Here is some more help to anyone who has grapes maybe you can add your thoughts.

Pruning overgrown grapes

Because of the harsh winters here, it seems as though it is better practise to prune grapes in spring, just before buds break. This is because pruning stimulates new growth, so doing this while the plant is dormant is a bad idea!

We have four rows of grapevines in a state of total chaos, supposedly growing along training wires (Guyot method). We have been trawling the internet for clues as to what to do with overgrown vines, with many, often conflicting, opinions! It’s quite maddening, but frankly I’m not going to spend too much time over it because after all I want a garden that will take care of itself. But it would be nice to have grapes and I am curious to learn about the mystical art of viticulture. So naturally what I write here are the words of a humble novice just trying to get some grapes to grow in an orderly fashion without killing the plant. The grapes at the moment have a fairly good yield although I am not sure what they are capable of so maybe it’s very poor;
last year was a bad year for fruit and vegetables in the village as there was a very late frost which killed off a lot of new buds. But hopefully with a little training the grape crop will more than double with the correct pruning.

The Guyot system is one in which a vine is trained vertically up from the soil to a wire, and then trained horizontally along the wire, either just one branch in one direction or two branches trained in opposite directions (left and right). The idea is that fruiting branches grow from two main branches and are replaced each year. I am still trying to get my head round it: fruit will grow from buds only on one year old wood, so you need to replace this each year by cutting off the two year old wood and training a one year old branch along the wire in its place. And from this one year old branch grapes should grow from!

The framework we have upon which to train the vines is three rows of horizontal wires which are strung between concrete posts, so I guess it is possible to train a maximum of three stems off each grape trunk in either direction (a total of six) – one horizontally along each wire. The alternative and possibly the more correct method is to train only two branches (one to the left and one to the right) of the main trunk, on the lowest wire;
these branches will sprout smaller branches as the season goes on which can be trained along and tied to the other two horizontal wires in such a way that all of the branches get enough light to make the fruit nice and sweet. Having seen how many branches and what a mass of leaves and fruit is produced in just one season’s growth it seems that this is the wiser option. So I think we will go with the latter option of just two main branches off the trunk trained along wires, as with the first method (six branches in total) there is nowhere to train the branches that are yet to grow and the vine will surely be overcrowded.

The first cautious step to take was to simply cut back the vines that were growing beyond the limits of the training wire as there was no way these would be trainable as they were just growing along the ground. Then other vines that had come loose from the wires and were growing along the ground within the borders of the wire system were reattached to the wires. Now at this stage there was still much branching and general chaos in the plants, not to mention more than one and often several trunks coming out of the root bundle, where there should only be one thick main trunk.

The plants that have more than one ‘trunk’ coming out of one root system need to be radically pruned back in such a way that only one (preferably the thickest) trunk remains. From this one trunk, one or two branches can be left and the rest pruned away. These one or two branches should be of one year old wood – certainly not older as these are useless as they don’t produce any fruit. Spotting one year old wood is simple as it has not yet hardened – two year old wood has a distinctive wizened appearance. These one or two branches should then be tied to the support wire, one to the left and the other to the right.

There are a couple of plants which have a thick mass of wood near the ground and many weedy looking ‘trunks’ that have sprouted out of it. I am in two minds as to whether to hack all of it back to ground level or to leave one trunk and prune the rest off, in the hope that it will become more substantial as the years progress. There are relics of grape plants which have been completed hacked down to the ground and subsequently died (or maybe they were killed some other way, not sure) which are a bit ominous for me, so for now I will just prune back so there is one trunk only and see how it fares because I am a wimp!

Continued pruning during the growing season is also a good idea. Pruning any branches so that they do not exceed 3 feet in length is something that I have read – the idea is that excess energy is put into fruit production as opposed to growing branches. This will also keep the vine to a manageable size. I will see how they grow and will keep them within the boundaries of the wire system, making sure that adjacent plants do not infringe on each others’ growing space.

Cheers for that Brian, we only got our house in October, forgot to do any reading before we went over, no pruners, hacked away blindly thinking I should 'trim' them for the winter.
If they aren't dead I should have a better idea this year.

Brian1 Good luck with your grapes.

We did he same as you tivoliend just cut away until there was almost nothing left. The intention was to cut them back so they would take a good while to grow - Wrong!! next year we went back and there was grapes everywhere - Looked good but the wasps were also everywhere. So late summer we cut to the root and pulled away what we could and even had a small tractor in to rotivate. Last year grapevines covered the ground with loads of grapes. Will just have to dig the roots out this time.

Oddy

How do you know if your grape vine is dead? mine has got mixed in with a few weeds and a bramble bush so the whole thing looks like a scene for day of the triffids. I'd like to save them if possible but i'm not sure what i'm supposed to be looking for.

