Boxing Day - vine-pruning completed

Friday 26th December: another brilliantly sunny day. Ideal for completing the pruning, which this time (ie for the wall-grown grapes) entails climbing a ladder. First, a re-cap of what they looked like before pruning:





Ok. To work. For each "spur" you start by removing any old, dead wood:





In the example shown, that left two rods - last season's fruiting laterals. I pruned each of these to about two good buds ("eyes"):





The finished job:



I then repeated the process for all the spurs on all the vines. A certain amount of judgement is needed. If a rod is very thin and weedy-looking, for example, it is worth cutting it out all together to give the remaining one a better chance.

This is what the vines look like now:









Much neater, I feel.

So that's it for now. Next tasks will be in February, when I'll feed and mulch the vines. It's also a good time to plant the cuttings I prepared from the prunings.

Finally, if you're interested, take a look at this web page I set up with some FAQs on vine-growing and winemaking.

Cheers!