Why Every Southern Farm Should Grow Muscadines

Hi guys, this week we have a fun episode. We are talking about muscadines, and we're gonna be showing you all of the processes and lessons learned on growing muscadines here at Bountiful Blessings Farm in Middle Tennessee. So follow along. So, you know, we struggle with a lot of things in the South, with the heat and humidity. I don't know if you can see the sweat dripping off of us. Insects and disease, but hey, we've got one thing that makes it all worthwhile, that's the muscadines. I mean, you Northern growers eat your hearts out because these things are amazing. And the beauty of them is that they're like so easy. You know, we have sprayed nothing on these. You know, you can't grow grapes in this part of the country unless you spray like crazy, you know, but these have never been sprayed. Well, I have the water on now. This is the third time I've watered all summer. I have put no fertility on them. And I'm not bragging about that. I'm just saying they're neglected, but yet they still produce incredibly. I mean, look at this vine. And you know, we've been eating on these for a couple of weeks now, but still, you know, they say they can produce 40 pounds of fruit per vine. Well, so I think there's a lot of commercial potential. And the exciting thing is they're actually starting to breed seedless varieties. You know, a lot of people have an issue with muscadines because they've got a thick skin and they've got big seeds. And so, you know, that turns people off, but hey, it's worth crunching through the skins and spitting out the seeds. I enjoy it. I kind of like the crunch of them. They're delicious. I'll tell you, the place to buy muscadines at this point is Ison's Nursery down in Georgia. They're like the leaders in muscadine breeding. They have dozens and dozens of different varieties. You do have to be aware that some are self-fertile and some need a pollinator. And so you need to be aware of that. But the point is go to Ison's website. They've got all the information. They've got some great videos that I review every year by Greg Ison on how to prune them, how to get them down the wire, all the information you need. Ison's Nursery, they can do a better job than I. But the point is you just train them up the, you have like a string or something and you train them up to this top wire, which the wire here is about five feet high. And then you train them down the wire in each direction. So they come up and do a T basically. Exactly. How far apart are your plants spaced? Do you remember? Well, this is a hundred foot long trellis and there's supposed to be six plants on here. So I think it's like, it's 18 feet approximately. So you want to give them plenty of space to go, you know, it sounds like eight or nine feet each direction. Exactly, they're a big plant. And so that's your goal the first year is to get the plant up to the wire and then down the wire as far as you want it to go. And most of ours are down the wire. There's one down here that's not quite there yet. See, this one is not quite to the post here. Is this a new plant from just this year? No, these have been here a long time, but we'll talk about that a minute. But see, this one still has a ways to go. So in order to encourage them to put their energy into these lateral branches, you want to keep pinching off any other branching on it. And usually on here, you know, like here's a couple, anything that's over six inches, well, that's actually going to be the end here. So pinch this off, pinch this off. So that's really the only work involved during the first year as far as getting it up and down the wires, you've got to go through every couple weeks and just pinch off anything to encourage the plants to go out. And then there's winter pruning, but again, there's great videos. There's short videos on Ison's website, tells you exactly how to do it. And I mean, it's pretty basic, pretty simple. Once the plant has gone into dormancy, basically. Yeah. Okay. I mean, they say usually late winter, like I think February is the ideal time. I mean, that's kind of late winter for us. Almost early spring. Okay, cool. So the challenge we've had is that they keep winter killing and dying back to the base. And I think we've figured out the solution for that. They say you should mound up dirt like 18 inches on the base of the stem. And that's supposed to keep that somehow from freezing. And I can say we did it this year. And this is the first year that all our remaining plants made it through the winter. Okay. So just keeping that base part alive, did that also keep the rest of the vine alive? It was amazing. Now we didn't have a particularly cold winter. I mean, we did have that one stretch. We had a couple of weeks of pretty brutal. Ice storm. But I don't think it got down super low. I don't remember. I know three years ago, I think it was, we got down to minus 13. And we had friends that had mature vines that were killed back. Now the good thing is the roots don't die. So you were asking how old these plants are. I mean, I think these plants are about six or seven years old. So if it does die back, you just basically got set back a year or more. Exactly. So it's really unfortunate if that happens. Yeah, and believe me, it's happened more times than I like to admit. But you think from the recent experience, just mounding up 18 inches of dirt around the base made a big difference. Well. What about like mulch? I would