Spring is in the air

As we welcome in spring with all of its amazing and wonderful growth, I hope you'll welcome this new blog. Gardening is a bit of a hobby of mine and I've really wanted to find a way to reach out and share this interest to my family and friends who can not come to visit. I hope to post about once a week on average, but expect a lot of 'catch-up' posts initially as I try to convey with both words and pictures the wonders of a garden.

The Grape Arbor

Grape Arbor

The grape arbor is perhaps one of my favorite garden locations. We built the grape arbor last year and planted a Cabernet grape on the left (house side) and a Concord Grape on the right (garage side). During the spring and summer they grow up and over the top of the arbor and provide wonderful cool shade with those great big grape leaves. 

Grapes are a joy to grow as well. As much as plants can, grapes have that instant gratification that is often elusive in the backyard garden. They start the spring off with growth that you can almost watch. Also, the new growth deploys the grape bunches right from the start, no need to wait for months hoping it will flower! Of course, after a month, that joy in watching them grow starts to give way a bit to cursing as you realize your grape vines are now 5 feet long and still going strong and its time to start tying them to supports before they break!

March 21st

April 13th

April 20th - The start of concord grapes

Already providing nice shade!

Care and maintenance

Grapes are one of the few plants that even in Southern California lose their leaves and go dormant. This is your time to prune them back for the year. I don't have any pictures from this years pruning but if I'm still blogging this winter, I'll be sure to document the process. Grapes only grow on old growth, so when you prune, you want to leave a little bit of the old vine there, about 1". 

We water our grapes from a drip system, probably about 1/4 gallon a water a week. We keep them well mulched as well. We use a fertilizer from Home Depot that claims to work on grapes, and we only fertilize it twice, once when the new growth starts and once again a month later (which reminds me to do that this week). 

As the grapes grow, we use a green elastic tape from hope depot that is meant to allow plants to grow while still providing them support. The tape helps prevent the long vines from snapping in the high wind we can get in the backyard (upwards of 15-25 mph) and also from collapsing under their own weight. We also add strings from the grape arbor to the house and garage to let trail the vines out from the arbor a bit and provide some shade to our more delicate plants like lettuce. 

Finally, each grape vine grows 1 to 4 bunches of grapes. We prune them all back to 1 bunch of grapes. This theoretically makes the plant concentrate its efforts in making the grapes in that bunch the sweetest and juiciest. Given our results last year, it was a successful strategy.