How to Grow Grapes, Complete Garden Growing Guide For Grapes

The two-year grape journey is a sweet and interesting journey of planting Thompson seedless grapes all the way to harvest. So sit back and enjoy as we go through grape paradise. So we started our grapes back in January of 2015. This is the Flame seedless grape. We got this at Home Depot and you can get these grape plants at any gardening center in your area. And the first thing you need to do is once you get the package you just open it and you want to make sure that the roots stay hydrated while you're preparing your potting mix or while you're planning to plant this in the ground. So as you can see here this is a bare rooted plant and you just keep it in water. Just make sure the roots stay hydrated while you prepare your potting mix. We're going to be planting this in a container. You can plant it in the ground as well. And here we go it's just a simple just container with water. And now we're going to prepare our potting mix. We're going to be using a large pot. Grape trees grow into very large plants and need a lot of space for their roots. So we're going to be using this container. It has a lot of holes drilled as you can see. A common question that a lot of users ask me is if you need holes and containers when growing plants. And the answer is yes you do. We're going to be using a mix of peat moss. One third of peat moss. I'm just using this compressed bale of peat moss that you can get at any garden store. Make sure that you break up the pieces very well. And to this mix we are going to be adding one third of compost. Now I'm using some homemade compost here. You can buy bagged compost if you want. And some of my compost is unfinished. So I'm going to be removing some of the unfinished compost from this mix. And make sure that I have a lot of finished compost. Now it doesn't really matter even if you have a lot of unfinished compost. It will eventually break down. But I just want to make sure that the compost that I have is almost finished. And I'm going to be mixing this in very well with the peat moss. And what I'm going to be doing for the third part is adding some vermiculite. Now I had an option to use perlite here. I just had some vermiculite with me and it was relatively hot weather. Not very hot but it was sunny and I just wanted to make sure that there is adequate moisture retention for the plant. Especially moving into the spring season and the summer season. Now you can substitute this with perlite. Perlite is equally good. It improves drainage and it doesn't retain moisture though. Vermiculite does retain moisture while providing good drainage for your plants. The potting mix for your plants. Now mix this in thoroughly and your potting mix is created. Now I'm going to be just adding this potting mix to our large container. Now this is a pretty large container as you can see here. It's probably about 22 inches in diameter and about 20 inches high. Very similar to a whiskey barrel container but just a little better shaped. Now when you add the potting mix just make sure that you add some water at every stage. So if you fill up the entire container and then add water you're going to be having some issues with the drainage. So what I'm doing is I'm adding some potting mix, adding some water and then continuing to add the potting mix till we complete the container. Now it's time to plant. You're going to be planting it just this way as you see here. Just make sure that the plant is well balanced in the center and then you can add additional potting mix along the sides to make sure that the plant is well seated. And this is exactly what you need to do for planting your plant. And what we have done before this is made sure that the roots are hydrated so that the plant roots doesn't dry and the plant is not in shock. And finally you need to water the plant. So just make sure you water it a few times. Make sure that the potting mix is well soaked in and it might take some time for the mix to start draining. So just be patient. You might have to water this two or three times. And this is the trellis for our grape plant as you can see here. Not this one. This one is the one on the raised bed but the one along the wall. The wooden trellis or the arbor of the home that's right next to the wall. So fast forward one month and you can see that the plant has started producing a lot of new growth. Now as long as you get this new growth you can consider your planting as a success. You're going to be getting a lot more shoots growing from this grape plant now. Now as you can see here I've tied some mason line. Now what this mason line does is it is a strong trellis support for these grape plants to grow. And what I'm going to do is as the plant grows I'm just going to train it to grow around this string or this mason line. You can get mason lines very easily at any hardware store. I'll also try to provide a link in the video description below. Now let's go back to the selection for the grape plant. The reason we chose flame seedless grapes to plant is because they require less chilling hours or chill hours. Now it's very important to understand what is chill hours. In places like Southern California we get very less cold in the winters. So the chill hours is a number which tells you whether your fruit plants will produce fruits or not for that year. So this variety of grape the flame seedless requires very less chill hours. If you noticed when we planted the plant if you notice the package it had a chill hour rating of 100 chill hours. Now usually we get about 100 to 200 chill hours every year during the winters. However some years are exceptions. For example the year before last we got just 72 chill hours. Now as you saw here we trimmed off some of the shoots that were growing towards the bottom. During