How To Plant Grapes Well Easily

In deep summer the grape vines are lush and dark green, beautiful, and with clusters of still unripe grapes hidden under the broad leaves. A couple of months from now the grapes will be ripe and the family can decide to eat them fresh, or make raisins, or make wine or grape juice. Besides food, grape vines provide me with shade and privacy, since the vines can be — must be — trained to provide architectural structure in the edible landscape and to keep them healthy.

Plant whatever kind of grapes you find. Plant everything. The more diversity the better, whatever is available locally will be cheapest, and if nothing else, grape vines are easy to produce and usually on sale somewhere. I got a lot of my grape vines from 4-H youth fundraisers in my town, usually for $5 apiece.

Grape plants take a few years to get established and create a strong enough root system to support fruit production. So don't worry at all if you don't see any sign of grapes for a long while. All of a sudden it happens, and the long lead time lets you get some practice with pruning before the plants get really big.

Once your grape vines start producing fruit, there are all sorts of things you can do with the grapes besides eating them fresh. If there are children in the house, you might enjoy making grape juice, then pasteurizing and canning it to keep a supply through the winter. Adult grape growers often start making wine, and at the moment I have two gallons bubbling away in a cool closet.

Wine grapes grow, famously, in California, Chile, and the Mediterranean countries…all dry places with thin, rocky soil and little rainfall. But while traveling in relatively lush Hungary many years ago I saw grapes growing practically in water, where farmhouses sat next to creeks and grapevines were trained high around porch supports. Here in America, wild grapes grow high up in trees and scent the air, near forest edges. In any case, grapes need something to cling to and grow around.

At my house, early and mid-summer means training time, and it seems to go on forever. Until the vines have matured and hardened in late summer and through the fall, the vines want to reach out and grab something — anything — including the porch furniture and any tools left around.

So almost every day I spend some time basket-weaving the supple young vines, the new growth from the previous night, through the porch supports and stair railings. And I have to trim leaves to keep them from overwhelming the living space, being careful to avoid those that are sheltering grapes from the view of birds and squirrels.

A bit earlier in the season, in spring, one of my favorite events in nature's calendar is to watch the tiny pink grape buds emerge from the tender leaves. The actual flowers are tiny, but as the flowers appear they will attract lots of small pollinating bugs.