How to Grow & Tend Grapevines

Hi this is Yolanda Vanveen and in this segment I am going to talk about how to grow and tend grapevines. Now grapevines are a very rewarding plant because they are beautiful to look at plus they make beautiful grapes that you can use to make wine or you can eat the grapes themselves and they are just wonderful. So there is a few rules that you should follow when you are growing grapes and basically grapes have to have something to grow on to they're a big vine. So whether you have a real elaborate type of pergola or something that they can grow on to or you just use a fence and you let them grow up on to the fence it is very easy to take care of them and basically you can grow them by seed or the easiest way is to get a graft or a piece of a grape from another plant and then you let it grow for the first year and just let it grow wild and at that point you want to trim off all the side shoots so you just have one main shoot the first year and then tie that up to the fence. The next year you kind of let it grow wild again and the main goal is to have two branches that are coming off to the main branch. You want to cut away all the extras except the two main branches because you want to have all the energy go to the main branches and then every year from then on out you let it grow on to your wire or your fence or whatever you are growing it on to and you want to cut out all the side suckers so that there is only two main suckers with just a few like every other one growing. You want to thin it out every year and that way the plant can concentrate on growing even more lush grapes and you will find that just by trimming out some of the dead branches or the spindly branches you will have gorgeous vines with really thick branches that will produce gorgeous grapes.