Pruning vines
Sunday, January 31st, 2010With all the time lost in December and january to the torrential rains and getting our basic living accommodation in a habitable state, I’ve been keen to get on with pruning the large number of vines on the quinta. Last year we were only here for 2 weeks in January and I was only able to spur prune a handful of vines without really much of a clue as to what I was doing. I didn’t kill them though, so armed with that knowledge and a few techniques learned at a recent garden open-day in Barril de Alva, we’ve set about tackling the vines in earnest before the warming weather starts the sap rising.
With so many vines to do, it’s not really been possible to adhere to the bio-dynamic calendar, so we have just been proceeding on a daily basis for the last week. In any case, I’m not sure what days vine pruning should be done on. Most people say fruit days, but to my way of thinking, you’d want the vine’s energy concentrated in its roots if you’re going to be hacking large chunks off it above ground, so I’d be inclined to prune on a root day.
Double Guyot vine pruning
