I have located a number of wild muscadines that are fruiting on my place. They are all growing up trees, but I’ve found a few that have great flavor and are located on some smaller trees. What i’d like to do is to set some of these up on a trellis after they bear fruit, so that I can start pruning them in the winter in order to get more fruit in the coming years.
Anyone have any experience doing this? Would it be better to cut it back severely to a 4-5 ft stump to allow it to send out lateral shoots and grow down the wire? Or possibly cut it down to 15-20 ft and train the existing vine along the wire?
I’ve never tied to get them to grow on a trellis after they have grown up in a tree. However I do cut mine back out of the trees and get the grapes off that way. They seem to come back even better than before so cutting them back does not hurt them any. If you have them in a good location to put up a trellis I would try it. Mine are all scattered throughout the pastures in large oak trees and I just pull my tuck underneath them and cut the limbs so they fall in the bed of my truck.
That being said, I may just your method and go around and cut a bunch off that I’m not sure produce fruit or not. It ought to kick start them to regrow, and hopefully any that do fruit will be close enough to see, so that I can tag them and keep an eye on them in the future. Once they grow up into the tops of the trees, it’s hard to know if they have them or not, besides just looking on the ground. Problem with that is there’s so many vines, can’t tell which is producing.
Seriously, before I bought the property, I walked it and found a small logging deck. It was so covered and intertwined with muscadine vines, that it felt like you were walking on a trampoline…
I’ve never tried to root cuttings before. Is it necessary to use rooting hormone with muscadine cuttings, or will they sprout roots without? I don’t mind getting some rooting hormone, but was just curious…
Only you can decide what is feasible to do with these vines but if I could I would try to save about 15-20’ and put the vine on a single wire trellis and prune as best as you can this winter into a traditional vine. Sounds like fun and best wishes for success.
Blueberry and ramv: Have you rooted muscadine cuttings before? If so, tell us the details please…To start new rooted vines from plants that have made good grapes, it would likely work best to air layer some 3/8" to 1/2" thick vines from the wild plants. There is time now to get them started so that they could be clipped and replanted elsewhere this coming Winter/Spring. I’ve done this many times to make give-away plants rather than pruning and burning the long vines each year. All that it took was to pull off a tangled-up vine and clip off the zillion tendrils holding to everything in reach, make a circular loop the size of a 3 gallon nursery pot, tie the loop so that it stays put in the pot, and fill the pot with potting mix. The pot just stands there on the ground with the inbound and outbound vine parked there. It is good if the pot sits where rain will land in the pot. When it isn’t raining, it is good to add water to the pot when needed. Moist soil surrounding the loop vine will be hard to resist rooting out into it. I clip off all side shoots on the incoming side, and I leave all growth on the outbound side to photosynthesize and feed the potted vine. A little fertilizer will further encourage root growth in the pot. By Winter you would likely find adequate roots in the pot to clip off the incoming vine. If you wait another year or 2, those new roots will have grown down through the drain holes into the ground below. For some I waited 3 years to get them up, and it was pretty hard to get those wide roots out of the ground w/o chopping some root ends off. …For large/old/thick wild vines, maybe you could whack off the big vine4 feet above ground now, and it would have several months to sprout out replacement vines this season for future grafting or training on wire stretched across the area. The large root system can really go to town making new vines.
Thanks for the replies. Think I may try all of the methods and see what works for me and report back. Appreciate the help, I’m sure I’ll have more questions as I go along…
I’m on the Facebook muscadine page and a couple of the members have pulled some vines down to a trellis. I haven’t read it intensively since I have no access to wild vines. Air layering muscadines has a very high success rate but cuttings don’t take that easily. I think if you have a mist set up it really helps to increase the percentage of takes. I have sent dormant wood to someone that says he does a lot of cuttings and does get some takes based on the large amount of cuttings he does. Sounds like an interesting project.