think mulch, like wood chip mulch would be even better than dirt. Yeah, I don't know that. We use compost actually. Okay. And so I said, you know, we haven't fertilized. That's the only fertility these have had is that, you know, it's quite a pile to get it up this tall. You know, it's quite a large pile. And then did you just kind of rake that out in the spring? Yeah. Okay. That's cool. The challenge is we had a lot of things kind of burrowing into the pile in the winter. You know, I don't know if it was armadillos or what. So I really would like to come up with some kind of collar that I could put around the plants and fill it up every winter. That's my goal. You were talking about like two halves of like a corrugated pipe or something? Yeah. That you could put around it and then screw it together and fill it up. Just rivet some buckles and hinges on it. Yeah. And you could go up all the way up to the bottom trellis. So, you know, we're at the Northern end of the Muscadine range. I've heard that they can grow up into Kentucky, but just be aware that this is not something that can be grown up North. They will die back and we've experienced that. But, you know, once the trunk starts getting thicker, it's supposed to be more winter hardy, but we're going to continue to try to mound up the dirt because that seemed to work really well. Benji, do you want a Muscadine? Oh, they're so amazing. And Muscadine juice, man, it's incredible. Yeah. So let's see, what else is there to say about Muscadines? Well, we've just kind of talked about the planting, where to get them, where to go for more resources and stuff, planting them about 18 feet apart, six plants in a hundred foot bed. But we haven't talked, and we also talked about how to kind of cultivate and trellis, but we haven't talked about your irrigation system or your trellising system, which I think you wanted to talk about as being kind of unique. Yeah. So we can show it right here. Most trellises seem to me be made out of wooden posts. And then they have this wire coming out down here to brace it, to hold it up. But I never liked that because number one, wood in our part of the country just doesn't last. You know, you'd want to use treated wood, but we don't want to use treated wood. So it's kind of a catch 22. Plus this line coming out here is just something to weedy and mow around. And it's just kind of a pain. Tripping hazard. Yeah. So I just went to Lowe's and got standard chain link fence parts. This is the post. I think these are eight feet. I wanted to price this out and I'll try to do that before the video posts just to, so this is the chain link fence posts. This is the top rail. And if I remember correctly, this comes in 10 foot sections or maybe. Yeah, it's 10 foot sections. Is it 10? Yep. I mean, typically at like Lowe's or Home Depot, you'd be able to get it in 10 foot. So we cut it in half, although this seems longer than five. That might be more than five feet. Yeah, I don't know if it comes in longer pieces, but I just know we cut it in half. And so we put it way down into the ground, put concrete around it. And then this is just the standard fence post cap. And this, I don't know what they call this piece, but. Yeah, brace, some sort of brace component. Yeah. But yeah, I got all of that's available at Lowe's. It's just off the shelf. It's worked great. So you're bracing this way with a solid component rather than using a cable to brace outside, which. And it makes it a lot easier to work with. And then the actual wire components, this looks like just high tensile. High tensile fence wire that you can get at the co-op. And then these are Gripple. Yeah. There's a company called Gripple that has these parts. So you put this around your post and I just drilled in a couple of tech screws to keep it from sliding. And then you just have it connected here somewhere. Where's, oh here. So you've got these Gripple things. You just have two sides and then you have this tool. I was gonna bring the tool down and forgot. But it's just a special tool to tighten it up. Yep. And it's pretty simple to use. So we just have two wires, one at about these. So in between the two end posts, which are what we just showed, we've got, what is it? One, two, five, eight foot T-posts. So they'd be spaced. Spaced out. And then run two lines. One, like I said, about five feet. And this one, I don't know, two and a half feet or something. The only purpose for this is for your irrigation just to keep it off the ground. So it's easier to maintain. And we bought these things from Ison's too. They're just, I think they're actually just pieces of this pipe. Okay. That they had some special cutter. But this is the best way we've found to attach the irrigation tubing. Anything else we've tried, you know, like zip ties or whatever. There's a lot of expansion and contraction of these things. And you see even here, it, you know, it starts sagging. Yep. But you can just- Yeah, it's amazing how much just the temperature fluctuations from the sun, the heating and cooling, this irrigation pipe will move all over the place. Yeah. I experienced that recently setting up a drip system and I felt like I had it all perfect and it was all pulled tight and staked out. And I came back a few days later and it was like all weird. For the irrigation, we just have a valve box here. And I believe this is just half inch orchard tubing. And these, what do they call these? Anyway, just screw on fittings. Of