you’ll have a huge crop the following year. The vine can’t produce enough energy to ripen an unregulated crop, and it’ll be poor quality. The clusters will be straggly, and you won’t have much fruit worth using.  Even if it is able to ripen, given that it has to force so hard to come through, the vine will have diverted energy that it might ordinarily use to mature the wood and to help the vine get ready for winter.  For free master class on growing grapes visit Grapeschool now..  The Grape Grower's "Pruning Mindset" Its vital for you to learn how to prune and know that the pruning is not just a chore.  It’s something that keeps the vine in balance. It maintains the natural equilibrium. It helps keep the vine in the form you want it in.  It allows you to have a good regular crop of the best quality grapes you can have year after year after year. You shouldn’t be flip-flopping between a big oversized crop and a scraggly little one the next year, and so on. Pruning is the whole method for keeping a vine in balance.  It will balance itself of sorts, in a way, after it grows its own way after a few years, but then you have something that’s probably growing up in the trees; has much less crop than you would ever get if you were to keep it pruned and guided. Learn pruning and training, and you’re vines will always give you a good reasonable crop, everything else being equal.  Claim your free expert advice on growing grapes for beginners and more experienced growers.. What about grapevines out in the wild? If you simply let a grape vine grow it will be difficult to manage and probably won’t be doing any of the things you’d like it to do. I’m sure everybody whose ever grown fruit has seen this once in their life at least where some; an old grape vine has gone wild and grown up into a tree or something and you notice that it will have fruit pretty much every year.  If you look at it and find out if you know what variety it is you usually will find out that the fruit is not nearly as good as on a vine that which has been kept under controlled and pruned. In many ways pruning is, in essence, the art of grape growing. I see grape growing as living art which seeks to improve on what nature does anyway, by encouraging the natural process. This is the foundation to everything I teach about growing grapes. You can claim your free master class by going to Grapeschool now..  The point of pruning is simply to keep not only keep the vine in control because you can get a big vine and I’ve seen grape vines that wild vines and cultivated ones that were let go that could cover a half acre. This is the point – grapevines have the ability to grow and spread to cover considerable areas, so from a practical point of view this needs to managed.  In summary, the point of the pruning is simply to keep the vines in control, keep them in a form that you can work with and to regulate the crop. The next thing to learn is how to work with spurs and canes. As buds come in you’ll find each has a small cluster or two or more of grapes in it. This leads to the “over growth” already mentioned. Pruning grape vines is essential to Regulate the crop size Adjust the quality of the fruit Control the growth where you can manage it. Whether your reasons for growing grapes are to create decorative garden features, making wine, practical and commercial reasons, it doesn’t alter the principles and the importance of pruning. For expert tips and advice from award winning author of The Grape Grower, Lon Rombough, grower of over 250 varieties since 1963, claim your free master class now..        Wed, 08 Aug 2007 07:04:16 -0600