When to cut Brambles and Grapes

Originally this post was going to be all about my first attempt at planning a Fall garden, however as I went out to assess the damage to our summer garden from Tropical Storm Hanna I realized there were a few issues I had to deal with first.

The first challenge, was that somehow (it seems like overnight but I am sure it was not!) my raspberries, blackberries (known collectively as brambles) and grapes have taken on a life of their own. This was the second year for the blackberries and grapes and the third for the raspberries and also we didn't get much production from them this year (we didn't expect too, all of those plants take 3ish years to produce a lot of fruit) they all certainly grew to what seems like giant proportions.

Jason has been asking me for over a month when we should cut back all three of those plants, and my "I'll research it and get back to you" is really no longer good enough. So instead of fall garden planning I grabbed my favorite gardening tool, Rodale's Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening and started reading. I highly recommend this book to gardeners at any level.

What I discovered was quite interesting. There are two types of raspberries, summer and fall bearing, and three types of blackberries, erect, semi-erect and trailing. So my first order of business having thrown away all the information on the plants after I purchased them, was figuring out what type of berries I had. Luckily Rodale's had clear descriptions and sketches and I was quickly able to determine I had summer-bearing (OK this one was not hard as my few raspberries that we ate this year all came in the middle of the summer) and erect blackberries (which was basically determined since they can hold themselves up without needing support).

Upon determining that I also learned that I should have pruned both plants as soon as they flowered and had the tiny bit of fruit they did. Oppps! Well it's good knowledge to have and you can figure out what I will be doing tomorrow night. Jason and I also solidified our plan to reign in the brambles by building a trellis for them to grow up next year, instead of letting them overtake a good portion of our herbs and a few tomato plants.

Turning to the grape portion of the book, I learned that there are four main types of grapes grown in North America (European (kind of ironic!) or wine grapes, American (duh!), hybrids between European and American and muscadine. Luckily as long as I purchased them from a reputable place, which I did, it didn't matter what type I had all of them were to be pruned in the same way.

There are three common ways to "train" and prune grapes - cane, spur and head training - all depending on what you actually want to do with your grapes and where you want them to live. Unfortunatly for us, we didn't completely think through the placement of our grapes when we planed them early Spring 2007 and so the two plants we have live on opposite ends of our tomato garden. We had already decided to build or buy a big trellis next spring that spans the garden and allow each of the grapes to grow up their respective end, meeting someplace in the middle.

Rodale's goes into detail about each planting season and pruning season for the first four years - we sit squarely in season two. Luckily, we are not to late for pruning on our grapes (pvew!). They are to be pruned mid-winter by either tieing two of the main canes to a training wire and shortening the rest leaving only ten buds on each (cane or spur method) or selecting five canes at the high you want to plant to be at and prune them back to just two buds each (head-trained method). We are not sure which one we are going to go with since we honestly can't even figure out where the tomatoes end and the grapes begin right now. Thankfully we have some time! I'll update everyone on that process once we get to it.

Get out and enjoy your gardening while the gardening is still good!

Tomorrow: When is a Bug not a Beetle and a Beetle not a Bug