Transcript
Cane Pruning
Okay so we are going to do some pruning
of grapevines today and we're going to
start out with one of two ways to prune.
We'll start out with cane pruning, so we
have a couple of things that we need
whenever we do pruning, especially for
cane pruning. We need a loppers and
hand pruners as well as safety wear for
your eyes (so this can be sunglasses or
safety glasses in the veneer). A
couple of things also when you're
pruning is you want to make sure that
you have a scale for weighing your
prunings as well as gloves that you can
gather your prunings with.
Bilateral Cane Pruning
We are going to do cane pruning of a vertically
shoot positioned bilateral cane system
today. Whenever we do pruning of a
system like this we have to look at
renewing back to our renewal zone, and
that's the head of this trunk. The top of
the trunk is the head where all of our
shoots originated from. Here is last
year's cane that was laying down and
from that grows the shoots that we had
last season. So this season we have to
come in, we're going to remove about 90%
of the vine in doing this and we're
going to select two new canes to layout.
So that means that we have to select
those from this head area of the vine so
by looking at this we want to choose two
nicely formed shoots that are no smaller
than the pencil diameter and has nice
display of but along the shoot.
So right here closest to the
head are too nice keys that came out
last year. We have another nice one right
here that we could use so this old one
from last year can come out completely
so I'm going to cut that out right here
and all of this down here has to be
removed from the trellis. You can do that
by just grabbing and pulling firmly. So
we have a chute right here that grew
last year. We've got one right here. We've
got a lot of nice ones in the head so we
can remove the other cane over here.
So now we're down to where we need to
make our decision on what we want to
prune back so we know we have to lay out
two canes and we always prune back to 1
year old wood. This is all 1 year old
wood here. The canes from last year that
were laying out last spring are actually
two year old what we don't want that so
we're going to lay out two canes this
one is nicely positioned however some of
the inner nodes are quite long so we
have some others that we can choose from
that might have a shorter internode
space. So this one right here might be a
good choice for laying out on onto the
wire and this one over here will be my
choice for laying on to this side of the
wire so that leaves us to tipping and
tying the chute. I'm going to cut it off
add a note about halfway to the point of
the next fine space. I'm just going to
wrap it around the trellis while you're
here for now but we can tip and tie that
later and with this one right here I'm
going to do the same.
Just wrap it around the wire, usually
just needs to be once I just wanted to
hold right now.
We see that we have a number of shoots
in the head here that we want to take
care of we don't need all of these we've
got our cane out here a cane out there.
We can actually choose to leave just two
shoots, so we can take out the other two.
So this one we won't need and let's take
out this one right here and leave two of
them that are in the center or the head
of the vine and when we're doing this
now we have our two canes we have two
extra shoots here what we're going to do
is cut those back to either to two bugs
firs or we can leave them in this case
of a frosty vineyard or a vineyard that
has a spring frost. We will actually
maybe want to leave these two as full
canes until the early part of spring
because they'll be serving as kicker
canes otherwise we could come through
and just cut those back to individual
sperms down to about two count us.
Pruning Weights
So after you prune divine it's critical
to do burning weights, that is if you're
pruning reference vines for a vineyard
block where you want to understand how
much vine size gain you had during the
last growing season and it's critical to
get the printing weights off of a one
year old, would only so this happens to
be an old cane from this vine that I
just pruned and the cane that was laying
out last year is actually two year old.
What we want to quantify the one year
old wood weight only, so I'm going to cut
the shoots off of this cane for my
pruning weight estimation. You can do
this while it's still on the vine or on
the trellis or you can do it once you've
pulled out the cane. So you want to just
gather all of those 1 year old wood
pieces and we'll weigh those. Ok so to do
our printing weights of vines we
basically want to gather that 1 year old
wood into a bundle and you can feel free
to cut it into smaller pieces that you
can fit it into a nice neat bundle
four-way you need a string to tie it in
that bundle and you need a hanging scale
and it's best to have as precise as
possible this happens to be an
ice-fishing scale that's waterproof and
it can be measured in different units
but up to 3 hundredths decimal 4 pounds
and basically you want to weigh that
total weight.
And per this vine I would record 0.76
pounds and then I would move on to my
other reference vines to get an idea for
this last growing season how much grew
in that one year. It's critical to take
these measurements at a different
reference vines throughout the vineyard
that you come back to each year and you
compare those weights across here and
that helps you understand how your
management practices might be affecting
that fine size during the growing season.
Cane pruning is one of the two most common ways to dormant prune grapevines. This video provides instructions on how to select canes during winter pruning and how to collect dormant pruning weights, a measure of vine size.
Want to learn more about this topic? Explore more resources from OSU Extension:
Berries, table grapes and kiwifruit, Wine grapes