course you don't have to use screw on fittings. But yeah, just run it down. And at every plant, we have a couple of these emitters and again, we got these from Isons. I'm sure you can get them other places, but they're supposed to be really good at not clogging. Okay. You know, if it stops dripping, you just pull it out and turn it around. Oh, they're reversible. Yeah. And that flushes it out the other way. And that flushes it the other way. That's cool, I've never seen one like that. Yeah, so that's kind of neat. We just turn the irrigation off. So that's why it's not doing much. So the plant that was supposed to be here died, it looks like. Yeah. But typically you have an emitter on either side of the plant. And that just waters that whole zone. And they say they take a lot of water. I think I said, this is only the third time I've turned it on this year. So that- Of course, we've gotten a lot of rain. Tells you how much rain we've gotten. And also on some level, how much these are neglected. Now at this point, we're not selling these, we're still just kind of playing around with them. Yeah. But I do believe there'd be an incredible market for them. Yeah. And I think the most exciting thing is that there's a private breeder in North Carolina that has bred three different kinds of seedless muscadines. That would be pretty cool. A purple and a green and a red. They're supposed to have thinner skins and be seedless. And my understanding is that he has now let, given, you know, these are all plant protected kind of things, you know. What are they called? Plant patent kind of things. But he has allowed the University of Arkansas to have access to his genetics. Okay. And so the University of Arkansas is actively breeding seedless muscadines. And I think that's going to like blow the market open. Yeah. People are gonna be clamoring for these things. As long as they can maintain the flavor and the hardiness of them for growing and all that, yeah. I mean, it'd be amazing. So super low maintenance. Like I said, you know, there's a little bit of pruning in the winter time. And once you get the plant up and down the wires, up to the wire and down the wires, you just kind of let them go in the summer. You know, they kind of just flop over and, but they'll start producing. You know, this is the beginning of September. We've been eating them for a couple of weeks, I would say. Yeah. So one of the things that we haven't talked about though was the clips or plastic bands that you're using to attach it and hold it to the cable. It's called the time up taper. The one thing I've learned this year, you know, this is really only the second year that we've had a significant fruit load. On some of these, I've kind of just tied it from the bottom up to the wire. But what I've found, if this lateral branch is just held by the tape, once you get a lot of fruit on there, it just breaks the tape. Now they do send out some tendrils, but it's not really enough to secure it. I think I've got to be more conscious about making sure that this branch is on top of the wire when I tape it. So yeah, that works well. I mean, I don't know of any other method that would be efficient. Of course, once they're up, you know, it's not like you really have a lot to do every year. So it's really the first year that you have to worry about it. So final thoughts and recommendations? Yeah, I just, I can't say enough good about them. I mean, to me, the flavor's just incredible. Yeah. And they're low maintenance, low work. I think they have a high return. You know, you don't pick clusters like you do grapes. You just pick individual muscadines. And you can tell when they get some softness to them, that's when they're ready to pop. Yeah, that's when they're really ripe. Pop in your mouth and enjoy. I suppose the fact that you pick them individually is kind of a, I mean, maybe a good thing and a bad thing. It takes a lot more time probably to pick them, but they're also really big. They're big. Yeah, you can go pretty quick. And these aren't the biggest varieties. We had one, unfortunately it died. So we have three varieties here. We have Pam, which is a bronze one. I guess we really didn't show the bronze ones. A lot of people call those scuppernogs, but that variety is called Pam. And then there's one called Ison, after the Ison Company. And the other one we had was Supreme, but I think all our Supremes died, which is probably a good reason not to have them this far north. I guess we're a little too- Yeah, I mean, I guess that's one way to go is point the bunch and see what there is. But I mean, they were huge and they were really good. The first year we had them, they were amazing. Yeah, cool. So those who live further south, you could grow any of them. Yeah, give it a try. And you northern growers, you have to come south or we'll ship them when we get into full production. There's plenty of cons to living in the south, so it's okay that there's a few perks that the northerners don't get. All right, I hope you guys have enjoyed this video. If you have questions about muscadines, drop them down below and we'll answer every one we can. And if you've made it to this point, we have a special invitation. We're doing a fall open house at Farmer's Friend. If you're interested in that, we have a link down in the description with information and a link to RSVP. We would love to see you at our fall open house here in Centerville, Tennessee. And until next time, happy growing.