In last month’s Vineyard magazine I dealt with the basics of getting your vineyard in the ground: measuring your site, ordering your vines, vine density, rootstocks, site preparation and planting. For November I propose to deal with four other very important issues: pruning, trellising, weed control and post-planting care.
Pruning
Pruning is something that needs to be considered along with vine density as the two are bound together, plus the type of pruning usually fixes the type of trellising.
Of course, some types of pruning systems need wider rows: cordon-pruned systems such as GDC (Geneva Double Curtain) and Sylvoz: and Lyre and bush (or gobelet) trained vines – there are others. These types of pruning are more common in hot regions, where large yields are possible, but now rarely (if ever) seen in England and Wales.
Some types of pruning lend themselves to narrower rows and are more commonly found in cooler regions of which England and Wales are prime examples.
Whilst there is no official data on pruning systems, it is my guess that the vast majority of vineyards planted here in the last twenty years have been single or double Guyot trained with a few growers adopting an arched cane system, known as Pendlebogen in Germany.
There are also a few plantings of Scott Henry, which can be cordon or cane pruned, a few GDC diehards, and a few spur-pruned fans, but these are very much in the minority.
The reasons that cane pruning is now the industry standard are easy to see. Higher planting densities, as discussed in last month’s article, have higher yields and better-quality fruit. Cane pruning is easy to understand, to teach and to carry out, something new vineyard owners appreciate.
Additionally cane pruned vines will give you a fair crop in year three (sometimes a small crop even in year two), great for cash-flow. Whereas once 1.2m -1.4m between vines was considered normal, with two-cane double Guyot as the standard, many growers are now planting at 0.8m -1m and using single Guyot pruning. It is my experience that single Guyot allows next year’s replacement cane more space to grow and it gets more exposure to light and air, both helping promote fruiting.
Trellising
As well as ordering your vines and booking the planting contractor, you will need to give some thought to trellising, both timing of and materials.
Unless there are financial or other constraints, putting the trellising up in the first summer is best for the vines.
In most soils, given the opportunity, coupled with the right post-planting treatment, your vines should reach 1.5m high and, in many cases, even higher. This is far too high for them to be unsupported and as a minimum they need a planting cane or rod to grow up.
Don’t worry too much if your vines have only made 75mm growth by the end of their first season as long as most of the vines are around the same height. What you don’t want to see is some tall ones, some smaller ones, and some that have made very little growth. That’s a sign of poor soil preparation or poor planting technique.
The best planting cane is undoubtedly a 1.2m x 6mm galvanised steel planting vine ‘tutor’ (as they are known in France). These have ‘waves’ in them which provide anchorage for the vine’s own tendrils to latch onto, saving you time and materials. These rods are best left attached to the vine for life as not only do they provide support vertically for the vine’s trunk and keep it straight – important when you want to use a double-sided undervine weeder – but also provide support horizontally for the fruiting wire to which they are clipped.
Try to think of your trellis as a complete unit with each element: vine rods, intermediate posts, end-posts and (most importantly) end-post anchors all playing their part in supporting the vine’s foliage and of course, its crop. The intermediates need to be 70mm-75mm in the ground, the end-posts a bit further. The anchors – and please never trellis a vineyard without good anchors – must be suitable for the soil they are going into and the length of the rows they are servicing.
One element to the trellising which I feel is often ignored is the height of the leafwall. With 2.40m intermediates, the fruiting wire at 0.75m, and allowing the leafwall to extend around 0.20m above the (single) top wire, you will end up with a leafwall of around 1.20m. This is the minimum you need in our climate to get enough leaf area to both ripen the fruit fully, plus produce enough carbohydrates to replenish the vine’s canes and permanent woody parts (trunks and root system) for it to survive the winter and produce lots of viable flowers in the early summer.
Do not be tempted to raise the height of the fruiting wire to a more back-friendly height of say 0.90m (and I have even seen them higher) as without increasing the height of your intermediates, this will only reduce the leafwall height and thus the area of leaf needed for photosynthesis. It goes without saying that if you want a trellis that will last the life of the vineyard, galvanised steel for everything is the only sensible choice. Whilst timber may look nice, try telling me that after you have replaced an end-post after only five years in the ground.
