Grape vines

Stage 0: I've been thinking about grapes in the garden for many, many years, but always chickened out. But now life is short, so today finally decided on doing something about it.

Stage 1:

I've bought two vines - "Autumn Royal", a black seedless table variety, and a Hanepoot or "Muscat of Alexandria" table/wine variety. Now I have to keep them alive until they can be planted into the ground.

Here is some advice on cultivating Autumn Royal. And some on Hanepoot.

Still to be done:

Buy materials for a trellis - 3 x 3m creosote poles, brandring (for bracing?), wire

Dig 5 holes and construct a suitable trellis

Plant grape vines

Sort out irrigation

Update 2015/11/13:

Stage 2

Here's the three 75x100 x 3m pressure treated poles being inspected by one of the trellising fundis.

I fetched the poles from the Penny Pinchers warehouse in the industrial area, and it's next door to a massive - as in huge - unlabelled warehouse which I was informed is where Peppadew store their goods after they're pickled in their Grahamstown factory. There's a story in there I need to follow up on sometime.

And the poles invoice, including sturdy handle for hooked blades used to rip out tyre sidewalls.

Update 2015/11/24:

Stage 3 or maybe 3a. The three poles are dug in 800mm deep (which is deeper than you might expect), and concreted into place. The height is 2.2 metres (one can reach the top of the pole with an outstretched arm) so there's space for a 2 wire system with the first wire 1 meter off the ground.

Missing for the moment are the wires, and bracing. The tyres will contain strawberry plants at a later stage. Just checking for spacing and fit at this point.

The two holes for the grapes. I originally had the idea of surrounding them with a tyre as a grass barrier, but there are spacing problems, so I'll let the grape grow up in an extended inter tyre gap and use concrete blocks or bricks to try and keep the grass away.

Some grape specs from their bags. The grape vines have been hanging around mainly in the shade for a couple of weeks - nearly four - but are still going strong.

Update 2015/11/25:

Some research shows that a quadrilateral VSP (virtual shoot positioning) trellis system might be a good one for a small two vine backyard vineyard. This involves training the vines onto two wires (four lateral shoots, thus quadrilateral), then feeding the resulting annual shoots vertically up between three pairs of positioning wires. The heights of the wires are: Trunk wire = 24" (610mm), Fruit wire 1 = 36" (914mm), FW 2 = 44" (1120mm), Catch wire pair 1 = 52" (1320mm), CWP 2 = 64" (1625mm), CWP 3 = 72" (1830mm). Fortunately the pole size and spacing I have set up will accommodate this. It'll even have a bit of spare length at the top of the exposed 2.2m of the 3m poles to attach rails (or bracing?) to hang bird netting from...

I think I have enough thick fencing wire for the two fruit wires. Not sure if the trunk wire is necessary? Certainly not in the longer term, so maybe a temporary one that'll last a couple of years? Setting up the less heavy duty catch wires can happen a bit later.

I'll start construction later today.

Update 2015/11/26:

Stage 3b

The two endposts, with the trunk wire (actually security fence cable secured with crimps) and two heavy duty fruit wires twisted into place with visegrips. As I don't have an obvious way of tightening them, they don't "ping" when you pull on them. But they're more than solid enough to bear the weight of an adult vine.

I'm still not sure I see the point of the trunk wire for a small home trellis. Not yet, anyway... but it's  been installed anyway,

An overview of the whole thing. The lower three wires go through 8mm holes drilled through the end posts, and hang against clout nails in the middle post. I probably need to staple them, once I find my staples.

I'll make a pair of the keeper wires sometime just to check out whether my idea of using security fence cable and springs will work, but there's no real rush.

One of the holes, showing black PVC pipe down to where the roots will be, cable tied to a 1.8m length of 10mm rebar hammered into the middle of the hole to act as a stake. The three wires are tied on to the two stakes, so there's plenty of support for them - at 5 points over the 6m length of the trellis.

As regards irrigation, I was thinking of putting drip irrigation buttons down into the PVC pipe. 2, 4 or 8 l/hour? They'll run for 10 minutes or so, so maybe 8 litre/hour. Again, no rush - there's still some tidying up to do around here. e.g. compost into the tyres for strawberries. And how to irrigate them without too much grapevine interference?

The other prepared hole - compost mixed with top soil and some bone meal (I read somewhere you're not supposed to do that, but read it after I'd done it) - and soaked several times with a hose. They drain slowly but surely, so there shouldn't be a waterlogging problem.

Stage 4

The vines are planted - Hanepoot nearest the neighbours fence, and Autumn Royal closer to house. Soaked the topsoil after putting it back in to fill the holes. Photo later - my phone went flat.

The sun is blazing down, so the vines are probably going to be in the right sort of conditions once they settle down. Let's hope nothing goes wrong! (Well, later in the afternoon the rain poured down).

The end goal will be to enjoy a bunch or three or more of grapes, but that won't happen for at least a year, maybe two.

This all took about three and a half weeks to put into practice - from conception to completion, and cost about R1.2k - poles (R400), vines (R450 for two), labour (assistance in embedding pressure treated poles and assorted other holes - R240), rebar (R32 for two), wire. Not bad on the time taken to do this - usually I'm much slacker than this. The old fully employed me would have put it off for a year and killed the vines.

I'd hate to think of the costs of doing this on a commercial scale, but I'm sure they've got lots of low cost mechanised bulk methods in comparison to my low volume ad hoc manual efforts.

The next things to worry about will be getting the vines established, then training and pruning them.

Update 2015/11/27:

Ater rain overview of the two vines neatly dug in, with spaced but unfilled tyres. Maybe room for another row of tyres for even more strawberries on this (lower/western) side of the trellis?

Autumn Royal, closest to house. Visible wire is trunk wire. Note the West Indian Key Lime tree to the upper right of the vine starting to look pressurized. It needs to be relocated, but there's limited options. The assumption is that Key Limes won't get too big or bushy.

The Hanepoot, closest to neighours fence, running up its stake. The visible wire is the trunk wire. Maybe there's room to put in the White Genoa fig between the rightmost pole and the fence? The originally selected spot is now in deep shade and would be disastrous, and I'm running out of room everywhere else.

Update 2015/11/28:

Installed lowest pair of catch wires, munufactured from security fence braided cable components. It seems OK, even though I messed up one of them by overcompensating for anticipated cable stretch... with this stuff, there's zero stretch. Fortunately I allowed for fixing this in the design.

Update 2015/12/10:

Cow damage.

There was more cow damage just before Christmas, when the other vine was also munched down below the level of the PVC pipe.

Update 2016/01/24:

Irrigation at last sorted out - it's now apparent what the lowest "trunk" wire is for.

Dripper heads running ino PVC pipes leading to roots, tyres being populated with strawberry runners, some still to be filled with compost.

The vines seem to have settled, and both are recovering from the attention of the cows. Future pruning might be a bit complicated.

Update 2016/02/21:

The Autumn Royal looking like it's establishing itself.