Standard Appearance vs. Personality

The severe pruning I gave our two Kay Gray vines and single Canadice vine, last winter, seems to have had its effect; for the new shoots coming up have flower-cluster buds upon them.

While the clusters seem less thick then they are on the other varieties, that they are there at all is a pleasant fact to contemplate. For these three, last year was in essence an extra one for encouraging vine development without obtaining fruit.

In the unseasonable heat, yesterday afternoon, I worked on shoring up wire supports for this trio. My system is the four-arm kniffin system -- more or less. I need actually to add height to the entire set-up, to be following this model correctly.

Earlier in the season, after seeing a vineyard employing the Geneva double-curtain method of growing, I considered reshaping my entire system of wire-supports.

The idea that had prevailed in our first seasons of growing, however, was that we would need to mulch all the vines each winter. Their trunks, as a consequence, have personality. Rather than shooting up straight and perpendicular to the ground, in the manner of your typical well-controlled vineyard vine, these trunks twist a bit, turn a bit -- for they start from the ground at an angle and then bend back toward the vertical in the course of reaching the wires.

The option remains open to re-grow these vines from vertical shoots rising from near the base of the vine. What do I want, though: standard appearance, or personality? Certainly the venerable wild grapes you see ranging up into the trees, in woods in this area, have curvings and bends in their trunks, They trail along the forest floor, or even loop back down to the ground from some high branch before rising back into the forest canopy. Appealing to the eye? Yes, indeed.

It is a vine, after all, not a tree ... although the normal aim in grape culture seems to be the achievement of a treelike appearance. The idea appeals to me, of letting these twisty vines grow thick and gnarly over the years ... yet so does the idea of regrowing them, so that I might set up a better trellis system for coming seasons.

Cheers ...

Luxuriant but Unproductive

Our Kay Gray grape vines, two in number, are so far our least productive. They were two of our first three planted -- it must be three years ago already. Nursery-purchased, potted and not bare-root, they have done well in establishing themselves and in growing luxuriantly, if not in producing fruit. The fault may lie in our not having purchased them bare-root: for our other bought-potted grape vine also has barely produced. Perhaps more likely, my inept pruning of them in their second winter is to blame. Had I done better at that, we might have seen more fruit last year. I was too timid, apparently, to take the vines down to properly spare winter skeletons.

Before December I had pruned the other vines in the back yard, leaving these Kay Grays for another day. I finally started on one of the vines on a cold day in January or early February, and then finished that vine and did the complete pruning of the second one yesterday afternoon. Although we have thick snow on the ground, as of yet, the air temperatures climbed into the thirties, making for pleasant working.

At this point, for me, pruning calls for a goodly amount of standing and thinking: a vine, especially one incompletely pruned the prior winter, offers quite a few decisions to be made. That second Kay Gray -- what a wild unruly longhair of a grape vine! I had left on shoots growing from the lower trunk, had let a second trunk start to thicken ... but even given the wealth of choices for this pruning, I had to weigh each snip of the shears twice and three times before committing myself and the vine to the irrevocable.

Kay Grays are a white grape, one of the Elmer Swenson hybrids developed in Wisconsin. Its reputation as being one of the heartiest of Swenson varieties helped guide our choice, as I recall. As to how the fruit is, for winemaking -- we have no idea, as of yet. A vanishing few went into this or that wine, last year. So few bunches formed that I put little effort into defending them from the feathered grapivorous fleas that clustered so to our clusters last summer.

Cheers ...