Tips For Planting Grapes

Planting grapes offers the gardener so much more than the simple pleasures of gardening and digging in the dirt. Grape vines can live for over a thousand years so once you have established your plants you are potentially leaving a legacy for generations to come.

If you are planting to grow table grapes, after a couple of years you will begin to enjoy a bountiful harvest and if you are planting your grapes for wine making you will have many hours of tinkering with a fun hobby ahead of you.

Location is a key factor when you plant your grapes. Sunshine helps the grapes concentrate the sugar and bring sweetness to the grapes, so a sunny location is ideal. The sugar is vital to the winemaking process so the more sunshine the better. Table grapes can tolerate partial shade and do not need such high concentrations of sugar.

Don't Over Fertilize

Unlike most plants, grapes can thrive in nutrient depleted soil. There is no need to enrich the soil with compost as you would for tomatoes or flowering plants, however, extremely poor soil can benefit from the addition of some fertilizer. A good test is whether weeds are growing in the dirt. As long as weeds are thriving it is a good place for planting your grapes. If you have invested a lot in your grape plants, having the soil professional tested can pay dividends.

Plan Before You Plant

Before you plant, take the time to do a little planning. Grouping plants by variety, if you are planting more than one type of grape, will make it easier to maintain the grapes in terms of pruning since different varieties will grow at different rates, be susceptible to different insect pests and diseases, and may require different spacing. European vines grow low to the ground with the fruit at the top whereas hybrids grow tall with fruit clusters bunched at the bottom of the vine, so trellis requirements can be different too. You will also want to try and maximize the sunshine along the whole row of vines, so that none is too much in the shade or more in the sun than the rest.

Pruning Is Important

Because of the way grapes grow, pruning is an essential maintenance task during the growing season as well as during the dormant season. When properly pruned, your grape vines will have one thick stem and two primary branches trained along the trellis. Each year new shoots, or canes, will support the development of grape clusters. New shoots must be clipped constantly to maintain the integrity of the grape vine growing structure.

Grape production will begin in the first year or two of planting. By the third year after you plant your vines, the grape clusters should be developing nicely on your young vines.

Allow the Grapes to Ripen Naturally

Grapes do best when fully ripened on the vine. A taste test is an easy way to tell if the grapes are sweet. If you want to be precise you can test the specific gravity of the grapes with a hydrometer. You can purchase a hydrometer at your local wine making store. A specific gravity of 1.1 indicates a fully ripened berry with sufficiently concentrated sugar for great wine.

Planting and harvesting your grapes will bring you much pleasure for many years and investing a little extra time to get the grapes settled in the first two to three years will bring you many rewards in the future.

Mark Pollack is a grape growing expert. For more great tips on grape planting and wine making visit http://www.bestwinegrowingsecrets.com.

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Benefits of Organic Gardening

We tend to think of organic gardening as something the hippies or greenies would be doing, but have you thought about how doing a little organic gardening might really benefit you? ... Not to mention your family and the environment.

Benefit 1: To me, the greatest benefit of organic gardening is the benefit of health. You know how you've grown your fruit and veggies, no chemicals, no sprays, just the way mother nature intended.

Sure you might get the odd caterpillar chewing on your cabbages, or a few aphids on your kale - even bird pecked or sunburned fruit - but you can be sure there's no chemicals on your home grown veggies. No need to scrub your veggies under running water for 5 minutes to be sure, you only need to remove dust.

Benefit 2: Convenience has to be right up there. How wonderful is it to stroll around the garden picking thing for dinner. No need to take a trip to the supermarket or greengrocer - just walk outside and you're there. This ties in nicely with all the recent hype about food miles.... Zero! You're doing your bit for the planet - nicely done!

Benefit 3: You get to eat your home-grown produce as fresh as it can possibly be. I believe that fresh food has its own 'life energy' and that's why it's incredibly important to eat things that are freshly picked. They still have that life force in them and when you eat them, you add their life energy to your own.

Imagine picking your veggies, preparing them for dinner and eating them, all within an hour. Food you buy at the supermarket may be days, weeks, even months old before you even buy it. How much 'life energy' is left by the time you eat it?

Benefit 4: You'll be saving a great deal of cash when you grow your own organic fruit and vegetables. Have you noticed how expensive food has become lately? It's staggering to say the least.

Growing your own veggies might seem expensive to set up (if you do it properly with irrigation and good soil etc.), but you'll be saving money in your first season. Just think: if you spend just $30 a week on fruit and veg, that adds up to $1560 over a year.

The beauty of organic food gardening is that if you are willing to save your own seeds from the plants you've grown, you'll have them for next spring and will need much less money to get set up for the coming growing season.

With the world economy in a real pickle (pardon the pun), organic food gardening is a great way to reduce your monthly expenses.

Benefit 5: There are so many health benefits when you become an organic gardener. I've already talked about the benefits of eating your wonderful produce, but there are further health benefits.

For a start you'll be outdoors more. Just that alone is a big health benefit. Most of us live in stuffy homes that don't have enough ventilation, with toxins exuding from the walls, cupboards, carpets etc.

You'll get a little more gentle exercise. You know you need more exercise! Then there's the vitamin D that you'll get from the sun - don't stay out long enough to risk skin cancer, but do get your daily quote (at least 15 minutes sunlight). Plus you'll be breathing in fresh air while you're in your garden.

And did you know that gardeners live longer than non-gardeners? I believe it is partly because of the health benefits I've outlined above, but there's another reason. Firstly you're keeping your brain active - thinking about what you're going to plant where, when etc. And secondly because you expect to be around for the next season. Planning ahead seems to be connected with keeping us alive longer.

Benefit 6: You'll finally have somewhere to put all your kitchen scraps and garden waste without polluting the planet any further. Most things that come from the earth can be returned to the earth by way of composting, mulching or creating a liquid fertilizer. So your waste doesn't need to add to the world's problems any more.

Benefit 7: (my personal favorite) An incredible sense of well being will wash through your body every time you walk through your garden. It doesn't matter if you're watching a tiny seed develop into a healthy young seedling, you're gleefully discovering an insect that eats a problem insect, you're enveloped with wonderful scents of aromatic herbs or are so very proud of growing the vegetables for your family's next meal - organic gardening is joyful. Just allow yourself the privilege of caring for your own organic food garden.

Don't start saying to yourself that you don't have the time, or "I'm a lousy gardener". It really takes quite little time to create a productive organic food garden once you've got the basics in place.

And if you're not a green thumb yet, get some information and have a go. No-one gets good at something until they get a bit of practice in. Meet some of the gardeners in your area. Or ask your relatives - there's bound to be someone who's will to share their gardening skills with you.... We love to do that

Hi, I am an avid organic gardener and am known by my friends as the recycling queen. I live on a small country property in South Australia.

It is my mission to encourage as many people as possible to start organic gardening ( I know you'll become addicted). This will improve both our individual lives and the wellbeing of our personal and global environments. Anyone can grow their own healthy food with Organic Gardening. Click here to get started now!

Happy Organic Gardening, Healthy Living...
Julie Villani
http://www.1stoporganicgardening.com

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