How to spur prune grapevines (in English)

So now I'm going to show you how to do

spur pruning of vines. This is usually

done on vines that are trained to a

cordon. So a cordon is this

semi-permanent arm that extends from the

base or from the trunk. So they can be

either unilateral or bilateral core

knots. So in this case we have vines that

have two cordons that extend either

direction from the main trunk to

[inaudible]. You basically need the

same tools that you need for cane

pruning: so you can have a hand pruners

and a loppers but you're going to make

use of this hand pruners much more

because we were basically just going to

cut back our 1 year old growth - 1 2 3

bud Spurs depending on the system. In

this case because we have such a wide

spacing we can cut back our Spurs to

probably only one or two buds. So we're

going to take a closer look at what

these Spurs will actually look like. So

we have our cord on here and from this

corner we have these little extensions

that you see. We can call these arms and

from that arises our one-year-old wood.

So this 1 year old wood is actually

going to be the spur that we cut back to

just a couple buds and on here we want

to count only we're going to keep

probably only one or two buds and we

want to not include our non-count bud. A

non-count bud is this bud that arises

right at that apex of where that new 1

year old wood had come out. So we don't

want to count this bud here but we can

count this one and this one, so we want

to cut that back right there and remove

that 1 year old wood. So similarly I'm

going to go on through and cut back this

all to 1 year old wood however it's not

so easy when we come to a spot like this

where we have two canes coming out of an

area. So what we want to do is choose the

healthier of the two the one that

clearly has has the bigger diameter and

looks healthy in this case it's this one

you want to remove. This one right here

and we want to cut this back to that two

buds. Not only do we choose the one that

appears more healthy but we choose the

one that also is

closer to the cordon. So while in cane

pruning the head is the renewal zone, in

a cordon trained system our core not is

that renewal zone. So we want to cut back

to that cordon. So we can cut back to two

bud Spurs and if you have any older

material like this in here we can remove

that completely - that's where our loppers

comes in handy.

So we can cut that off and we don't have

as much extra material in there so we've

got our spur right here. We can actually

cut it down possibly a little bit more.

So here's an example right next to it

that's, and this is pretty common in a

cordon train system, is that we might

have a spur that no longer has any

one-year-old wood on it. In this case we

would remove it completely by being

bringing in a possibly a handsaw that we

could cut that out. So if we come down

over here, we have a spur with

significant area that can be cut off,

older portions that can be cut off, and

then we've got this spur here so we want

to cut that back to two buds and you can

remove any of this older material right

here, which would have been the previous

seasons growth. And here's the same thing:

we've got some older wood that we can

cut out to clean it up and we've got

multiple things coming out here - multiple

shoots. We want to keep the one closest

in these. Two would be removed

and this would be cut back to two buds

per and we keep continuing along the

vine in that manner. So in this case we

came to a spur that we have to make a

decision about what to keep in what not

to. In this case this won't shoot right.

Here is actually closer to our renewal

zone our cordon. This one is just a

little bit further away but it has much

nicer thickness or diameter it looks a

lot more healthy than this very short

shoot here. So what we're going to do is

we're going to maintain this shoot -

actually cut a little more and we cut

this one off completely. So that is what

will we will keep here, then over here we

can decide to keep some of this shoot

right here and we've got a lot of dead

wood that we can come through later

on and cut out. So you first pass through

you want to make your selections your

shoots that you want to keep. Order these

canes you want to keep that you're

cutting down to just a couple Spurs and

then afterward you come through and you

cut out any excess Deadwood that may

exist in there in some cases you may

have too many Spurs next to each other,

which might require you to remove some

of these burrs. So we may choose to

remove part of this one and keep only

the spur right here. This really comes

down to your shoot density per vine.

Another thing is if you leave two buds

on here two shoots are going to grow

from that so you can potentially have

more crowding in this area if you leave

too many Spurs in a given area. So now

I'm at a completed vine that has been

pruned to two or one bud Spurs on a

cordon system and if we come and look at

some of these we have a nice display of

these arms with the one year old. Would

we have any if we have any that tend to

have too many new

in an area, we can remove them and that's

the case right here we actually have two

Spurs that we may actually want to

choose one of them so you can come in

and actually remove one of them from

that area to reduce the chute density. In

this case we have an extension here that

has really no new one on it. You can

remove that completely - just to clean it

up and here's another one where we have

two Spurs we can come in and remove one

of them completely. So we can really

clean up this area down here towards the

end of a cordon. A lot of times can get

very crowded you can actually have a

couple Spurs. We might want to remove

some of these Spurs out of here and

these are about 20 year old vines and as

they get older this cordon can get

quite gnarly. There can be cases where we

may even want to renew that cordon and

in that case we could cut the whole arm

off and we would just lay out another

cane and that cane would serve as

providing that new cordon and we just

would start just burr printed over the

years.