Newbie grapevine questions

General Fruit Growing
1

I have some questions I’d like to get answered before setting up my grapevine support.

What I know:

  • In cane pruning, you take one of last year’s shoots to serve as this years cane (I assume this involves reposition it to last year’s cane’s position)
  • Fruit forms on current seasons shoots
  • I can grow my grapevine by having two canes growing horizontally; I can either do low canes (shoots growing up), or two high canes (shoots growing down); they look like forks. Image of what I’m talking about: Imgur: The magic of the Internet

But there are some no-so-obvious situations and it might not be that straightforward. For example:

  1. When growing them against a metal fence, what is the difference between growing grapes versus down? Is one better than the other? I assume growing them up is better because the shoots don’t grow down onto the ground, and you don’t have to guess about the correct cane height size like you do with growing them down.

  2. Do shoots form on both sides of a cane? How would you handle this issue if for example you are trying to grow against a metal fence, and you’re growing them up from two low horizontal canes? Would you have to clip off the shoots growing from the bottom face of the cane?

  3. In cane pruning, once the growing season is over or it’s spring pruning time, wouldn’t repositioning the new cane to last years cane’s position break it since it has hardened off over winter?

4a. Why do I have shoots growing from this years shoots? I thought that shoots grow on last year’s shoots.

4b. Does this mean that a shoot will not form from on that node the next season, since it went ahead and grew out from that node this season?

2

I’ll try to address your example questions–

  1. Grapevines have natural growing habits. Growing up, aka vertical shoot positioning, is the best choice for vinifera and some hybrids because they naturally want to grow up. They’re also prone to disease which VSP can help alleviate. Natives and some hybrids have a procumbent/prostrate growing habit, so they’re grown down so as not to fight their nature. That system also requires less maintenance, and the natives aren’t as disease prone.

  2. Shoots emerge out of buds. So yes, those buds could be on either side of the cane if you wrapped it that way. And generally canes are wrapped in a spiral fashion so you only need one tie. The shoots that emerged from the bottom facing buds will curl upwards as they reach for the sun but are still good candidates to thin if you think you have too many shoots.

  3. Grapevine canes are still flexible after they have lignified. That being said, try to keep cane thickness to the same as a pencil. Thicker are more prone to breaking. For vinifera we use 50F as the coolest time at which we can still tie, and even then we stay away from fragile/problematic varieties until it warms.

4a. Not sure what you’re referring to here. A picture would be useful. My guess is you’re talking about laterals. These can emerge if your shoot tip is injured, or simply if you have excess vigor.

4b. If we are talking about laterals, then no. Emergence of laterals on this years shoots has no bearing on next years shoots. The buds next to laterals may be less fruitful but that may not be worth worrying about.

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