Your rows are tilled. Your stakes and end-posts are emplaced. Ideally, it is on/around mid-October (though in our case, it was early spring). You are now ready to order your vines, plant them, and hang the wire before diving into the Year One growing season.
Ordering and planting your vines doesn’t have to be as complicated as some resources make it out to be. We recommend asking yourself two key questions:
1) What kind of wine do you like to drink?
You won’t put much effort into maintaining grapes that you don’t enjoy drinking.
2) What grape varieties can thrive in your local climate?
While identifying your local “American Viticultural Area” and “regional suitability” might be a fulfilling research project for many backyard vineyard enthusiasts, those of us with 2+ kids and a full-time job can get by with simple conversation. Ask established vineyards nearby what they grow, why they grow it, and the vine tolerance for fungus and the like at your next visit. Imitation, after all, is the best form of flattery.
Once you have this basic info, reach out to an established nursery. As we’ve recommended before, we have nothing but positive reviews for Double A Vineyards.
For a Maryland climate, we decided on grafted Chambourcin for the red section (with several grafted Noiret for experimentation purposes), and grafted Vidal Blanc for the white section.
Receiving and Preparing your Vines for Planting
1) Once you reserve your order, work with the nursery to choose a delivery date that comes after the last seasonal frost. For Maryland, this was early May.
2) Never let the bare-rooted infant vines sit in the package for more then a day or two (even if packed with moist newspaper, as many will do).
3) Soak the roots overnight in buckets of water (6 hours minimum, but no more than 12 hours).
4) Trim the roots back to 6-8 inches – this will encourage healthy new growth, but anymore will rob the young vines of necessary energy.
5) Cut back the top, above the graft, to two or three buds. Relying on one bud alone is risky business, especially for backyard amateurs – better to grow two or three in case your dog or two year old son accidentally damages one (or more…)
6) Trim off any roots above the graft – these pop out from time to time until the vine gets settled in the soil.
Planting Your Vines
1) Using the spacing plan developed in “How to Build a Trellis”, wake up early one morning and dig your planting holes 1-1.5ft wide and deep enough to keep the graft 2-3 inches above the soil line. (Err on the side of deeper than you may need, as a slight depression in the row will be good for Year One irrigation purposes.)
2) With the vines still soaking in buckets of water as you plant (never let the roots dry out prior to planting), form a small mound at the bottom of each hole to adjust the planting depth, emplace the vine, and spread the roots around the mound to avoid overlap and ensure full contact with the soil.
3) Give the young vine a healthy dose of water at the base of the roots.
4) Use the excess soil to backfill the hole, gently pack it in, and have a buddy following in trace to soak each hole thoroughly.
***NOTE: If frost threatens after planting, you’re top priority is to protect the most vulnerable part of the vine, which is essentially the graft and the buds. Mound excess soil up and around/over the exposed buds and graft until temperatures stabilize for the spring, at which point you should remove the mounded soil. This happened to us the weekend after we planted, but luckily every vine made it through.
Hanging Your Wire
Once the vines are planted, you have about a month or two to hang your wire. Don’t hang wire before planting, as you’ll be dodging and ducking wire the whole time, which limits your workspace and efficiency.
Hanging your wires properly, and tightly, is incredibly important to the future health (and sight) of your vineyard. We can’t stress this enough. You can purchase and utilize Wirevise tensioners to assist with this task, or you can do it the old-fashioned way with a buddy, a crowbar, and a hammer with large galvanized staples. See our thoughts and recommendations below.
Key Recommendations:
- Use Wirevise tensioners if you can find them and afford them. We did not and are left with (somewhat) loose wires as a result (four years later). This hasn’t caused any damage and isn’t really a big deal, but it bothers us nonetheless.
- Hang the bottom wire first – if it becomes slightly loose when tightening the top wire (as was our case), that’s OK – the top wire is much more important and bears more weight.
