Getting the most from the ‘straggly things’ over the back fence.
A well-tended grapevine looks awesome, all those juicy grapes hanging off the vine, slowly filling out and turning the right colour (mine turn an awesome deep red) as they sweeten up are just awesome to look at. A real point of pride for any gardener, even the professional takes pride in a well-tended vine or two.
A neglected vine, on the other hand, looks horrible, dead leaves on the vine, tiny grapes falling off well before they’re ripe, just to mention a few things.
Grapevines are probably among the easiest plants to tend, (it’s probably why man’s been tending them for thousands of years) yet, with a little ‘tender loving care’ they give spectacular results!
And 90% of the work is done in winter!
Having said that there are a few things for the writer to learn.
- Winter pruning. The best results are achieved when the Vine has been pruned. The major ‘pruning’ is done in winter when there are no leaves on the vine. This is to cut back all the extra growth that happened. You cut right back to where you want the new growth to start, the best grapes come on the new growth, if you don’t prune you’ll still get grapes, but they’ll be small and disappointing.
- Summer pruning. Actually, this one needs a bit, but that’s great as there are so many grapes on its brought the vine off my fence! Summer pruning is when the grapes are growing but you want to improve the quality of the fruit.
What you do is simply find a joint beyond where the grapes are and just cut. It’s important to make sure you leave enough of the leaves on that they cover the grapes, otherwise the birds are going to have a feast and all your work is wasted. The grapes on this vine aren’t ripe yet, but I’m having to pick a few to ‘lighten the load’
Grapevines will pretty much grow anywhere, but they prefer certain conditions. They like to grow in well-drained soil. It doesn’t matter too much the quality of the soil, some even like the gravelly ‘shingle’ type soil that won’t grow too much else, but having soil that will drain well is vital.
My back yard isn’t the best for growing stuff, but the soil drains well (thankfully as our neighbour over the back frequently drains his pool and floods the yard, it just drains away, and leaves us with some awesome grapes!
You know writing is like growing grapes, it doesn’t take much to start, but treating the ground right, and making sure you can drain the ‘superfluous’ ideas are important and mostly easy, just start writing and see if the idea makes sense.
Once the basics are there, prune away what’s not needed, and the idea starts to become a story.
Once you’ve got the story, and it’s reading pretty well its time for ‘Summer pruning’ where you take it back to the fruit, but leave enough of the mystery on the vine so the reader enjoys looking for the ripe ‘grapes’ in the story!
Whaddya think?
Let me know.
Lawrence
Lawrence's letters 