I will pick one up this year and let everyone know how it goes. I have never grown grapes before so I should be a reliable test of whether or not this grape is idiot proof.
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Are there any seedless varieties of muscadines? Where does the term scuppernong come from?
Fry Seedless
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scuppernong are the bronze ones
There’s a serious dispute in the South: Are they called muscadines or scuppernongs? Some of us just go by color on these fragrant, thick-skinned grapes, calling the purple ones muscadines and the bronze ones scuppernongs. We asked Dr. Arlie Powell, a fruit scientist, to settle it. “All scuppernongs are muscadines, but not all muscadines are scuppernongs,” he says. “A ‘Scuppernong’ is actually a specific selection of muscadine.”
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Thanks I keep telling everyone I am not lazy and and the skins and seeds are good for you. A scuppernong is just one bronze cultivar, but it often gets used for any bronze. I have never found a native Bronze, but the woods here all full of the dark ones mostly non-fruiting or sparse. I think a majority are either male or just don’t get the proper light to fruit well.
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I think I remember reading somewhere that the the wild bronze muscadines originally only grew in one small area in coastal NC. Now they can be found in other places but the black ones are more wide spread. I agree that ‘Scuppernong’ is actually a specific selection of muscadine, but in the south the name kind of stuck with all bronze fruited varieties.
A wild variety can produce good crops if irrigated. My seedling beds are against the woods edge with overhead watering and the wild ones adjacent to them produce profusely now vs before I installed the sprinklers they where sparse as strudeldog mentioned. The ones lacking fruits totally are what we call wild males, I know named males will produce a crop just not as much as females but I have seen wild vines growing into the canopy of trees with vines so thick you can swing on them and never produce a single muscadine. I’m not 100% sure they are males but that’s what I’ve always been told.
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I would graft those wild vines over. Reading earlier that Kansas is actually part of the natural range of muscadines https://www.crfg.org/pubs/ff/muscadinegrape.html. This is very interesting information I’m reading in this post. Had no idea they were male and female. I’m kicking myself for running the mower over a grape seedling from my vines a few years ago. I should have taken the time to dig it up. Hybridization seem relatively straight forward http://homeguides.sfgate.com/crosspollinate-grape-vines-24083.html
@clarkinks. The information about Fry Seedless was extracted from your link above. This is the first details about it that I have seen. Thanks Bill
Fry Seedless
Medium-sized fruit similar in color to Redgate. Sugar content 20%. Vigorous vine. Needs to be pollinated by another self-fertile cultivar. Tolerant to disease. Erratic yields.
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clarkinks I’ve never been able to successfully graft them. layering is very easy though
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I tried three grafts and all failed.
edible l/s- I suppose that you may have tried to do cleft grafts on muscadines before, and I also suppose that you used grafting scions cut from long, straight vines with visible buds that formed at the nodes. Strictly guessing. When I tried that on many grafts the results were ALWAYS the same. The fat buds bust out quickly to form small leaves using the sap inside the scion, the sap runs out, and the small leaves soon wither away, leaving a dead stick stuck in a live vine. Like spraying some engine starter fluid into a gas engine intake, which quickly fuels the motor, but only lasts a couple seconds or so before leaving the motor gasping for more until in dies. When I did the graft autopsy below the tape, there would be no evidence that the hardwood stick ends were starting to heal/fuse together with new tissue formation. OK, so is there a way to get the fat node buds to wait for the healing to take place so that there will be a continual supply of vine juice flowing through the grafted scions to nourish them? Key: very tiny reserve buds that lay dormant on big, fat nodes found at vine “intersections” can stay alive and dormant while waiting for the vine graft upstream from it gradually heals. I like to use “T” intersections along vines where there is a side shoot that emerged along a 3/8" thick vine, and I clip off all but a 1" stub on the side shoot, a 1" stub on the downstream (upper) shoot, and leave enough of the upstream (lower) vine so that there will be maybe 1 or 2 nodes on it. I want the extra few inches of length there in case I have to clip off a badly cut/whatever problem first try and re-carve the wedge for the cleft graft. After doing the graft, you can make a sure, money -winning bet that the graft will get flooded with the vines sap by the next AM, which is a bad thing. So, how can you install a faucet to open up the lower vine to divert the unwanted, excess, pressurized sap flow so that the graft won’t get flooded out. Think: how can a scrape/cut/ wound heal on flesh when it is kept parked under flowing faucet water. Cutting a “deep enough” but not “too deep” notch into the upstream vine just below the graft can relieve the fluid pressure and divert the excess sap where it will drip at the notch before it reaches the graft. I would notch it a bit to where the notch would feel moist in a few hours, or have a big dripping drop sitting on the notch the next AM. If the notch did not have a drip drop on it the next AM, and the graft area was moist, I recut the same notch a bit deeper and checked it again the next AM. Once the morning drops were consistent, and the graft area was not moist, it was good to grow, but I still checked it regularly in case the notch started to heal and block the outflow. After maybe a month or so, the very tiny brown micro buds on the fat intersection nodes will f i n a l l y start to swell. Although using a potted vine of one variety to attach to another vine variety in the ground can work when doing approach grafts, I prefer doing the cleft grafts and doing them in early Spring when the vines are just starting to bust out, and using dormant “intersection” cuttings that were clipped weeks ago when dormant. I am sure that many others have been very successful grafting muscadine vines with very different strategies, and much better strategies. Anyway, growing these is do-able, and adding other/better varieties if desired is another option. And fun.
