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RE: GRAPEVINE: PRUNING AND PROPAGATING

in #gardening7 years ago

Excellent topic :) Hope you manage to get a good yield this year! Pruning in Portugal is still considered an "Art" in rural areas, such as the one where my grandparents lived and where we've been living for the last 3 years. Although it seems like such as simple thing to do, the whole "science" of pruning and predicting where the new branches will grow to still baffles me :)
Unfortunately, I left my grandparents area when I was a kid to live in the city, so I didn't get to truly learn that knowledge from my grandparents (both of them paternal and maternal produced wine and table grapes for the household) specially my grandfather from my mother's side, who I followed around when he pruned them, sometimes during Christmas holidays from school. He did tried to teach me and it was like a mantra that he would repeat on each grapevine saying something like "Look for the branches that fruited and just leave 2 or 3 nodes" and then he would say to them, not me, "You will grow to there and you there"... well it sounded better in Portuguese and with his dragged and calm country accent :) ... And obviously they did grow were he wanted them to... Now the more I learn about nature and our bond with her, I wonder if they really had that relationship where he tendered and cherished so much that they like him back and retributed him with all they had... and the wine was truly amazing!
Well I could go on and on about this subject and how I witnessed how their love for nature, almost a symbiotic relationship that at the beginning came from the need to feed a huge family household but was actually a way of life, that is in danger of being lost, where they took care of the land and the land took care of them...
Fortunately (this may sound weird) we hangout a lot of time with the old folks of our village and they are super happy to teach us some tips & tricks for pruning, gardening and farming which is amazing :) Again, we could go on forever about the "Old Folks Gang Bar" and all the knowledge they share with us, specially our homemade honey supplier, who is like a walking encyclopedia... well all of them are in their own "specialty"

Anyway, getting to the point of what my initial motivation to comment was, we have a table grape vine growing in our house's small patio and we've been experimenting ourselves on conducting and pruning her, to have some grapes for eating in the summer but also to make a nice "ramada" (can't find the translation for that word) to have some shadow in our patio for the hot summer days... Also we experimented on pruning our pomegranate tree, but that one was more painful, hopefully we'll try to make pomegranate wine this year :)

So best of luck to you and do share the photos of the grapevine when she's fruiting!

Cheers :)

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