We covered a lot in the Year One Vineyard Management (Part One) post. The main takeaway is this: above all else, year one in the backyard vineyard is about preparing the vines for long, healthy, and productive lives.
This means two things to your Average Joe backyard vineyard enthusiast with a full-time job and two kids:
First, develop good roots. And for good roots, this means acknowledging that vines like water, but not too much water. The best grapes, we are told, are those which come from vines that are pushed to the brink of existence. This means deep, infrequent water applications and “treating the vines like a man, the grapes like a woman.” Push them to find water and nutrients on their own through the development of strong root systems. They, and your future dinner guests, will thank you later.
Second, your Year One vine training will serve as the infrastructure for decades of grape harvests. Normally Year One just means establishing/training the trunk, with Year Two focused on establishing the cordons. This process – the delicate training of a bud burst at ground level up a stake to the top wire and out and across the top wire in both directions – will set the stage for everything you need to accomplish in year two and beyond.
Do it right this year and reap the rewards later.
Year One Vineyard Management – Training
If you remember nothing else from this post, remember this: there is no short-term reward (i.e. fruit/wine) for your vineyard work and care in Year One and often Year Two. In fact, a big part of your job this year is to deliberately remove any fruit clusters which emerge so that none of the young vine’s critical energy/nutrients are used for fruit production. You want all of that energy to be funneled into root development and vegetative growth, setting the conditions necessary for an explosive growing season in Year Three and beyond.
If you followed our advice from How to Build a Trellis and Planting Your Vines, you’ll have neatly spaced vines, each with 2-3 buds, planted in soft, toiled soil just beneath a lower wire sitting at roughly 24in inches above the ground come late spring. A metal or bamboo stake should be placed right next to these shoots for easy training. Those with frost danger will also have a mound of excess soil up to the graft, which will be removed in the April/May timeframe.
At this point, those 2-3 buds will begin to swell and eventually burst, producing 2-3 little green shoots. Your job these first few weeks is to select, and diligently protect, the strongest shoot from the bunch and slowly train it up the stake, ideally hitting the top wire by the end of the first growing season.
(Alternatively, some winemakers argue for allowing each of the 2-3 shoots to grow freely this first year, increasing photosynthesis, promoting root growth, and developing the energy needed for the single-shoot technique in Year Two. This obviously requires cutting back the Year One growth and starting all over again with 2-3 buds in Year Two. This is a personal decision and something we chose not to do, but worth mentioning.)
Year One Vineyard Management
Selecting the Primary Shoot
When the tallest shoot is about 6-10 inches (15-20cm) in length, it is time to start training that shoot up the training stake. A few things to keep in mind:
- Always select the most vertically oriented, vigorous shoot for training. It will be quite obvious which one that is most of the time, but sometimes you’ll just have to make an educated guess, or just use the one which is closest to the stake.
- Always keep the other shoots growing until you’ve 100% successfully tied your chosen shoot to the stake with ½-in (13mm) green vinyl tie-tape. You will inevitably break a few chosen shoots in this process (as will your 3-year-old son, or your dog), so you always want to have some back-ups available until the job is done.
- Once the most vigorous shoot is successfully tied to the stake, you can proceed to remove the other shoots, either with a sharp thumbnail or handy pruners. Don’t hesitate – just pinch them off and move on (much like you have to stoically remove weak vegetable seedlings under grow lights in late winter).
Training the Primary Shoot
Once your initial tie is made, you are now responsible for walking through the vineyard at least once a week to apply additional tie-tape every 4-6 inches (10-15cm) of growth. A couple tips here:
- Apply the ½-in (13mm) tie tape every 4-6 inches, which roughly amounts to the average growth in a week or less.
- Tie the tape loose, but not too loose – you want about a finger’s width of space between the shoot and the tape to allow for the expected season’s growth (while avoiding choking/strangling the vine as it grows).
- You are literally “painting” your future vineyard in this process – if you allow the growing shoot to bend and sway and curve around the stake, so will the future trunk for the next 30 years. Straight and upright is what you want, so be diligent.
Top Wire Decisions
Your top wire should be about 6-ft from the ground. If your primary shoot reaches this top wire in the first year, this is a good decision-point to have. Some considerations:
- The classic technique at this point is to snip off the top of the vine to promote lateral growth from the sides of the shoot. This will accomplish two things: first, it will allow you to start training the “cordons”, or permanent arms, along the top wire in both directions. Second, it will push the vine to begin creating its “head” which, can be used to create fruiting wood from year to year, depending on the fruiting technique you’ve chosen.
- An alternative technique, illustrated below, is to “drape” the shoot up and over the top wire, producing a single strand of shoot which will serve as both trunk and cordon. You’ll then train a second shoot up to and over the top wire in Year Two, giving yourself two trunks/cordons to work with in future growing seasons.
- If the primary shoot fails to make much progress in Year One (i.e. it doesn’t hit the top wire, or fails to achieve at least 36in/90cm of growth), don’t fret – this just means that you’ll need to cut back all the Year One growth in the fall and restart the process in Year Two, which is perfectly normal in many cases, and even deliberately sought in others.
(Photos courtesy of Double-A-Vineyards, our go-to supplier for all things backyard vineyard.)
The only other consideration worth mentioning in this basic overview is dealing with fungus. In your weekly walkthroughs, keep an eye out for powdery mildew, which will look like a thin layer of snow on the backside of the leaves. If you see it, you may need to start applying some fungicides, such as wettable or powdered sulfur, to manage the outbreak before it becomes irreversible. Uncontrolled mildew in Year One can become a major headache in subsequent years if not controlled properly.
Year One Vineyard Management – Summary
At the end of Year One, you may find yourself in one of many situations:
- You may have a vigorous, productive shoot which has reached the top wire (and either been snipped at the top, promoting lateral shoots for cordons, or draped along the top wire to serve as both a trunk and a cordon in one uninterrupted vegetative growth).
- You may have a relatively unproductive shoot, which now must be cut back to restart the training process in Year Two. This is also perfectly fine.
- You may have opted for the alternative Year One method, in which you allowed 2-3 shoots to grow freely, untrained, in order to develop the roots and energy for an explosive Year Two training season.
Whatever method you chose, as long as you focused this young vine’s energy towards its foundation (roots) and future infrastructure (trunk and cordon), you’ll have achieved the end goal of year one vineyard management around the world – early sacrifices for healthy, productive lives.