the first year you want to make sure that you grow two to three main branches. Some people recommend growing just one branch but I would recommend growing at least two branches for your grape plant. And the reason is it eventually becomes easier to manage your grape plant in the second and the third and the later years. And as you can see here our mason lines are still intact and we are training our grape plant around this support the trellis support using the mason line. And in the first year you can see that the plant is producing some buds and some flowers and it looks like it's going to be producing some grapes. Now remember that during the first year it's recommended that you remove all the fruit from your grapes so that your plant concentrates on growing shoots. Now I did not do that because I just wanted to see if this would produce any grapes and the results are interesting. So I'll let you watch the video through this year and see what you think about it. As you can see here it's growing pretty well it's following our trellis and coming back to the chill hours just make sure that you buy your grape plant with the chill hours that are specific to your region. Most of the grapes have very high chill requirements and they will not grow in your area if you have warm winters. So in April you can see that the plant has produced a lot more foliage and the grapes that it produced are also growing a little larger but the plant has shown a lot of lush growth. Now let's talk about the fertilizer requirements for grapes. Now grapes must have adequate nutrition and fertilizer during the growing season which is February through September and every three months you need to make sure that you add some kind of fertilizer. So you can follow the schedule that you see on your screen here and that's a good idea of when you should add fertilizer to your grape plants. You can use organic fruit tree fertilizer, you can use slow release fertilizer, all of them work very well for growing grapes. We keep training our plants as we discussed as they keep growing just make sure that you train them. We have been doing that for a while now and you can see that the plants are now reaching towards the arbor that they are supposed to grow on. So how about the grapes that were growing on the plant? What happened to them by now? I recommend that you remove all your grapes during the first year just cut them and throw them away just because they won't produce true grapes. Now what happened in my case is the grape plant was growing very well and the grapes were actually showing on the plant but one fine day when I looked at the grapes on the plant they had all dried and vanished so they didn't really produce well they were premature fruits and it's best to get rid of them. So yes if you're growing grapes for the first year you can just cut and throw away all your grapes. It might be difficult to do that but as you can see here the plant has grown into a very lush green plant. So that's our progress of the grape plant in the first year and as you can see here it's now June in the first year and the plant has produced a very nice network of stems that will grow very well in the next growing season. So let's look at how the next growing season turns up. So the plant has remained dormant for the fall and the winter season and now in March of the next year March 2016 the plant has grown into a very nice network of stems. A lot of leaves are now sprouting and showing up. You can see a lot of new growth in the plants right here in March which is the spring season. Now you must add fertilizer for your grape plants starting this season. March is the first month when you should start adding fertilizer. You can even do it in February and you can see here the plant is now producing a lot of new growth and some new buds that now look like grapes bunches of grapes growing and the key to getting good fruit from your grape plant is that you need to see a lot of these bunches being produced on the plant. If you see one or two you're not going to get a lot of fruits from your grape plant. So in April you can see that there's more lush green foliage produced by the plant and more buds that are growing and these buds will form flowers and eventually form grapes. So all in all the plant looks very beautiful and just look at the fruits here. These are the buds and they will eventually open up into flowers and they look very pretty. Here you can see some of the buds that have transformed into fruits and you can see those dried flowers along the fruits and the grapes are very interesting fruits. They look pretty interesting and you can see that they already start looking like grapes like a bunch of grapes at this stage. Here's another flower you can see very clearly the flowers the buds sprouting into flowers and they're self-pollinating you don't need any other pollinators for your grape plant and here you can see we have about three to four main branches. Now you can limit your grape plant I just had enough space for about three branches and I let it grow and you can see that the plant has grown very vigorously on the support and is growing very well now in the next year or the second year and it will continue to grow that way. You can see more greenery and more buds and more fruits being produced in your plants. Now grapes need full sun to grow so if you have areas which do not get about eight hours of sun it's not a good idea to grow grapes there and this is one of the reasons why I planted my grape plant in a container because I thought I could move it later. Now in May you can see that the plants have a lot of more bunches of grapes growing and the grapes are now showing a lot of definition and unlike the first year where they just fell off the plant the fruits are now staying very well on the tree. Here you can see