I took down a tree last Fall that had a large wild muscadine vine growing into it. I was going to clear it too but my wife convinced me to see if we could save it. It took a bit of work but I basically removed branch by branch of the fallen tree, until all that was left was the muscadine. I am wondering if you can give any advice on pruning and training it? I'm prepared to build a trellis for it; the usual setup of 9 gauge wire between posts 20' apart. And it should get plenty of sun where it is. But since the vine grew up wild, it isn't in the usual training pattern. The trunk goes about 15 feet before it does anything, and then it branches and splits several times, and the growth is just everywhere. In all it's about 45 feet long. Do you have any advice, especially on how aggressive I should be in removing growth? Thanks!
It would be difficult to advise about exactly how to prune it. That would require a "hands-on" session. It would indeed be difficult to train it to a trellis of any sort without radical pruning.
Since the trunk is bare to 15 feet or so, you might consider a high overhead trellis. Take a look at the image below:
I found this image on TripAdvisor. It's a vineyard in NZ. You can see how wire is strung from post to post, the arms stretched across and the vines closely pruned. Something like this could work if you care to go to the trouble and expense.
I visited a similar system at a fruit experiment station near Shepherdstown, WV about 30 years ago. It was made for apples. Telephone poles supported an overhead wire grid upon which the scaffold limbs were trained in a flat umbrella fashion. The trees were pruned annually by a person who would walk across the top of the grid wearing footwear resembling snowshoes brandishing either a swing-blade or a "string trimmer" outfitted with a circular saw blade. (I tried to find a picture of the Shepherdstown system online, but no luck. Unfortunately, I have no pictures existing from my visit.)
A less interesting but more practical solution might be to cut the plant to the ground during dormancy. It's likely the stump would sprout and you could train one of the young shoots to a convention single-wire trellis.
I hope this helps.
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ReplyDeleteI bought two muscadine plants at the same time about four years ago. I don’t know what variety, but they are the exact same kind, planted in the same place (about 12’ apart), planted at the same time. They are self-pollinating ones.
I planted them along a fence. One of them took off, and it now has the T shape along the top of the fence (each lateral arm is about 10’). The other grew painfully slowly, but since I only had about 12’ of fence left, I grew it in without pruning it to a T shape (so it goes up and then turns to the right and grows for about 12’ along the fence).
The first vine (the T shaped one) produces very well — I have nice, big clusters of grapes this year. The second one only produces small fruit (maybe 1/3 the size of a regular muscadine), and not very much of it. The trunk of the first one is huge; the trunk of the second one is about 1/3 the diameter of the first one (and, again, they were planted at the same time). I thought that maybe once the second one fit the space and was there for a few years it would start to produce as expected, but it’s not.
So this is my (very ignorant) question: do you think the second one will ever become “normal,” or will it always produce not very much small fruit? I’m trying to decide whether to keep it or dig it out and start over with another one next year.