How to properly prune grapes in the fall?

Pruning is considered to be the basis of vineyard care. It is the basis for providing further prospects and opportunities for the development of the bush. This is an important stage of preparation before the winter cold, which will allow to survive the winter without losses, in the form of overfrozen and shrunken vines. In turn, no less important remains how to properly prune grapes in the fall. After all, allowing even small mistakes, you can seriously harm the plant. Let’s consider the most common of them, which are encountered in practice.

Pruning of single tops

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Many, especially novice vine growers are often greedy when it comes to pruning grapes. Because of this, only the tops are pruned, leaving the rest for the next season. For this reason, the bush gradually thickens, losing its ability to grow and reducing yields.
When pruning, on average, 50-90% of the green mass is removed from the bush. This list includes young shoots, stalks and fruiting shoots. Only replacement shoots should be kept on the bush.

Wrong prioritization when pruning shoots

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When pruning shoots, winegrowers often focus solely on their age. Some of them get rid of stiff shoots, others buy young shoots. It should be said that none of these options is correct. Обрезка винограда включает удаление лозы, которая:

• has borne fruit this season;
• has signs of disease;
• has mechanical damage;
• is beginning to shrivel up due to its old age;
• severely thin, unable to withstand the winter cold.

If you do not know or doubt this question, you can always watch a video on how to properly prune grapes in the fall, from professionals.

Pruning without stumping

It is customary to prune only first year vines without leaving a stump. Left on such a vine sprout can eventually bend and lead to the appearance of various diseases. The adult vine, in turn, is almost completely devoid of such a problem, since the second year begins to derevenet. Therefore, when pruning such shoots, small stumps should be left, up to 1 cm in size. They allow you to protect the eye from damage and will help to avoid sprouting unnecessary stepchildren.

Not timely pruning

The best period for pruning at the end of the season is considered late fall, when the plant almost completely stops vegetation. At the same time, frosts should not take the pruned bush by surprise. If the temperature drops below -3 ° C, the cut sites can frost and crack, affecting the entire bush. According to experts, the best time for pruning is considered to be 2-3 weeks, after the fall of leaves. In this case, in 2-3 weeks after performing this task, you can start preparing the bush for covering and its subsequent isolation for the winter.

Lack of pruning

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Many beginners do not perform this operation, for the reason that they do not know how to identify or remove the stepchild. This leads to the fact that the offshoots of the second, third and subsequent orders remain on the bushes, reducing their yield and sucking out the useful substances necessary for the vitality of the main, fertile vine. Stepchildren are removed above 2-3 leaves by pruning or pinching.

This mistake can be attributed not only to the fall, but also indicated as a disadvantage of viticulture in general. Having initially selected any type of formation, you will always have a scheme indicating how to properly prune grapes in the fall, how many main sleeves should be placed and what order of pruning shoots to apply taking into account the further formation of the bush.

The most common and easy to implement methods of shaping are considered to be:

• multi-sleeved fan shaping;
• bunched and unbunched formations;
• Huygheux method
• the cordon by Belikova;
• Tokarevs method.

Choose one of the options and follow it from the beginning of the shrub’s growth to its full maturity in the future. A clear pruning scheme will avoid most mistakes and will itself become an instruction manual explaining all the stages of work.