Vineyard Pruning Full Disclosure

A few days ago, my husband and I were pruning, yes, we were pruning our vines. In the spirit of full disclosure, this is what we did. We did our pruning and laying down canes in March and left a good 6 inches or so on our dormant canes as insurance against a frost.

This practice relies on the fact that the apical buds will bloom first and if there is a killing frost, then the apical growth can be cut off and the remaining buds on the cane will use the energy to grow. There were times during the spring where we had some very warm weather (March 9 and 10). In April, I blogged about the yoyo-ing temperatures that we were seeing this spring, so all in all, it seemed like a good idea to have left our canes on the long side. Our dormant buds were beginning budbreak during the last week in April and had begun to unfurl during the first week in May, which we have seen is quite typical for our property. Although we had a mild winter, May was on the cool side and the buds for a while seemed to be in a state of suspended animation at the budbreak stage, where they appeared not to grow at all.
Then in the crush of work that followed, drilling holes, mowing, planting, we let our vines grow to an unwieldy state.

The majority of the growth of the vine were at the apical ends where there were many beautiful inflorescence (grape flowers). But, for the health of the vine, we had to cut them off! This was very hard to do, but I think we made the right decision because we don't want to overcrop our vines.