- If hanging/tightening wire by hand with a crowbar, fill your end post holes with Quickcrete and give them time to set. This extra stability will prevent you from loosening your bottom wire while tightening your top wire.
Hanging the Wires
1) If using Wirevise tensioners, follow the instructions included with the device. Essentially you’ll be drilling holes through your end posts, feeding the wire through said hole, and then leading the wire into the Wirevise device (it allows the wire to feed in, but doesn’t let the wire slip back out). You can now tighten your wires every year while doing winter pruning.
2) If you choose to hand and attach wires by hand, the process is quite simple.
- First, carefully open the wire packaging (if you haven’t already). Grip it firmly, as there can be a lot of tension released when you do.
- While one buddy holds the wire bundle at one end of the row, you should walk to the far end with the free end of the wire.
- Leaving yourself about a foot of slack beyond the end post, attach this free end of wire to one side of the end post by hammering a galvanized staple into the wood, trapping the wire between the staple and the post.
- Instruct your buddy to cut the wire from the bundle, again leaving some slack for adjustments, and then have him walk to your end of the row,
- With staples attached to each wire stake (ideally on same side of stakes as your initial end post), have your buddy feed the wire through each staple until he ends up back where he started at the other end post.
- With your wire attached to one end post and loosely strung along the row, you now need to tighten the wire “like a banjo string” and hammer it into the second end post.
- Pull the string manually as tight as possible, keeping it taught against the second end post. Then, with a crowbar (wedge point, ideally with a gooseneck of some sorts), you’ll need to grasp the wire in the wedge point and crank it as tight as you can, using the post as a brace, while your buddy hammers the final staple into the post, trapping the wire securely. You can even attach it with 2-3 staples to be extra safe.
- Repeat this process along each row – you’ll get the hang of it eventually.
At this point, you have some Year One decisions to make prior to shifting into Year One Vineyard Management:
1) Do you want growing tubes?
Wordy academic research aside, they essentially act as mini-greenhouses for the young buds/shoots. You can go old-school with leftover milk cartons (though you’ll need to start saving them months ahead of time), or you can order them from your nursery. You’ll also need some basic stakes (bamboo works well) to hold them in place. We purchased growing tubes separately and highly recommend them.
2) How do you plan to manage the rows and aisles?
To review, the rows are the “beds” in which the vines are planted. The aisles are the areas between the rows. We opted to cover our rows with landscape/garden fabric, cutting long slices and emplacing them with leftover hangers from Grandma’s closet.
And for our aisles, we just let the grass grow as usual, mowing it every week and edging it every spring to prevent encroachment.
Cover crop is essential for the aisles to prevent erosion and just make it look nice. Cover crop for the rows is only recommended mid-season and beyond, or roughly mid-July for us in Maryland. It helps the vines shift into a harvest and “going dormant” mindset according to the experts.
Watering Your Young Vines
Once these tasks are completed and decisions made, your primary duty this first month is to ensure the young vines get an adequate, weekly drink of water. If you’re able to afford the installation of drip irrigation, great – you should be all set.
For those of us with neither the time nor budget for such extravagance, opinions vary on the amount of required water, but we essentially went vine to vine with a hose once a week and allowed water to soak the hole for 1-2 minutes. All 50 vines survived year one and reached the top wire in their first season, so we consider this a good practice as a result.
Protecting Your Vines
Lastly, and unfortunately somewhat expensive, is your decision on how to protect the vineyard. You have a few things to consider:
1) Do you have a dog who can roam freely and safely?
Dogs are a great, affordable and fun way to protect a small vineyard from deer, birds, and the like. But they can only cover so much ground.
2) Do you have a lot of deer in your area?
We do. As a result, we purchased plastic fence and fence posts from Hope Depot. It was expensive, but well worth the price – we see them scheming outside the fence every year.
Congratulations. You’ve prepared your backyard vineyard, received the vines, planted them, set the wire, and created a plan to manage first year growth. With your Vineyard Preparation complete, you can now officially shift into Vineyard Management.