Our spring has been a cool one punctuated with weekly rain and our vines have been loving it! While we are behind in our task of shoot thinning, some of the vines have reached the top catch wires so we have to think about stringing more wire so that we can move our fixed wire netting to the moveable wire netting. We feel that we can avoid the problems that we faced last year when the grape vine tendrils wrapped around the netting and we spent and inordinate amount of time removing the tendrils from the netting. But, I digress.
Today, I want to blog about my go to online article, Ed Hellman's
Grapevine Structure and Function. This article is an excellent reference about grapevine growth. It also contains detailed illustrations of the Principle Growth Stages of the grapevine.
Currently, our vineyard is at
Principal growth stage 5: Inflorescence emerge, consisting of the following stages:
- 53 Inflorescences clearly visible
- 55 Inflorescences swelling, flowers closely pressed together
- 57 Inflorescences fully developed; flowers separating
- 61 Beginning of flowering: 10% of caps fallen
Keeping our eye out on flowering will allow us to fill out our chart of our annual cycle of grape vine growth:
I have been keeping this chart since 2015 when we had our first flowering and consequently our first very, very small harvest. Keeping this information helps us to see what happened in the past and how to plan for the future in terms of flowering, harvest, etc. But, as always, Mother Nature has a huge role in this. Our chart is merely a guideline.
References:
1. Ed Hellman,
Grapevine Structure and Function.
What type of netting did you use? I can see it's side netting but what brand?
ReplyDeleteWhere would you have rather put the netting to avoid the tendril issue on your trellis? Below the fruiting wire?
Hi Fermentswine,
ReplyDeleteWe use TightLoch® netting. Since we are on the East Coast, we purchase this netting from Spec Trellising in PA. In 2017, when we first put in a significant (10 rows) of netting, we used anchor clips to secure the netting to the catch wires that were two catch wires above the fruiting wire. The side netting is 31-32" and that covered the fruit zone. We had serious tendril issues during the growth season in 2018 when the netting was on the catch wires.
This year, we are putting in moveable catch wires for the netting and intend to put the netting at the highest level during growth (now) and then move it back down to the fruit zone area once the vines have reached the top of the trellis. I can blog about it with photos in my next blog post. I hope this answers a few of your questions. Thank you for reading our blog!