Figuring out how to start growing grapes.

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I understand the Lemberger variety is gaining popularity in the NY area. I understand it's not very resistant to PM, which is a problem in my area.

I have a lot of issues whenever it rains with downy mildew i have yet to have any powdery mildew which is weird.

I battle insects mostly eating the leaves on my vines. About 2 years ago a farm planted some fruit trees with sharpshooters and didnt know and they got loose and have been absolutely assaulting everything in the area. My grapes are mostly on rootstock thats completely resistant to them 1103P cant be impacted by them.
 
I'd snip those inflorescence off on those newly rooting canes. They are too much for a vine trying to root. I have a small pair of scissors I use to trim all but a couple of leaves off. As they root, they will grow more, but too much is too much now and will result in an unsuccessful attempt at rooting. I use Clonex gel to stimulate rooting and it will help support a couple of leaves, and they in turn will aid in root development. At least that's my approach. I've been cloning trees for a long time (pears right now), and used to use the powder hormone mix. The gel is much better.
 
I have a lot of issues whenever it rains with downy mildew i have yet to have any powdery mildew which is weird.

I battle insects mostly eating the leaves on my vines. About 2 years ago a farm planted some fruit trees with sharpshooters and didnt know and they got loose and have been absolutely assaulting everything in the area. My grapes are mostly on rootstock thats completely resistant to them 1103P cant be impacted by them.

I spray year round now (just finished my last dormant oil spray). PM and beetles are the biggest problem I have. Early on, the grapes will grow great, but when the humidity sets in, so does the PM. And when the beetles hit, they come by the bus load. I spray immediately upon sighting. Determining when they will strike depends on soil temps and moisture. Zeta-Cypermethrin is very effective for beetles (for me) at this point. Mancozeb and Captan regiments seem to control PM, but last year I started including Serenade (a biological fungicide) in the mix. It is for long term management, and the jury is still out. Some researcher institutions have noted a noticeable decrease stuff like PM with it's use. I'll tell you at the end of the season what I think.
 
Dennis, I'm right next to the WKU vineyards, so any issues they have I'll have here-so far, so good. Biggest problems locally are black rot and powdery mildew, and due to PM being a huge problem for the local tobacco growers we've been lucky that they hunted down and killed off as much as they possibly can for decades-makes for a much easier time keeping it under control here. There was a time where the tobacco farmers would spray for mildew on homeowner's crops who lived nearby!

As to pests-Japanese beetles are the main problem here, alongside golden beetles. They're a year-to-year problem, the last 10 years haven't been too much a pest in my yard, but go a few blocks down the street and they've stripped roses and beans to nothing.

Have you spoke to them about why they chose the varieties they grow and what issues they have to manage with them? Might want to ask about the grape root borer as well. The only cure for those is digging, fire, and soil fumigation. I read that some vineyards remove the soil entirely and then fumigate it, and then use new soil for the new plantings.
 
They did have grape borer at one time, but were able to eliminate it by nematode introduction and spray programs. Went by today on my day off work and helped train vines into their respective trellis styles, learned a bit and also learned what varieties they are switching to this year for the research programs. Apparently Malbec and Cabernet sav are coming out and more syrah and cab franc are going in to replace them. They are retraining Vidal Blanc into a VSP trellis this year too, coming from MWC.
 
They did have grape borer at one time, but were able to eliminate it by nematode introduction and spray programs. Went by today on my day off work and helped train vines into their respective trellis styles, learned a bit and also learned what varieties they are switching to this year for the research programs. Apparently Malbec and Cabernet sav are coming out and more syrah and cab franc are going in to replace them. They are retraining Vidal Blanc into a VSP trellis this year too, coming from MWC.

Interesting. Good to know about the nematodes. Wonder why they are trying VSP for the Vidal Blanc. I thought they preferred TWC.
 
Dunno. It's a research plot, they do weird stuff apparently just to get data.
 
So about a week ago, the fencerow buds emerged. Starting at the end, I could have left this "cordon" 70ft long and it would have filled in quite nicely as it does every year, but I wanted to experiment with growing other grapes so it got bobbed back to about 10ft long.

Here's the buds, you can see two on the cane plus one more down at the base, on the main vine.

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A wider shot of the next two canes back:

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All of the other rooting attempts have been moved outside, it's now 65-80 degrees out, and will be until end of June, when temps will start living in the 80's and 90's. August will be 85 to somewhat rare 100F, cooling off in September back to 75F and then mid-October we'll start seeing 50's at night again.

This group is the fencerow grape in the small pots, and the original syrah and vidal blanc cuttings in the two big green ones. Some of the vidal blanc cuttings are starting to swell buds, while the syrah are not so much. All of them are still green, though.

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This group is the second group of cuttings-Cab sauv and Syrah. These were soaked in water for a few hours, then into a bag of moist peat and zip-locked, then put on the top of my computer monitor for two weeks. The Syrah all budded out and started growing, and one of the Cab Sauv opened up. I didn't get on the ball fast though and the Syrah started to brown up and die back where it was touching the bag.

Now, before you say that's crazy, what are you doing...this is how I do hardwood rose cuttings. Cut them off the plant, into rooting compound, then into dirt. Cut the base of a 2-liter soda bottle off, and it's now a private greenhouse. The soda bottle stays until the plant has enough roots to show near the bottom of the pot. It works. To control humidity, you take the cap off the soda bottle, or leave it on but unscrewed, or screw it right down.

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Even though it's only been three or four minutes, you can see humidity collecting on the inside of the still-sealed greenhouses-I let them go like this for two days then unscrew the cap and let it sit on top, unless the temperature gets over 80 on the porch-then the caps come off and I water a bit more frequently.

