Your backyard vineyard site selection is complete. You’ve ordered some grapes. Ideally it is still late summer/fall before the winter arrives.
What should you do now?
Your priorities before planting – ideally the summer/fall before your anticipated spring planting – should consist of finalizing your backyard vineyard layout, preparing the soil, building the trellis, and rapidly educating yourself on the upcoming year, if you haven’t already.
Backyard Vineyard Layout
Vines need space.
Though they may not look like much as one-year-old plants, vines require a lot of space for a variety of reasons. Your backyard vineyard layout should enable this space.
First, their roots need space for horizontal growth, depth (six feet or more) as well as for sufficient water and nutrients. Planting them any closer than six feet apart in any given direction is generally a bad idea for the backyard vintner. You want quality, not quantity.
Second, vines need space for sun. If you plant your vines six feet apart in each row, each cordon will have three feet to grow in either direction along the wire. This is a good setup, especially if you space your canes or spurs about 5-6 inches apart.
Third, more space allows for more airflow, and more airflow means less disease, fungus, and rot. It also means less work for you later on in the form of leaf pulling and the like.
Bottom line – your backyard vineyard layout should space your vines at least six feet apart in any given direction. Six feet between vines, and ten feet between rows is the ideal.
Some caveats:
1) If you plan to use any sort of machinery for vineyard labor, such as mowing the grass or spraying, ensure your backyard vineyard layout has space in the aisles (the space between rows) to allow for said equipment to operate (along with expected vine growth mid-summer).
2) Always include enough space on the backside of the end posts for mechanical equipment to turn around.
3) Consider whether or not you will be installing any basic fencing (to keep out deer, for example). You’ll need to include the additional standoff along the entire perimeter of your backyard vineyard layout.
In our case, we identified two solid plots on a site with good sun, decent airflow, and some slope.
We split the two plots for two reasons. First, we wanted to experiment with both red and white grapes. Second, we use the central part of the lawn as a small golf fairway (more like a short chipping course) every year during our annual Memorial Day gathering.
For the purposes of sharing with you our backyard vineyard layout planning process and some basic math, below is our thought process for the Red Grapes (ultimately Chambourcin):
Red Vines (Chambourcin)
- Total Space Identified: 70ft x 36ft (including a generous cushion for adjustments and fencing)
- Rows:
- Row Length: 70ft – 16ft = 54ft total (each row will use 8ft at each end post for interior earth anchors, so we subtracted 16ft to give us our real row length, 54ft)
- Vine Spacing: 54/6 = 9 vines per row (54ft total row space, with 6ft between each vine, so 54/6 gave us the exact number of vines we could fit in each row)
- Row Spacing: with a 36ft width, and ideally 10ft between rows, that left us with four rows total.
- 4 Rows x 9 vines = 36 Chambourcin grape vines total
With this backyard vineyard layout preparation and planning complete, you can shift into soil preparation mode (ideally the fall before your spring planting, but late winter/early spring is sufficient as well – that’s the timeline we had to work with.)
Go ahead and get some rest – the manual labor is about to begin!