I haven't had this problem but I hope this may help you,It may be difficult to tell if your grape is dead in the winter. Canes that have been dead for a while often appear somewhat "
wrinkled"
and will be dry and brittle;
however, dormant vines that have died very recently or are dying over the winter may look healthy. Living buds usually begin to swell in early spring. They will appear pinkish or cinnamon brown and somewhat fuzzy. Also, sap usually drips copiously from living canes in spring when they are pruned. Some grapes break bud later in the spring, so you may have to wait to determine whether the vine is dead or alive. Even if the vine appears to be dead, new canes may grow from the trunk or from living portions of the vine near the roots.

brilliant thankyou. I'll aim to do them when i'm there in july then I should be able to see which is which.

Thanks Sallyann that's useful to me as well because I think I have some dead grapes but not really sure and it would be a shame to uproot them if they are ok.

Easter (‘Velik Den’ in Bulgarian) is almost upon us and I am still waiting for the seeds to arrive in the post. In case you were wondering why I would buy seeds on-line instead of at the local market, it’s because there are many varieties that I would like to grow that are nigh on impossible to buy as fully grown vegetables, let alone seeds. What is more, seeds are actually comparably priced if you buy them from ebay – you might be wary buying seeds there but there are several well established stores with lots of positive feedback. In the past I have had a lot of success with buying from these stockists and they are incredibly cheap compared to on-line stores that appear if you type ‘buy fresh seeds’ into your search engine, not to mention buying from a garden centre. There are set EU standards regarding the average germination rate of seeds, which on-line stores as well as high street outlets are required to adhere to, so you really would be unlucky to get a dud packet through the post.

So I have very itchy feet to begin growing, as it has been 20c recently and I am hoping that it won’t get too hot too quickly… likewise I hope that we don’t get another deep frost because that would really suck and kill all of my seedlings. But as any gardener knows, especially when you are overhauling a garden that has been neglected for the past several years, there is a lot of work to do even before you plant your first seed. Unfortunately it’s not just a case of chucking some seeds out of the window;
although sometimes this method does work, I wouldn’t call it foolproof.

Clearing unwanted plants

As I have mentioned, the garden had several outcrops of aggressively growing thorny acacias – great nitrogen fixing trees, but they do grow in swathes and are difficult to manage so we have cut them all down. Ideally cutting out the roots and burning them is a ‘final solution’ as it were (could that be the most inappropriate use of that phrase? Answers on a postcard!), but we have made a quick fix this year and are going to monitor them to see how rapidly they grow back over the summer.

Preparing the soil

We now have various patches of earth that we have turned over to get rid of weeds so that the earth is ready for planting. Having done my research following this gargantuan back breaking task, I realise now that there is a much easier way of preparing the earth that, although requires a little more time, is virtually labour free. This is to prepare a ‘kill mulch’ of leaves, cut grass, newspaper, straw – anything composting material that will sit on top of the ground and kill whatever is growing underneath by simply smothering it. This is a superior method because you retain the moisture and organic material in the soil;
when you turn over the soil, the birds will come along and peck out all the insects and worms and good things living in it, your soil will dry out, and you risk leaching out nutrients as you have done away with the bulk of the soil structure by mashing it up. So we know this for next year…as it stands we didn’t really have the time to wait for this process to occur, so we will have to just make do with watering in and mulching over the seeds we plant out.

Planting fruit trees

The six fruit trees we bought in the market last week: two apricots, two cherries, an apple and a peach, are in the ground and will hopefully take successfully. If not we will plant some more next spring. We realised that we were tempting fate by only planting several about two metres tall with a few side branches. When buying fruit trees it is always better to buy them with a soil bundle attached, instead of bare roots, as they will have a much more substantial root ball to give them a head start in the ground. We could only find those with bare roots, which we pruned a little (maybe cutting an inch off each rootling). We also pruned the branches: the main stem, which grows vertically upward, was trimmed down until it was about half the height from the main trunk, and all other branches we trimmed off about a third. Then we dug holes in the ground about twice or three times the size of but only as deep as the root ball, as it is important only to bury them up to the border of the roots and the trunk (it is obvious when you look at a sapling where this is due to the change in quality of the wood). We put the tree in the hole and replaced the earth, mixed with a little ash from our wood burning stoves. Lightly pressing the soil down around the trunk, we filled with earth up to the boundary of the roots and the trunk then watered the tree generously. A light dose of manure was laid around, but not touching, the tree (as unless the manure has been composted for several months it is likely to burn the bark and kill the tree) and on top of this we placed a layer of mulch in the form of last years partially composted walnut leaves. We will continue to water about once a week unless of course it rains!

Thank you Brian I'm absolutely shattered just reading this but I can see from reading that you must love gardening

Brian1 another

Oddy