Though you may want to let out a sigh of relief after successfully planting your young vines, the work has really just begun. Year One Vineyard Management is perhaps the most demanding year in a vineyard’s lifetime. And worst of all, you won’t have a harvest at the end of the growing season to celebrate your work.
No need to fret, though. Although demanding and time consuming, the satisfaction you’ll receive from watching the young vines creep their way up to the top wire each week is hard to replicate.
As a backyard vineyard manager, your sole goal in Year One is to ensure these young vines are set up for long, healthy, and productive lives. Like any quality construction project, this requires two essential components: a solid, below-ground foundation (the roots), and a sturdy, reliable above-ground infrastructure (the trunk and cordons). We will take a look at both in this Year One Vineyard Management series.
The Foundation (The Roots)
While a full-time vineyard manager (with time, resources, and staff) will have a wide variety of priorities this first year, a backyard vineyard enthusiast with a full-time job and two kids should have one top priority above all others: establishing strong, healthy roots.
Promoting healthy vine roots, like raising confident children, requires a balance of support, challenge, and independence. Doing so ensures the young vines have what they need to thrive, but at the same time don’t become dependent on reliable, man-made sources of nourishment (like drip irrigation water and regular fertilizer).
The three key things you’ll need to focus on to promote healthy roots are water, weeds, and pests.
Year One Vineyard Management: Water
Bottom Line: first year vines need water. But not too much.
You need to support the young vines in this first year, their most vulnerable year of all, but you also must push them to “dig deeper” into the soil for their own, independent nourishment.
Roots which are “trained” to wait for a daily drip application of water at the soil surface will never venture deeper into the soil to seek water and nutrients – this will result in a dreaded “root ball” at the base of the vine and a life of dependence and mediocre production at best.
Of all the lessons to remember, this is perhaps the most useful: vines do best when pushed to the brink of survival. Knowing when that limit has been reached, however, takes some time and experience.
As briefly discussed in the “Planting Your Vines” post, we ensured each vine received a deep, two-minute, independent hose session each of the weeks in which we didn’t receive much rain. (And by hose session, we literally mean sitting down next to each vine and allowing the hose to fully soak the base of the vine for about two minutes.)
This worked well in our small backyard vineyard, but is time consuming and tedious. Installing drip irrigation is one option many choose to pursue instead, but we don’t recommend it outside of extremely hot, desert regions.
A few things to note regarding your Year One watering plan:
- Vines don’t like wet feet. Like tomatoes, vines prefer deep, infrequent watering. One inch of water per week, or a 1-2 minute soak with a hose each weekend, should suffice.
- In other words, vines don’t like muddy, moist soil. Rows (and roots) should be encouraged to dry out between water applications whenever possible.
- Vines don’t like sprinklers. Though your crazy uncle may suggest this on multiple occasions, as was our case, this method results in shallow/superficial soil penetration, promotes things like fungus/mildew on the young leaves, and is an incredible waste of water.
- Look out for signs of genuine thirst. The best signal that a vine is truly thirsty, especially in Year One, will come from the tendrils. If they appear wilted/stunted and shrink back behind the tip of the corresponding shoot, this is a sign of thirst.
Deep, infrequent water applications are the name of the game this first year.
“Treat the vines like a man, the grapes like a woman.” This all starts in Year One.
Year One Vineyard Management: Weeds
Did you start a backyard vineyard to walk-around spraying a bunch of chemicals into your freshly-tilled soil?
Or did you start a backyard vineyard to work outside with your hands, with family and friends, on something physically challenging and intellectually stimulating?
If you align with the former, great – here is the Amazon link to purchase some Round Up. If you align more with the latter, then please read on.
Good weeding habits are essential to a healthy vineyard every year, but particularly so in the backyard vineyard’s first year. Weeds beneath the vines in spring and early summer invite all sorts of insects, disease, and fungus that you should avoid. Disciplined weeding also ensures the young vines don’t have to compete for sun, water, and nutrients when establishing the necessary roots and shoots to live healthy, productive lives.
Some good rules of thumb here are as follows:
- The soil beneath the vines should be bare until August. Your freshly tilled rows, and especially the beds immediately around the base of the vine, should be kept that way through the entire spring and most of the summer. This is best achieved with a simple hoe used at a shallow depth, no more than the top two inches to avoid disturbing roots.
- Vines don’t like mulch. Mulch can confuse the vines, causing late season growth in the fall (and resulting winter kill) and early season growth in the early spring (killing buds after late winter frosts). We used landscape fabric as a middle ground choice and had good success with it.
- Cover crop is good in the fall. In August, simple weeds or cover crops (such as clover, vetch, or other nitrogen-fixing plants) are permissible and even recommended, as they help slow down the vineyard and shift its mindset to winter dormancy. These should be hoed and turned under before winter, though, to avoid any production of seeds.
- Presentation matters. The aisles, or the spaces between the rows, should be kept neat and tidy, with weekly lawnmower clippings serving as a healthy organic compost for the rows. Once a year, you’ll likely have to edge the rows, ensuring the grasses from the aisles don’t creep too far into the beds.
If any of this sounds too demanding or time consuming, you can also do what many backyard vineyard enthusiasts have done in the past – pay a teenager in your neighborhood to take care of it once a month until late July, and then just make sure the cover crop doesn’t go to seed.
Year One Vineyard Management: Pests
For the most common pests in Year One, such as deer, gophers, rabbits, or squirrels, the backyard vineyard enthusiast has a few options:
- Dogs – though they can only cover so much ground, (and may not be as reliable as you may hope), dogs are a good, natural and entertaining deterrent to most large vineyard pests with some proper training and oversight.
- Fencing – this is the best way to keep out deer. 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.
- Trapping – we haven’t yet attempted this, but there are tons of resources online for how to build some basic traps for things like gophers, etc. if you can stomach the result.
- Owl Boxes – like trapping, this is a fun DIY project that can produce some serious results if you live in the right area/habitat.
- Milk Cartons or Growing tubes – fancy academic research aside, they essentially act as mini-greenhouses for the young buds/shoots while also protecting them from ground-level pests (rabbits, for example).
With your planning for watering, weeding, and dealing with pests completed, you can shift gears to training the young vines up to the lower and top wires, building the trunks and cordons to serve as the grape-growing infrastructure for years to come.
This is where weekly walk-throughs and attention to details really come into play, and is covered in Part Two of the Year One Management series.