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!

Christmas Eve - update on vine pruning

Last night's weather forecast said we'd have to "wait until Boxing Day to see any sun".
Funnily enough, today was gorgeous. Hm.

So I thought I'd continue on with the vine pruning. Remember on Sunday I was starting to prune the ones in the "open ground"? Well I finished them. Not too difficult as there are only five plants.

This is what they look like now:







Again, the contrast isn't too good because of all the shades of brown.

The next task will be to prune the vines growing against the house wall. Here are a few more shots of them as they are now:











You can tell how sunny it was by the sharp shadows, n'est-ce-pas?

These vines are pruned according to the "rod-and-spur" system, which is more straightforward than the Guyot method employed in many open vineyards

For the wall-grown vines all that is needed is to take back the current year's shoots to a couple of strong eyes. One of these will be allowed to develop into a fruiting lateral, and the other will be rubbed out. Because this procedure is repeated annually, a knobbly spur gradually forms, from which the method derives its name (natch). "Rod" refers to the permanent framework of old wood.

I'll post some more pics when I've pruned them.

Meanwhile, have a great Christmas.