Watch This Before Growing Grapes 🍇

If you've ever wanted to grow enough grapes to make your own wine, this isn't the video for you. I'm just going to show you how to grow enough to snack on in your own backyard. Kevin Espiritu here, aka The Grapefather. Welcome to my backyard. This is my very first cluster of grapes on what's been a three-year journey. So this video is going to be what you should know before you grow grapes, because it is quite a journey. You're probably not going to get them in the first year. We're going to cover what that planting timeline looks like, what kind of varieties you need to choose, and importantly, the soil and pruning techniques that will allow you to get some of these juicy, juicy grapes. So the most important thing to know is sunlight. Without it, of course, most plants won't survive well, but grapes will not produce well at all. In fact, I'll show you a little bit later on some of my more shaded out grapes. They're trash. They don't have any fruit on them whatsoever. And grapes are such a studied plant because they're so commercially viable for wine and other sort of value-added products that we know down to the percentage point, how much shade impacts plants. In fact, if a grape leaf is in shade, it's at 6% effectiveness as far as converting that energy from the light into actual sugars and carbohydrates and stuff for the grapes. So put this baby in the sun seven to eight hours minimum. And this is south facing. So I'm getting blasted by sun's rising in the east, setting in the west. This is getting hit with sun the entire time. A single grape vine like this one right here needs probably at least eight feet of space between the next one. I think we did about 12 feet, maybe 10 to 12 feet here. There's a vine there. There's a vine there. And then you get into soil. You can grow grapes in a ton of different types of soil. I have sort of a clay style soil here in my climate of San Diego. It's just that they don't want wet feet or they want to be soggy. So we planted ours up on a bit of a mound. You don't want these down in some sort of channel or hole where they're accumulating a lot of water. In fact, dry farmed vineyards is a really popular way to grow grapes where you basically only use the water that's coming down from the sky above. You don't actually irrigate it at all. That's how sensitive they are to too much water. With grapes, it's pretty much a three-year timeline. At least it was for me to get your first cluster. So year one's going to be planting and setup, which we did two years ago, I think two and a half years ago now. The year two is going to be training. So we'll get into how you get them up on the trellis and what you're supposed to do at that point. Year three, which I'm at right now, you should start getting your small first harvests of grapes. And I'm very fortunate. This year I actually have a pretty big harvest. There's a ton right here and there's a ton over there. So let's get into some varieties cause that's probably the most important thing after sunlight. Varieties wise, I'll just tell you the one I'm growing. It's the flame seedless grape, which is very well suited to my climate. I'm in Southern California. It's probably not the climate most people are used to grapes growing in. They're probably used to them growing a little bit more northerly. So this one works for me, but there's so many different types of grapes, just like the wines. Actually, when I was a kid and honestly, until not that long ago, I didn't realize the names of wines were just the names of the grapes, like Pinot Noir, Pinot Grigio. Those are just grape names. Maybe a wine person will correct me on that. But either way, I'm not a big wine drinker. So I'm just going to be growing my table grapes, Concord, flame seedless. You can get into some hybrids, which I do recommend. The biggest problem you'll probably run into is some sort of fungal disease on your grapes, if it's not a growing mistake, which by watching this video you will prevent. So we've had some of that. The flame seedless is supposed to be a little bit more resistant. You can get a hybrid that's specifically resistant to it. But I would say with variety, it's hard for me to say, Hey, you go grow this one, go to your local nursery and say I need to know what grape works well in my region. That will set you up for success. Cause remember, it's a three-year journey. So you need to get the right variety in the ground. And speaking of, how do you get these in the ground? So we planted these a few years ago. Like I said, it's actually really easy. I feel like with grapes people complicate it a lot because you think about wine and you think it's so fancy, it's so precious. No, what we did is we dug some holes. We actually didn't put too much fertilizer in the ground at all. We put some compost and some organic matter in these holes, plopped them here. I think if I was to redo this, I would put it a little bit closer to my fence here. Cause you can see the main stem had to bend a little bit and that's really what year one's about is getting the main stem up to your trellising system. So I would have planted it a little closer. The positioning does really matter because of course grapes need to be grown on some kind of support structure. There's a million and one ways to do it. You definitely don't have to set up like a viticulture level system. And to show you how we did it, pretty inexpensively I might add, I'm going to bring in Paul from the team who set up the Epic grape trellis. So for this backyard home system, we went super simple. We're using stainless steel braided cable that runs the entire length of the wall. It's perfect for your first time as you're just letting the grape stretch out. The stainless steel cable is set into the wall with these stainless steel anchors. Those are offset a little bit from the wall, but the idea is that you want the grape to really creep out and gain that foliage for the grape production. So you'll see throughout the trellis we have jute cord that is tying the vines to the trellis and it works perfectly. Let's get into pruning. And the first caveat I'll make is I am certainly not a master grape pruner, but I've gotten grapes in the time it's supposed to