Now we’re going to talk about cane pruning, and this is a well-pruned cane-pruned vine. And this variety is suffoc red which is normally cane-pruned. So what you see here are one year old canes that have been wrapped around this, one of two central wires, and you see wires out here on the outside, so there’s four wires across the top. There’s different ways to do a caned pruned trellis system. But this is how we do it, we wrap the cane around the inside wires and then the outside wires act to sort of cast the shoots as they grow out and down. And so, they end up growing out rather than kind of stay down or possibly breaking. In addition to leaving the canes, we’re going to show leaving some spurs. And the reason with these spurs is to create next year’s canes. Sometimes you get next year’s canes that would grow out of the trunk. But we want to ensure that we get them by losing some spurs. So this one needs to be pruned and here is last year’s cane that we left. And notice the way that it’s cracking?
That’s how you can tell; it looks older than this one year old cane. There’s a big difference between this two, and this is what we’ll prune off, we remove the two year old wood, and get back to where we’re leaving, one year old canes. So we’ll start there. And we don’t want to just remove it all the way back because we might find that there’s a cane coming off of it that we want to use, either for a can or for a spur o create a replacement cane. So, kin of the first thing you need to do is decide which cane you’re going to leave, which two canes you will leave on this side. Cause we’re leaving two on each side of the vine. So we want to choose a cane that grew last year not down here below all the foliage because that will be, it was shaded, and we want to have some of that canes from last year. Because they’ll be more productive, they produce more fruit. So we’re going to find something up here like this.
Here’s a good example of something that we can leave as it came although it’s coming from the wrong side. We would leave it on this side if we have a choice. So we’re looking for something while we’re here like maybe this one, this one is a little too thin and not, not long enough. In so maybe this one right here, this one would grow, fairly on the, on the top and this is actually a pretty nice cane right here. So the best thing to do is probably to mark it, put a flag on it so you don’t pet it off accidentally. And it comes from the middle. You want canes in the head trains system and this is head, this is called a head because all the canes are coming from one spot and they call it a head, as opposed to a cordon. So we’re choosing a cane that comes as close down low on the head and in the center as possible. If you choose a cane way out here, and you have to cut it off halfway to the next vine, you’re not going to have much fruit. So here’s one of our canes and we’ll choose another one. And they’re not always easy to find. So here’s one right here that will probably work just fine.
So there’s our two canes that we’re leaving, so we know that we don’t want the majority of this two year old, last year’s cane, we’re going to cut it off at least back to, we’ll go at least to right here. And now we can take off the tie tape and we try to, and here’s where it ended last year, and there’s next line right there. And now it looks much simpler, it was kind of tangled mass, but now we’ve removed last year’s cane, two year old cane. And we’re now going to select, again it was this too, right here that work; choosy. We could decide to choose the other ones later like this one doesn’t look half that, we could use it or we can make a cane as per out of it. Let’s remove the other one which was right here from last year, now we’ll cut back at least to here. So we’re decided we’re going to use this cane right here, and we’ll cut it to where it needs the adjacent vine. Then, we’ll wrap it around the wire and then we’ll tie it. There’s one and then we decided that the other one was right here and we’ll wrap it on the other.
Now look at this one that looks like a pretty nice cane and even better cane. So we’ll choose that one, and we’ll cut it halfway, and there’s the other cane. So we have our two canes that we’re leaving for next year. So now we want to choose our canes for the other side of the vine, and again we want to sand that cane. So here was one that grow up to on the top, we can choose it to go over across, and then one for this wire we might want to use this cane here which looks like a nice thick, hefty cane. You don’t want to use little wimpy canes like this, but you also want to try to avoid huge canes; they’re not as fruitful either. Medium sized canes like this we might hear are about ideal. And then of course, you cut all these side lateral things off, too. Okay, well that’s not a bad one, but it doesn’t go quite long enough.
Actually, that’s a pretty nice cane right there, even if it comes from the other side that’s okay. So a lot of times at the end of the cane, you get died act and discoloration. And this discoloration is probably powder and mildew. And you don’t want to leave that there, maintain them at control of powder and mildew at the end of the season, so it comes back and so this is what it kills the cane. So you want to cut back to good wood and once you do that maybe your cane’s not long enough to use. So let’s use a different cane instead of that one and this one right here doesn’t look too bad either. We have our two canes now on this side, one and two, and now everything else can go or be left as a spur. So what we want to do is bring everything kind of back toward the head, toward the center of the vine. So everything beyond that cane that we’re leaving, I’m just going to cut that off, and that’s a big part of the vine, gone.
That simplifies it, really nicely. And here’s last year’s cane on this side. This is a two-year old cane now. So we’re going to get rid of that back to not too far, here’s our cane coming off of last year’s cane that was left. So I’m going to cut back through that and we leave the old cane. It’s looking better. So let’s wrap this cane around and cut it to the midway point and then we’ll cut everything else back to spurs. There, we almost have it. Now we’re down to a bunch of spurs and then out four canes that we left. So we have way too many spurs that will produce way too many shoots. Now what we want to do is thin this out and to bring them as close to the center right below the wires as possible. So we have two sitting right here, one is going out. I’m going to save that one in case we’re, because I will produce a nice cane that will grow up and we could use it hopefully next year.
And then we have one that’s coming a little too high away from the center, I’m going to cut that off ; this one’s a little too thick and this one produced a huge cane so I’m going to cut that off. So we have one, two, three, four, five, this one’s coming from down here. Now we have four and if you think that each of these two-bud spurs is going to produce two canes, now we’d have eight canes coming from here. Ah, you can go with that, I would say, go with less, some people say go with more, but I’m going to cut this one off down here, and so now we have our three spurs, one back here that you can’t see, one here and one here. And they’ll produce next year’s canes hopefully, that we can select from. And so we have our four canes and we’re finished with this vine except for tying the ends of the canes, cause even though you wrap it, the wind, well, you know once it starts growing, the wind will cause it to come unwrapped much of the time.
