The Ultimate Grape Arbor - Tips on Building a Grape Arbor at Home

Alright, welcome back to the quarter acre homestead. Somebody asked me about our grape arbor when they saw pictures of our grapes, so I'm going to just do a quick tour of our grape arbor, show you kind of how I put it together, and then show you some of our grapes. They're doing super well this year, and I'm picking some. So that's the video for today. So this grape vine has seedless purple grapes. I don't know what the variety is because my dad just gave me a rooted cutting that I started growing maybe seven or eight years ago, and it kind of just was super vigorous. This, all of, I'll show you all of this grape vine here in a minute, but all of this was from one root, and then last year when I was pruning it, I did put one end of the vine into the ground to grow a second root. But before I show you kind of how big this one grape vine is, I guess I'll show you the grapes. So big clusters of these nice purple grapes. They're not as big as like store grapes, but they're, some of them are like pretty big, bigger than a blueberry, and they're about perfectly ripe right now. They're really sweet. Some of them are starting to turn into raisins, so it's kind of like, we only had like one or two days where they were all ripe, and then they started turning into raisins, but right now they're perfect. We've picked a bag to give to family, picked a bag to give to friends, and then we've been eating them, and I'm about to pick a big bowl to maybe make jelly or something, so I thought I would show you before we pick a bunch of them, but really good variety. If you'd like a cutting, if you join us on Patreon, which there's a link in the description, one month it's fine, then you can cancel, but this winter when I do, when I prune everything, I can send you, say, three cuttings that you could root. So the grape arbor, I have a frame of two by sixes, so these two by sixes I actually got for free, someone had a stand at the fair that they wanted taken down, they said free wood, so I got a bunch of like 18 to 20 foot two by sixes. So I have probably this direction, I think it's about 18 feet long, and I just have one on this side, one on the other side, it's a rectangle, and then on the ends, on these ends, it's probably 10 or 12 feet across, and on these, so then in the middle I do have one two by four right here, and this two by four is actually sitting on top of the two by sixes, so it's a little higher, because all this weight starts trying to pull it down, you're holding the camera crooked, all the weight starts trying to pull it down, so you want to build your arbor a little higher in the center, and then when it starts pulling it down, it looks more level, so I have one two by four across in the middle, and then in this direction I have pretty heavy duty wire that I got from my dad, but you could get like pretty heavy electric fence wire or something, that I strung across about every 18 inches, and the other thing I did, it looks like I need to, looks like I had a screw pop out actually, the other thing I did under here, I have a two by six laying flat, and screwed onto the vertical one, because again all that weight is going to pull on these wires and try to bend this two by six in, so by putting one horizontal, that gives it a lot more strength to hold it straight, but if you look right over here, I guess maybe the weight was too much or something, there's a screw that just snapped off, or we also have kind of our swing set jungle gym connected to this, that's like one corner post, so the kids swinging might have tweaked something and broke that screw, so that's one corner, another corner is over here, held up by the roof of our porch roof, so that way we don't have extra posts in our yard, and then this end, I didn't really want to attach it right to our house, so I have four by four pressure treated going up, and I have them in cement in the ground, and then I strung the wires, and I just had screws on each end and pulled those wires as tight as I could, and then this year, you can see the woody vine right here, when I pruned, this is the only vine that I left, one here, and then I actually have three of those, one is here, and one is way over here, basically everywhere where the grapes are clustered, so I had three vines going all the way across the 18 foot direction, when I pruned, so three going this way, and then all of the green is new growth, and the grapes kind of clustered right around where I left those vines from last year, one thing that's interesting, grapes only produce fruit off of growth that comes from last year's growth, so if you ever prune everything from last year's growth, you will get no grapes, what you want to do is leave a few vines from last year, and then what grows off of that will produce grapes, so I kind of just have three strips of grapes here, next year I'll probably leave at least twice that many of this year's growth going across here, so we'll have even more grapes, so that's the grape arbor, I can't think of any other question, so let me show you real quick how big this vine is, so I just had one vine over here on the corner of our porch, and you can see, I think it's about 8 years old, you can see it's pretty thick down there on the bottom, but it grows like crazy, so we have that entire grape arbor behind you from that one vine, and then all of this across, this is just like a 3 foot fence, and then I have a few wires holding the rest of these grapes up, and again this year I just had two vines going across here, and that grew all this green, and there's grapes hanging down in here by our gate, and if you come over here, before I had the grape arbor we only grew grapes across the front of our porch right here, so this is also the same grape vine all the way down the front here, you can see more grapes hanging down, and even wrapping around a little bit on this side of our porch, so you can see even down here this is some of the same grape, there are a couple small grapes coming here that are new varieties, but they're not producing yet, so some of this green is from them, but a lot of it's from that same vine, and then I'll show you one more thing, when I pruned I thought let's give this grape some more support, so I brought this one vine straight down, and I dug like a 3 foot trench and just buried it, so that's probably already growing new roots, and will help support everything, so that's our grape arbor, let me know if you have any questions on it, again if you want a cutting of this variety, I don't know for sure if it's vigorous because of our soil, I don't really fertilize it, we just keep wood chips on it, so I don't know if it's vigorous because of the variety or because of our soil, we do live in kind of sandy bottom land, but if you want some cuttings, join us on Patreon, put a note there that you'd like cuttings and I can get those to you this winter, let's see what else, I'm just going to cut grapes and probably make some jelly, so as I edit this video, I realized I didn't really tell you much about these grapes, so these are a seedless grape, more of a table grape, they're not concords, like I did mention in the video, I don't know the exact variety, but when they get ripe, they're sweet, and they're a good table grape, the window when they are ripe, like I also mentioned in the video, is kind of small, they'll be a little bit sour, and then they'll ripen up, and then they're good for a few days, maybe 2, 3, or 4, but probably about the second or third day some of the grapes start shriveling up into like raisins, but really nice variety that produces a lot and super vigorous, so if you would like a cutting from this grape, or actually a few cuttings, follow the link in the description to Patreon, you can join us there, look in the descriptions, I think it might be the third level, like $15 to get a cutting from grapes or from a fruit tree, and you can cancel after a month or keep supporting us if you like there, but this winter, if you join us there, I'll send you 3 cuttings from the grape that you can grow on your own, that's it, thanks for watching, let me know if you have any questions in the comments, and we'll see you on the next video.