take to get grapes. So that's pretty good, right? So what you need to know is the first year is very different than the years thereafter. What you do in the first year when you plant the grape is you'll have a shoot. This was the shoot, but you might have more than one shoot. So what you want to do is prune it down to one shoot, plant it and get this shoot up to about here or so. That shoot is basically going to become your trunk. That is going to be there for as long as your grapevine is there. Once you get to that point, you get into growing it over the trellis. So then in year two, you are going to take your main stem and there's going to be these lateral shoots. We'll call those cordons. I believe is their name. And you're going to get those to go over your lowest level of your trellis. The main stem can keep coming up and you can do that again. And of course if you have a third one like we do, you can do that again. So you can see the stems coming up here and I'm taking a lateral shoot this way, lateral shoot this way, lateral shoot this way, this way, and then this way and this way. Now I've set up kind of the skeletal structure of the grape and then you have to figure out how to prune it to actually reliably produce these juicy grapes. So now you're getting into the pruning techniques for, you know, how actually you get the grapes on the grapevine. The thing about grapes is these are called canes. So the one that the grape's actually hanging off of, that's a grapevine cane. And it's going to produce on first year canes. So after I harvest, let's say from this cane right here, these clusters of delicious grapes, this section of the plant is not going to produce grapes again. So at the end of the season, I can cut this one very aggressively back down to what's called the spur, which is where this is coming out of the cordon. So you want to do that and you just want to make sure that you're aware of that because you don't want to be pruning anything off, especially like in the spring that is actually going to produce grapes that year. So pruning powers grape growth, but Shopify, the sponsor of this video really powers Epic Gardening. We use Shopify for pretty much the entire backend and even front end of our business, our commerce business. In fact, the Flamed Seedless Grape can be purchased on our Shopify store. So back in the early days when I was selling Birdies Beds, then of course, when we acquired Botanical Interests and we sell all of the 750 varieties of seed that Botanical Interests offers, it's all powered by Shopify. I'm a gardener and a bit of a business person, but I'm really more interested in the plants and the creative side of things. So for me, using Shopify to help manage our orders, sales tax, inventory locations, warehouse, shipping, customer service, all that kind of stuff has been immensely valuable, especially when we were starting out with a smaller team. We've even used some of their point of sale tools when we were up at a garden conference, selling some of our goods directly to some of you guys who came out to see us. So it's really an all-in-one solution that has been massively, massively helpful. So if you're a business owner that wants to power your business, we wholeheartedly recommend Shopify. You can grab a trial at shopify.com forward slash Epic Gardening. That's shopify.com forward slash Epic Gardening. And now let's get back to the grapes. Backyard grape problems. There's probably a lot that you could run into. Maybe overwatering would be one. It doesn't really need that much once it's established. But what I would say is fungal disease has been our biggest problem. We've struggled with it a lot. Paul's been out here battling it like crazy. You can even see some evidence of it on some of these leaves that I just shredded, but that is a little bit of evidence right there. There are a couple of things you can do about it. Of course there's some sprays for things like powdery mildew. We've got a video on powdery mildew that's coming out pretty soon. But you also want to just prune. Grape canes only need at least 14 to 16 leaves to produce a nice cluster, right? They need at least that many. If there's more than that many and they're blocking other leaves, not only is that making them ineffective as far as photosynthesis goes, it's actually just cluttering it up. It's clogging up the airflow and it's probably contributing to some of that fungal disease. So you can come through and actually clean up some of the leaves. In fact, I mentioned that my grapes in the shade over there aren't doing as well. I don't actually have any clusters on my grapes that are underneath that avocado tree. Why? Because the magical scientists that study grapes know that a grape leaf in shade is 6% as effective photosynthetically as one that's in the sun. So there's really no point to even letting it be there. So pruning is super important, but the fungal disease, sometimes it gets you and you just got to keep on it. Well, we are at the point that I've been waiting for for three years. It's eating your grapes, harvesting your grapes. How do you know if they're ready to go? Well, this is a flame seedless grape. So it is a red grape. And of course it's getting red. That's your biggest clue. And I just kind of come through and taste test them, right? So you can see these ones, this cluster, I could probably take the whole cluster right now. The one that's over there, you can see the color difference. Some of them are probably fine, but I'd rather just let that whole thing ripen up a little bit more. Taste is absolutely amazing. For me as a kid, I don't know about you guys, but I used to freeze these and I thought that was a delicious treat. I might freeze a couple of these, but they taste absolutely amazing. I highly recommend it. It's so rewarding to grow grapes, even though it is a little bit more complicated than some of the other fruit trees. And speaking of, you can check out our entire fruit tree guide playlist right there. Thank you to Shopify for sponsoring this video. You can grab a flame seedless grape from Epic Gardening delivered directly to your door at shop.epicgardening.com powered by Shopify. And until next time, good luck in the garden and keep on graping.