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I accidentally layered Fry Seedless this past spring when I was late in taking the woodchips off. When I send out scionwood this winter, I should have some small vines to send out. I potted up about a dozen, even though I can probably only use 2-3.
I wanted to have extra Late Fry for pollination, so I put one of the vines on the ground and dumped some potting soil on it around the end of July. A month later, roots had formed and I was able to separate one vine into 3 new plants.
Resulting rooted cuttings:
Grapes are very hard to graft. I generally have good success with everything but peaches and grapes, with grapes being the more difficult of the two. I had my first successful grape graft this summer, after making at least 60 cleft grafts and chip buds over the last 3 years. I say at least 60, since I’m not sure how many I didn’t record. Normally I record everything, but when I started seeing 0% success for years in a row, I got less careful and started grafting a few here, a few there, etc- basically throwing a lot at the wall and seeing what stuck (if I ever hit on a technique that worked). So, now the one that worked (a cleft graft with templex tape, covered in parafilm) will need to bear fruit before I can figure out what it is.
Note- only 1 or two of the grafting failures were with muscadines, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they are similar in difficulty to normal grapes.
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I’ve cut the vine to slow down the sap but it didn’t help. I’ve t budded and cleft grafted them but neither worked. I’m sure it’s doable but it’s way easier to layer them. Thanks for the tips, but I’m giving up on grafting muscadines
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This link might be helpful to anyone wanting the challenge of grape grafting http://ucce.ucdavis.edu/files/repositoryfiles/ca3107p4-63301.pdf. They got 95% success once they mastered the techniques . One thing I will bring up from grafting wild pears is that not all rootstock are created equal. Many claim 100% success in grafting pears but in the real world they won’t get that on these wild callery pear rootstocks here. I’ve learned tricks to graft them using interstems and other techniques. The real world can be different from the studies. Some wild plants can be very difficult to graft because their genetic material is completely different. The nice thing about wild plants is that genetic difference makes a fantastic rootstock in the case of these wild pears. Fireblight does not kill them. Incompatibility is a concept that took me years to figure out through experience and not studies. Pears like all plants have certain varieties more compatible than others such as Clara frijs, Douglas and others. Muscadines have the same more compatible varieties but I lack the practical experience to tell you what those are. I’m still trying to figure out which muscadines I can grow here so I’m speaking hypothetically.
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Ditto for me. But, I have several very large Niagra vines (a seeded grape) which I want to turn into seedless. So I’m going keep trying and will read through the UC document. Thanks Clark!
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Bob I’ve had very good luck with vitis vinifera on 3309C and 101-14 rootstocks. What type of grape are you attempting to graft on the Vitis labrusca ‘Niagara’ ?
I found several good vines close to the house that I visit every couple days. We had lots of rain and the vines are loaded this year. My granddad had gold muscadines here years ago and these must be seedlings of those plants.
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Muscadine vary in flavor from variety to variety quite a bit. As for whether I eat the skin or not, it depends greatly on the variety. On the older leathery skin varieties, the answer is generally no. On the newer crunchy skin varieties, the answer is that the skin is the best part of the grape. God bless.
Marcus
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