Cab sauv #1 still has never broken buds, but 32 has a very nice single green leaf and short new cane growing. Syrahs 1-3 all have 1 bud open and about 1.5" of cane, but the leaves turned brown where they hit the bag and shriveled back-I am hoping that secondary buds can make up for the damage. Syrah 3 had two buds open up, although one was and is still buried below the surface of the soil. Maybe that will encourage rooting?

Note I don't intend to have these grow on their own roots-the rooting process is combination of practice and ensuring I will have viable budwood even if there is a mishap at the university yards or a change in faculty, and I loose access. The 3309C that was left ungrafted had 13 buds opening up on it-I took off 4 of them, leaving no more than two in each location it was budding out at. Once the 3309C has viable green canes, I'll cut the number back to only 4 canes left, and I'll root the others via the coke bottle method-this method works very well for green cuttings as well as hardwood cuttings.
 
Dunno. It's a research plot, they do weird stuff apparently just to get data.

I used to work at a college that had a OSU research plot, and I spent time checking it out (and the greenhouse) all the time. Got to know the guys pretty well as I was always bugging them with questions. Didn't know if it had come up in conversation. These folks are usually eager to share info about what they are doing (usually).
 
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I have a lot of issues whenever it rains with downy mildew i have yet to have any powdery mildew which is weird.

I battle insects mostly eating the leaves on my vines. About 2 years ago a farm planted some fruit trees with sharpshooters and didnt know and they got loose and have been absolutely assaulting everything in the area. My grapes are mostly on rootstock thats completely resistant to them 1103P cant be impacted by them.

It's the other way around for me. Rarely see DM, but PM seems to like most everything growing here. I suggest looking into Serenade for long term control.
 
So about a week ago, the fencerow buds emerged. Starting at the end, I could have left this "cordon" 70ft long and it would have filled in quite nicely as it does every year, but I wanted to experiment with growing other grapes so it got bobbed back to about 10ft long.

Note I don't intend to have these grow on their own roots-the rooting process is combination of practice and ensuring I will have viable budwood even if there is a mishap at the university yards or a change in faculty, and I loose access. The 3309C that was left ungrafted had 13 buds opening up on it-I took off 4 of them, leaving no more than two in each location it was budding out at. Once the 3309C has viable green canes, I'll cut the number back to only 4 canes left, and I'll root the others via the coke bottle method-this method works very well for green cuttings as well as hardwood cuttings.

Did you say you were planning on moving these to a permanent location? As that vine on the fence gets older, it may require a larger root ball to be moved with it in order to make it. As for the cuttings, patience is in order. If they haven't done anything by mid summer, then they failed. It can easily take a couple months. The 2 liter bottle cover is a tried and proven method to keep the cuttings and buds from drying out. I also have a spray bottle to mist the buds to keep them alive. Once the cutting drys out, game over.

Good luck.
 
First roots-4 weeks after I cut this errant cane off my Reliance red grape, the first roots are visible in the glass. Not at the bottom bud, but up right at the surface of the water, at the second bud on the stick!

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You can see the little rice grains right at the meniscus of the water, these are the first roots I've seen out of all the grape cuttings I've tried so far. Got lots of cuttings growing green, but nothing has ever formed any kind of callus, and these are the first roots!

The fencerow vine will stay at the current house. Any vines I take or plan to take will be in pots, or will be dormant cuttings that I'll root and bench graft this winter.
 
Now that it has tiny rootlets in the liquid, I added two drops of 2-15-15 liquid fertilizer to the water, which would be a normal dose. The fertilizer liquid contains rooting auxins as well, so hopefully I'll see the top growth slow up and more roots push out over the next week or so, and then it'll be time to put this one in the dirt.

I still need to figure out how the heck to get cuttings to callus up, though-without that callus tissue, it seems that they will grow greens but no roots when put into dirt-the sticks that are 6 weeks old yet still have no callusing, no roots, and the soil they are in was kept between 75 and 85 degrees for three weeks. I've got to have been doing something wrong to have this divergent of a result from all the data I can find that says "go this way", but I haven't got it nailed down to what it is yet.
 
Vidal Blanc has budded out today, and 3309C has opened up with three thick, short shoots. Cabernet Sav has 1 leaf, and Syrah has two open buds but the top one's leaf died back two days ago.

The chip budded vines are not doing much, in fact the rootstock that I grafted onto seems to not be doing anything now...it was planted the same day as the other that has the three shoots on it, but none of the buds have opened up at all. Guess it should be healing the graft?
 
I figure if it hasn't done anything by June, I'll have a closer look. Might need more water, but seems more like its either in root growing mode or just a stick in a bucket.

If its still just a stick at the end of June, I'll make a decision then on replanting.
 
Here's an update on the cuttings:

These two have been leafed out like this for a week-ish, leaves are covered in dense white hairs. This is the fencerow vine.

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This Syrah cutting had a nice leaf on there, but it rotted off because it was up against the bag in the peat moss. It's budding out a second stem at the next lower node.

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Cab Sauv is still looking good, this leaf hasn't changed in a week but it's still nice and green. The shoot is starting to grow out under it, but is less than 1/2" long.

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The Vidal Blanc cuttings...they're NOT Vidal Blanc. They're *VILLARD* Blanc. Went over to the vineyard today for the greenhouse sale, and noticed that I've been calling it by the wrong name this whole time!

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Here's the Syrah vine I took my cuttings from, in the University yards.

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And a shot of my field graft on the fencerow vine, nothing happening here yet.

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