How to Grow Grapes in Pots and Containers

Hi, this is Mark at Ding Dong's Garden. We sell grapevine cuttings to DIYers and people who enjoy plant propagation as a hobby. We're out here where we've planted all of our grapevines in-ground. But before we put them out here, we grew them in pots in a hoop house. Just wanted to share with you how easy it is to grow grapes in a pot and be able to harvest the fruit from. Growing grapes in containers is very easy and you can often get a harvest or get some grapes within the year following planting. First step is getting a grapevine. We grow our grapevines from cutting. We find that growing grapevines from cuttings is less expensive and it has a high success rate. Learn more about how we root our grapevines. You can follow the link I've put above or see the link in the description below. Whether you grow your grapevine at a nursery or root it from a cutting, the first step is planting it in a pot. Once our grapevines are a little established, we pot them up in a four-gallon black nursery pot. But any orange or blue five-gallon container from a hardware store would be just fine. You just have to make sure you drill holes in the bottom for water to drain out. Once the grapevine is in the pot, we use a tomato cage inserted into the pot soil to give some structure. So as the grapevine grows up, you won't have to tie it off or build a trellis. So during this first year of growth, you're just establishing that first year or second, what would be second year wood next year. A good root system in place so it can grow quickly next year. Because grapes will fruit on second year wood or you need an existing base of wood. And from the new buds on that wood, you'll get a shoot. And off of that shoot, the grapes will develop. Early in the second year after growth has started, you'll begin to see flowers set for the grapes. And once those are fertilized, they will begin to develop grapes slowly over the summer. And depending how warm your location is, because grapes love heat, you will eventually get grapes. And like you can see here from this Suffolk Red, we started growing this in a pot last year and it's putting out a nice set of grapes. And this is a table grape called Allwood. And one nice thing about rooting your own cuttings is that you can choose some more unusual cultivars. You can order the cuttings that may not be available in your local nursery and root them and grow them out on your own. So growing grapes or mulberries or figs from your own cuttings gives you a lot wider choice in terms of what you can grow. And here's one last example of Flame. It's another table grape and it's doing great. We started last year in a pot and this year it's producing a nice set of grapes. And if we left it in the pot, it would produce more, but we're probably going to take all these and put them out in our vineyard. And while you can keep growing grapes in pots indefinitely, as long as you maintain the water and fertilizer, you can plant them out. It doesn't have to be a formal trellis like this. It can be anything like an arbor or anything that would give the vine support. And these will become huge. I mean, essentially they're going to be in an infinitely sized pot. So the root systems will grow and the need for you to pay attention to watering and fertilizing will lessen since they can go get their own nutrients in the ground. So I highly recommend you experiment with grapes. Maybe grow some from cuttings, grow them in a pot. And if you have a little bit of space that you can plant them in, you can put them in the ground and see how great they are as a plant to have in your garden.