If you want your muscadines to grow more grapes and less
tangled vines this summer,
this winter is an important time for you, says a University
of Georgia expert.

“Muscadines grow so vigorously every season the vines can
get very congested if
they go unpruned,” said Gerard Krewer, an Extension Service
horticulturist with the UGA College of Agricultural and
Environmental Sciences.

Late January and February, Krewer said, are prime time
for muscadine pruning.

“You can prune muscadines anytime they’re dormant,” he
said. “But in
late winter the vines are less likely to be cold-damaged
after you prune.”

Muscadines, Krewer said, produce most of their flower-
bearing shoots from the lower
part of the previous year’s growth.

So the lower section — the first two to four buds — of
that part of the vine that
grew during 1998 will wind up growing the shoots and blooms
and, ultimately, the grapes of
’99.

That’s how you prune your muscadines. The part of the
vine that grew after those first
two to four buds of ’98 is unneeded growth. Cut that off.

Start at the tip of each shoot, Krewer said, and follow
it back to the first raised
bump on the stem, the “collar” that marks where last year’s
growth began. That
should be anywhere from six inches to five feet from the
tip.

When you come to the “collar” where the ’98 growth
begins, back up to the
second to fourth bud and make your pruning cut. The vines
may “bleed,” or ooze
sap, Krewer said. But that won’t harm the plants.

Pruning will keep your vines from getting unmanageably
tangled over the years. Perhaps
more important, it will also assure you of more reliable
crops of grapes.

“If you let muscadines go unpruned,” Krewer said, “they
tend to produce
too heavily, which leads into alternate bearing. That
becomes a feast-or-famine kind of
production.”

If you’ve let your muscadines go unpruned long enough
that they’re a tangled mess
already, consider cutting them back to the original cane
running down the wire.

If you do that, though, you won’t have grapes this year,
since this year’s grapes will
grow only on shoots that emerge from 1998 buds.

“Unless you’re willing to almost forgo a crop next year,”
Krewer said,
“I would suggest pruning one side back to the original cane
and the other side back
to the bottom two to four buds of 1998 growth.

“Then the following winter you can do the reverse,” he
said. “Severely
prune the other side. In that way you’ll have grapes each
year and still be able to clean
up your vines by next winter.”

On overgrown arbors, where you have seven or eight major
canes, “you might want to
take out one or two large canes each year,” he said, “That
way you can
completely renovate the arbor in a few years.

“Each year, be sure to cut the previous season’s growth
back to two to four
buds,” he said. “That will keep the arbor from becoming
overgrown again.”