Pruning Lessons

We've read how to do it, we've watched videos on how to do it, but that is no substitute for the real thing. Russell Holmberg from Holmberg Orchards invited us to learn how to prune grape vines, sacrificing a few of his Pinot Blanc vines to pruning novices. Russell's Pinot Blanc are cane pruned and under his and Michelle's excellent mentoring, we learned how to cane prune the vines.

The question is "how do you make sense of all of the shoots that are before you?" At first it just looked like a tangle, but then you pick apart the vine, understanding where last year's cane was laid down, get a good idea of what to keep and what not to keep, cut back dead canes and then trim back to two canes per trunk. One cane is the insurance cane and the other cane is the one that will be laid down for this year's growth. The tops of the canes were cut differently to serve as visual reminders of which was which. For the insurance cane, we made a cut farthest away from the node, for the cane that would be for this year's growth, we made a cut nearest the node. The cane destined to provide this year's growth is usually the one that is growing above the insurance cane. There was so much to remember. On the other row, Russell, with his lopper was making just 2 cuts and getting the same results that we were getting. I'm sure it took us 10 times as long to figure out how to trim one vine than it took Russell and Michelle, but we finally got to the end of one row. We learned a lot and the good news for Russell is that we only mangled a few of his vines.
Both Russell and Michelle were great! They introduced us to the practical aspects of pruning with a lot of good tips on how to do it correctly!