Pruning time, and I’m only just in time!
Sunny Sundays in mid-winter are the perfect opportunity for hand-pruning the dozen grapevines in our small orchard.
It’s a job that I enjoy, particularly as I grew all of these young table grapevines from cuttings.
Yet I soon discover that I’ve been too slow removing the tough plastic cords that I used to train the young vines up to the wire; these have cut deeply into the trunk where they were fastened at ground level three years ago when this small vineyard began.
This is also the likely reason I had such a poor crop this past summer – sap and nutrients would have been struggling to reach the canopy from the root system through this man-made bottleneck.
So after the pruning is done I get down on my hands and knees – a serious penance for me – and carefully cut away the original ties to allow the vines to recover.
I go to my bed a humbled man.
2 comments:
Hopoefully they'll come back full of vigour after their release.
This exact thing happened to me but it was the tendril of one of the vines which wrapped itself around the main stem and was literally strangling itself... I was worried the vine would be stunted because the stem did not seem to be thickening even after removal. Luckily it was half way up the main stem so I just cut the whole thing back to below the damage. Hopefully yours will recover though, as you won't have much left if you cut off below the damage!
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