a nice view of the garden and the arbor and the trellis where the grape plant is growing and I thought this was the best part of the garden that I could utilize to grow grapes because there's a lot of space here it got a lot of good support and I could just place the container along the wall of this support to grow my grape plant. So when you grow your grape plant just make sure that you choose a nice spot where the grapes can grow along the support and then produce all these beautiful grapes that you can see here. Now if you have been following my monthly videos I've shown my grapes harvest during the summer months and they're beautiful grapes. The Thompson seedless grapes produces grapes that grow from green to yellow to red as they ripen. So here you can see big bunches of grapes growing and now it really looks like you're going to be getting a lot of grapes for harvest during the season and by elevating the grapes to a height you make sure that rodents stay away from it or birds stay away from it. It might be possible that birds might eat some of your grapes especially when they're very ripe. Now in June we made our first harvest and as you can see here the grapes are about dark green to slightly light green here and what I'm doing is I'm not harvesting the whole bunch I'm just harvesting a few grapes from the sides and what I realized was that these grapes were still very good to eat. Now if you look at the grapes they are not really ripe they don't look very ripe as they don't look like yellow or red in color so they actually taste tangy. Now some people like eating tangy grapes they're not extremely sweet but they have a very unique flavor so if you're one of those folks that like to eat tangy grapes this is a good time to harvest your grapes and you can start eating them. You can even start putting them in smoothies make grape juice out of it they're all very good uses for that and once I realized that the grapes were sweet enough to harvest we harvested our first bunch of grapes and it's really very rewarding to harvest something like grapes in your backyard. Grapes are extremely easy to grow in the California weather so if you live in the coastal areas California or any other area that is conducive to growing grapes you should try it out. You can see here more bunches of grapes that are now ripening and slowly we started seeing that we had a lot of grapes to harvest. On any given day we would harvest two or three bunches of grapes as you can see here beautiful looking grapes and we are still in June so towards the end of June is when we saw that the grapes were turning slightly yellow as you can see here in fact the grapes that are ripe were actually falling down from the grape vine so we made sure that we harvested every now and then and here you can clearly see a very good harvest and at this stage the grapes are sweet so we went from tangy tasting grapes to sweet grapes by end of June and with this kind of color with this kind of a yellow color the grapes are very nice very delicious and nice to eat. Now in July we saw that the grapes started turning even more sweet and the colors are color was turning towards red as you can see here slightly red and at this stage when the grapes start turning red they taste very sweet. You can see here most of these grapes are reddish yellow in color and here you can clearly see the grapes turning red in color and these are the ripe grapes these are extremely sweet very delicious to eat and if you want you can wait till this stage but what I've realized is that if you wait for all your grapes to be in this stage you're going to lose a lot of grapes because they're going to fall down from the tree. So what I recommend as a harvest schedule is to start in June harvest slowly from July through August and you're going to get a really good harvest that way. So here you can see beautiful harvest and growing grapes is a real pleasure it's very rewarding so I highly recommend that you start growing grapes in your area if you can. Once again beautiful looking harvest as you can see here and for a harvest season from June through August it's a long harvest season from just one plant you can expect a lot of grapes and as you can see here this plant is quite large and it did produce a lot of grapes this year for the second year. Now the Thompson seedless grapes are the one variety I highly recommend that you grow in your home garden it's a very easy variety to grow and it produces a lot but if you do want to try out some other variety that's perfectly fine just make sure that the chill hours match the chill hours in your area once again you can see here beautiful looking grapes right out of the grape vine and in August you can see that we continue to harvest our grapes and they are the same they're reddish yellow very delicious and the sun has really increased the amounts of sugar in the fruits and they're tasting very sweet. Now at the end of August you can start pruning your grape plant once you have harvested all your fruits and you want to make sure that you remove all the dead and diseased stems remove all the dead leaves and make sure that your plant is ready for the next growing season. So there we have it folks that was our two-year grape journey this journey took a long time to film and make so I'd appreciate if you could give us a thumbs up if you like this video if you like all our videos and you would like to support us do click on the support button on our channel and that way you can contribute towards the success of California gardening and I also wanted to tell you that when you're buying your grape plant if you have a cost co or local costco do check it out they have some great deals on grape plants and you can buy them for a very good price. I wish you all a very happy 2017 I'll see you again soon happy gardening