Advice on pruning neglected grape vines?

 Right now I'm just trying to remove dead stuff. I hope that before the
vines start growing in the spring I can prune at least some of them
properly. I'm faced with a mess of trunks and canes of all sizes and
ages, and I'm having trouble figuring out how to start.

I've got a couple of specific questions.

First, how can I identify first-year growth, so that I can follow my
book's instructions to leave a controlled number of first-year canes
on each vine?

Second, how should I deal a couple of locations where the vines died?
I must decide whether replant in the same places or not, and if so,
what to plant and how. Saying that the vines died of neglect is
probably true, but not useful. All of the vines were neglected, but
some died while others thrived. Maybe the dead vines' locations were
bad. (For example, one was next the corner of a shed where it probably
got much less direct sun than most of the others, especially in early
spring and late fall.) Maybe the vines that were planted (now
unidentifiable) were inappropriate for the location. Maybe the soil
was bad. Or maybe it was a combination of those things and others.

Beyond that, I'm looking for any sort of advice on how to proceed.

 On Mon, 10 Jan 2011 22:26:11 -0800, Jonathan Sachs


Grapes are very resiliant... prune them all down leaving one trunk of
about two feet... then as they grow do not neglect them.  Grapes need
two prunings per year.  If you are unsure how find someone nearby who
does.  There are different pruning systems depending on how trellised.

 

First, ignore advice from Brooklin1/Shelly as he suffers from chronic
cranial-rectal inversion, and his advice will get you in deep Doo.

If the vines have been neglected for a number of years, it may take a
couple of years to re-shape them for cane pruning, where you have 4
canes coming off the branches, 2 going left and 2 going right (I'm
guessing that you are cane pruning from what you said above.).
Last years canes will show buds, and won't have bark on them. Canes that
come off the top of a stump, branch, or cordon are preferable to ones
that are attached to the underside.

If the grapes are meant for winemaking, then leave about 22 buds for
this years fruit. Leave fewer for more vegetative growth, leave half
again as many , if they are to be used for fresh fruit.

Where are you? What is the soil like? What kind of grapes are these? Any
idea if the vines are on rootstock? What did the leaves on the dead
plants look like last year, or the last year that they had leaves?
--
- Billy
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the
merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini.

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p

 wrote:


I'm in the Sacramento area. Winters are cool and rainy, with
occasional frost; Summers are hot and dry.


Generally deep, fairly heavy loam left by an ancient sea bed; but our
yard is heavily landscaped, and I don't know the history of the soil
that was used for fill. It looks like the native soil but I can't be
sure.


When we moved in two years ago I collected samples from each vine and
took them to one of our local Master Gardeners (part of California's
ag extension program). I got some identifications, some tentative
ones, and some of "Gee, that's interesting, but..." Almost every vine
seems to be different. I can't find my notes at the moment, but the
ones I'm working on now appear to be wine grapes.


No idea. I see no evidence of grafting scars, but I'm not sure what to
look for, and perhaps the vines are too old for them to be visible.
Many of them are over an inch thick at the base.


I think they were long dead when we bought the property two summers
ago. The vines are so tangled together that it's hard to tell which
ones are dead and which ones aren't. The one I mentioned, at a corner
of the shed: I suspected it was dead, but I wasn't sure until I
started cleaning up dead wood a few days ago.


Songbird wrote:


There are a lot of vines, almost every one a different variety, as I
mentioned above. Most of them are planted along the side of an arbor
covering a path about 50 feet long, which goes gently downhill in a
generally southerly direction. Most of those are in full sun (at least
at the top) through much of the day, but are shaded in the late
afternoon. Last year I put them on a drip irrigation system with a
couple of emitters near the base of each vine. They're on their own
branch of the drip system, so that I can water them infrequently and
deeply. The year before that, and probably many years, they received
no water at all except for the winter rains.

One vine (the only one producing heavily to date) is a seeded table
grape, Concord I think, which grows up a wall facing generally
northeast, over the top, and down the other side. (It also grows into
the surrounding trees, over 20 feet above the ground, which poses an
interesting dilemma: the higher vegetation does not appear to be
bearing much fruit, but I wonder if it is providing energy to the rest
of the vine, and should be retained.)


One thing I've discovered, to my distress, is that much of the dead
wood is still flexible! That has made it very hard for me to be sure
what's dead and what's not.

By the way, I've wondered whether the thicker stuff I cut would make
good kindling.


That's odd, now that I think about it: so far I've encountered very
few tendrils. That may be a peculiarity of the variety(ies) I've
worked on.


That's a good idea, and I'll do it within the next few days. Can you
give me a general idea what kind of pictures would be most useful?
 

Yes, that's along the lines I was thinking... if for no other reason,
because cleaning up a dozen vines would be overwhelming, even if I
knew what I was doing! Treating each half of each plant differently is
difficult, though, when I have trouble being sure where one plant ends
and another begins!

 
Perfect for grapes... should be many winerys about.


Even if the builder scraped off some top soil it wouldn't have been
much and wouldn't much matter... grape roots go deep, very, very deep.


Really doen't matter what kind at this point.


The ag extention would be your best source in the area for how to
grow/prune grapes, wtf didn't you ask???

An inch diameter indicates a very VERY young grape vine, couldn't have
been been more than the diameter of a pencil when planted 2-3 years
ago, probably planted shortly prior to your arrival.  Grape vines grow
extremely fast, that's one of the reasons they need to be pruned twice
a year and the second pruning very severe.


Obviously they would look like grape leaves. duh


If you arrived in the summer there would have been leaves... seems to
me you never even looked at those grapes till very recently.


Odds are very little of the vines were actually dead and it's very
difficult to kill a grape plant from mere neglect... as I indicated
previously you should lop off all but about two feet of the trunk (now
is a good time).  And as soon as they bud out in spring erect a
trellis/arbor of some type, very important that grapes are trained.
There's tons of information on the net about <how to grow grapes>.

I've grown grapes most of my life but since I retired I gave it up,
growing grapes is extremely labor intensive, never mind what to do
with them... one measely vine will produce minimally 100 pounds of
grapes, ripening all at once.  And where you live it will be
impossible to sell them let alone give them away.  I can't imagine why
any homeowner in that part of CA would want to grow grapes in their
yard.