Weed control
It seems strange to be planning for weed control before the vines are even in the ground, but believe me, you need to. If vines will grow and succeed in your soil, then so will weeds, that is unless they are controlled.
As I said above, newly planted vines have a very small root system when they are planted and they need to grow as fast as possible to access the fertilisers and other nutrients that are in the soil, plus of course the water they need to grow.
Weeds of course also need these and if you let them grow up amongst and around your vines, they will compete for those same resources. Until your vines are all well established with good root systems and good vigorous growth – which is probably by year three – the best practice is to keep a weed-free corridor directly beneath the vines of at least 60cm wide.
There are many different ways of keeping weeds away from your vines: some work, but only on a small scale; some work, but are prohibitively expensive and time consuming; some half-work, which is as good as not working at all; a few work well as long as the right equipment is on hand and used at the right time. You can forget mulches and undervine cover crops, they are just not practical or economical, and don’t get me started on sheep or other ‘weed eating’ animals.
The only two methods that really work are undervine cultivation and herbicides. Undervine cultivation means a tractor mounted hoe (of which there are many types) used regularly and at the right time for the weeds, which is not necessarily the right time for you. There are both single-sided and double-sided versions and none of the effective ones are cheap.
Most growers find that one type of undervine hoe works with the soil in one state (say dry with a light weed cover) and not in another (damp with lots of weeds). This means that many growers, especially larger ones, will have two different types in order to cope with all eventualities.
In order to keep your undervine area clean you will need to hoe around every two weeks during the (weed) growing season and unless you have a double-sided hoe, this will mean up and down each row twice. The wear on blades and the burning of diesel can soon add up. Many growers, whose primary method of weed control is undervine hoeing, will use a half-rate glyphosate in the early spring, in order to start hoeing with a clean(ish) vineyard to start with, and then follow up with a post-harvest clean-up spray.
And then there are herbicides. These work well if applied correctly and at the right time for the weeds. There is one pre-emergent herbicide permitted in English and Welsh vineyards (Kerb) which will stop most germinating seedlings, but which must be used by 31 January and four effective herbicides, some contact and some translocated.
Typically two to three sprays a year will be enough, but this depends very much on how much weed cover you start with. If you start early, within a few weeks of planting, with your vines protected by rabbit guards that double as spray guards, then the job will be much easier than if you start once the weeds have had a chance to grow and establish themselves. It goes without saying that you need a dedicated weed sprayer of which there are many different types. Fully shielded ones work well in vineyards.
The decision over which system to use is a tortuous one for most vineyards, but believe me, it needs taking sooner rather than later. Starting with herbicides and after a season or two, changing to cultivations (or a dual herbicide-cultivation system) is what many decide to do.
Care of vines after planting
Many growers seem to think that once planting is over, they are done for the year and all they have to do is sit back and watch their vines grow. How wrong can they be?
If you have done all your site preparation correctly, got the nutrient status right, and planted your vines into a receptive soil, the work of vine-building can start. There are (of course) several ways of achieving this, but in my half a century of involvement with viticulture, the best way to get your vines cropping, evenly and as quickly as possible so that you get your first crop and start recouping the considerable sums already spent, is to start early, and start properly.
This means as soon as you see shoots growing which will probably be around three to four weeks after planting. At this stage, you need to ‘single out’ your vines, rubbing off all but one shoot, typically the best positioned to grow into your vine’s trunk. Be careful not to select a rootstock shoot, which will be coming from the lower part of the graft, or even from the rootstock itself. You will probably need to do this twice over a two to three week period as not all vines will be as vigorous as each other and not all parts of the vineyard will push the vines at the same rate. After this you will need to start removing side shoots, so that the ‘leader’ shoot is not distracted from its task of trunk-building.
Whilst there are some who think that just leaving the vines to get on with it, allowing every shoot to grow in the first (and sometimes even the second) year on the basis that ‘more shoots equals better roots’, the fact is that the taller a young vine grows, the more leaf area it has, and the more leaf area it has, the more roots it will grow. More leaf area also gives you more area for sprays which will keep the vines healthy and photosynthesizing to their maximum. Except on the smallest vineyards, you will not be able to do the work of singling out and side shoot removal on your own, so plan to hire in labour in your first summer to help.
