Specimen Spotlight: Grape

Grape (Vitis vinifera, V. labrusca)

Grapes! - Source

I certainly hope that you have had the chance to eat grapes some time in your life. If not, you have been missing out. Grapes have been in use for food and ferment for a long, long time. And, like most food crops, they taste best when you can successfully grow your own. I have been blessed to have a city lot that already included a mature grape vine on an arbor when I moved in. However, one seedless green grape is not enough for my family and me, so we have since added five more vines comprising four different cultivars with plans for two more in the near future. What good are grape vines besides providing delicious grapes? Read on and learn.

• Edible
• Deciduous vine - provides shade in the summer and lets light through in the winter
• Drought tolerant - when well established
• Wet tolerant - can handle long periods of precipitation
• Light-colors friendly - sets fruit earlier and heavier when grown against a light-colored surface
• Guild member - nicely fills the vine niche in a plant guild
• Trellis-needy - wild grapes use trees as trellises to climb up above the canopy cover and get the light they need. While you definitely can send your grapes up a convenient trunk, it makes any type of harvest much more difficult. I recommend using a trellis, arbor, pergola, or similar device over which your grape vine can sprawl above ground. Grapes are also susceptible to many types of mildew and other fungi diseases, so dangling them above ground helps prevent these problems by allowing increased airflow.
• Shade-maker - as mentioned earlier, grape vines provide great shade. One of my vines turns a pergola into a shady room.
• Cooler - in the hottest part of summer that shady room is typically fifteen degrees cooler than the non-shaded parts of my yard, due in part to blocking the heat of the sun with broad leaves. However, a great deal of the coolness is created through transpiration, where the grapes loses water through opening in its leaves. This water absorbs heat and carries it away as it evaporates, creating a nice cool environment.
• Chicken friendly - chickens like grapes: the fruit, the leaves, even the tender new stems and tendrils, so it is best to have an established grape vine with most of the vine up out of the chickens' reach.
• Manure-lover - grape vines that receive well-rotted manure as a mulch during the growing season and in the fall have shown to consistently produce up to 30% more fruit than other methods.
• Propagation - easily grown from cuttings about a foot long with a bud near each end that are then planted in soil, burying about two-thirds of the cutting; be sure to water well and keep moist for the first few weeks.
• Hardiness - grape cultivars vary widely in what winter temperatures they can survive and still produce well the following growing season. Some can reliably handle zone 3 winters, others thrive in zone 7 or 8, and everything in between. Know what zone you are in, what microclimates of which you can take advantage, and research the recommended zones for the grape cultivars you want.
• Frost tender - grapes are frost tender after the buds begin to swell in the spring. In this area with the varieties that I have my grapes tend to not "wake up" until May, which helps immensely in preventing damage from most of the late frosts.
• Smaller seedless? - your seedless grapes are typically going to be smaller than commercial growers because they often add synthetic growth regulators to get larger fruit.
• Is it ripe? - my first year with a grapevine I was unsure of how to tell when the fruit was ripe, made difficult since it produced green grapes. My experience is that a grape is ripe when it tastes good. Don't be afraid to taste-test for ripeness. :-)
• Harvest - use small scissors or pruners to clip the cluster off while supporting it with the other hand. If you are going to pick a lot of grapes, it is best to do it in the morning when it is cool.
• Let in the light - let sunlight shine on the fruit clusters to promote ripening and prevent pests that would like nothing better than a sweet snack in a shady spot.
• Pruning - pretty much everyone that I have ever talked to about grapes says that pruning grapevines is a necessity for good production. Around 90% of the branching stems should be pruned off when the vine is dormant. When you prune, be sure to leave buds because they are where flower clusters (which, hopefully, become sweet, delicious grapes) emerge in the spring.
• Bird friendly - for some this is not a benefit, but birds really like seedless grapes (there seem to be enough seedless ones around me that they turn their beaks up at grapes with seeds). And they like hiding out in and flitting around in grapevines, especially when the vines are trained over arbors and pergolas.
• Medicinal
• Toxic to dogs - so do not let your dogs eat your grapes!
• Basketry
• Privacy - use a grapevine on a chain-link fence to make it a little less see-through
• Dye - yellow, from the leaves
• Oil - from grape seeds

References

• Gaia's Garden, Second Edition: A Guide To Home-Scale Permaculture, pg. 34, 103, 145, 215, 244, 245
• Free-Range Chicken Gardens: How to Create a Beautiful, Chicken-Friendly Yard, pg. 82, 133
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transpiration
• The Backyard Homestead: Produce all the food you need on just a quarter acre!, pg. 100
• The Permaculture Handbook: Garden Farming for Town and Country, pg. 235-236, 320-321, 323
• http://viticulture.hort.iastate.edu/info/pdf/cultivars08.pdf
• Garden Wisdom and Know-How: Everything You Need to Know to Plant, Grow, and Harvest, pg.  247-248, 252
• Vertical Gardening: Grow Up, Not Out, for More Vegetables and Flowers in Much Less Space, pg. 243-247
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grape
• http://www.pfaf.org/user/Plant.aspx?LatinName=Vitis+vinifera
• http://fossillady.hubpages.com/hub/How-to-Make-a-Grapevine-Basket