This land surprised me immensely with the mildness of its weather, winters never too cold and summers never too hot, grass covering the hills with a virtually evergreen carpet. Though it must be admitted this has noticeably changed over the last three to four years, this change seems to have been beneficial for growing grapes overall. The standard dessert grapes may still need a greenhouse (though I would try an experiment if you had a microclimate worth taking advantage of), but wine grapes grow outside very well here!
Since greenhouse growing presents a whole new set of issues we’re not yet ready to accommodate at this stage of our family life, we’ve chosen wine grapes. In small part this was also motivated by the need for a plant that would provide shade for a south facing utility room, which makes vines such a multifunctional miracle. And along the way we’ve discovered they work well as dessert grapes, too, and you can enhance their sweetness and size by pruning.
How we grow them:
Our grapevine must be about 6 years old now. We bought it very young in a 3 litre pot, from a very reputable source, which is the way to go when purchasing higher value plants, and vines and fruit trees especially. Vines do not propagate well from seed (they don’t come true to type this way) so your best bet is to buy a readily grown new plant or take cuttings from one you have access to. Just as a side info, the ones ready for purchase and planting are usually grafted on specific rootstocks.
The variety name of our plant was (back then) Black Regent and I believe it is either close or same as the one currently named as just Regent. It is a hardy northern European variety, quite disease resistant, originating from Germany, well suited for growing outside.
There is of course a lot of well established knowledge out there when it comes to planting and cultivating grapes, even in colder areas like the UK. Rather than trying to repeat it, I’ll refer you to one source I found particularly comprehensive, concise and accessible to even such an unexperienced gardener as I was, and it was specifically oriented towards UK growing conditions.
Royal Horticultural Society advice pages: https://www.rhs.org.uk/fruit/grapes/grow-your-own
It is really worth reading up on the basics such as planting, pruning and training even before you decide on purchasing a vine. Not because it’s particularly difficult, but because understanding what you’re doing and the plant’s needs really helps achieve the wonderfully sweet results you want to enjoy in the future.
It is okay to stray from the orthodoxy in the detail, as long as you can get it right on the basics. The basics are: spring, south, sun, support and shelter. We planted our vine in the spring, at the foot of a basic pergola construction nestled securely in the ground, against a south-east facing wall of our house. This spot seems to have its own unique microclimate due to lots of reflected sunlight (done by the wall and window) and protection from wind (being the northernmost corner of our garden) supplemented by getting some extra winter warmth from the house and warm soil thanks to some slate stone mulching the ground underneath (it absorbs some heat). That indeed was sufficient for the plant to grow and thrive and produce great quality fruit for the last three years. We do not apply any fertilisers except an inch deep layer of compost once a year, scattered underneath the stone mulch, but even that we’ve only started doing this year.
Some would probably add soil to this list of basics, but we’ve found our grapes to be incredibly forgiving of our heavy clay; we only made sure we planted our young plant in a big enough hole filled with compost to get it off to a good start. The hole was literally like a cube of clay dug out, measuring just under 2 feet long by two feet wide by two feet deep. I filled the base half with compost before planting the plant and back-filling with compost again. Beyond that cubed area we left the soil undisturbed. With hindsight I am glad we did not reuse the clay dug out from this cubed area to backfill, as it would have eventually resulted in soil compaction and waterlogging which vines do not tolerate well.
Then the only real need is pruning and training, because vines are so vigorous they can figuratively suffocate themselves. We prune twice in a year. Once in early summer (around June), once the branches have produced the beginnings of fruit clusters, when we remove fruitless branches, extra clusters and cut each branch back to about a meter long. We leave two clusters per branch to obtain a good yield of smaller but still very sweet fruit, which we mostly juice but also eat as dessert grapes (we’re not bothered by seeds as there’s usually only one per grape, rarely two, and very often none).
The second pruning is done in mid winter (January-February) when the plant is leafless and dormant. This is when you think more about how you want the plant to be trained in order to have good fruit the following season. You should cut all the side branches almost all the way back to the main “mother” vine leaving only a few nodules with buds left. I must admit last season we left our vine to grow and spread a bit out of hand, so it is not the best example of the "right" technique, but we still received an amazing harvest!
Unlike bushes such as raspberries, the vine fruit will form on the new (green) branches that will grow off of the branch which fruited last year. We will demonstrate this in more detail around the next pruning time in a separate post, because our vine has really expanded its territory and will have a couple of different case studies to demonstrate the difference between old growth and new growth, so stay tuned. But there’s also some great tutorial videos out there on YouTube... :)
So really grape vines grown outside require just a few bouts of attention here and there throughout the year. Minimal, compared to annual plants. But the return outweighs the efforts by a long way!
How we eat them:
Since this post is already long and full, we’ll limit this section to a brief list of what we do with our grapes, which may be quite surprising to some people without even going into detail!
But details are coming, as we’ve just harvested our last fruit for this year and have been very busy in the kitchen! Look out for new recipe posts coming soon!
- we eat them as dessert grapes
- we boil and juice the biggest harvests and heat seal them in bottles or jars
- we use the same juice plus the pulp and skin material as base ingredient for stir-fry sauces (like you would wine, only without the alcohol)
- this year I'm about to use the same juicing technique to make jelly (using a non-sugar jellying agent as the fruit is quite sweet on its own)
- we add them to roasted meats, particularly poultry and baste it in the juice
- this year we started to preserve the young leaves in a lemon juice solution and make our own Dolmas - grape leaf rolls stuffed with rice and a choice of veg and/or meat.
I hope this sounds tasty enough to get you growing yourself. Have we missed anything important? Do any of the above eating ideas grab your imagination and you’d like to learn the details? As always, we’d be thrilled to read your comments!
Till next time!
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