Everything for viticulture: how to properly harvest and store grape cuttings. In practice, grapes are propagated vegetatively, i.e. cuttings, eyes, and layering. This method of reproduction fully ensures the reproduction of the variety from which the planting material was taken.
Under production conditions, grapes do not propagate by seeds for the reason that when sowing seeds, plants similar to the mother bush are not obtained anywhere. In breeding work, when breeding new grape varieties, they resort to sowing hybrid seeds (obtained as a result of crossing specially selected parental pairs) and the subsequent education of hybrid seedlings.
It is clear that in production conditions we can only talk about reproduction by vegetative means (cuttings, eyes and layering).
Harvesting grape cuttings
Cuttings are harvested in the fall on fruiting plantations from annual vines, which are fully ripe and completely healthy. You cannot harvest a vine that is very thin, poorly ripe, damaged by fungal diseases and pests, fattening (very thick), or with short or excessively long internodes, and, finally, you also cannot cut the vine from bushes that are infertile or infertile. In order to use only high-quality cuttings for propagation, the so-called mass selection on fruiting plantations, the essence of which boils down to a careful annual selection of the best bushes in the vineyard, from which vines are cut for propagation in the fall. Mass selection can be carried out on positive or negative grounds. If the plantings are pure-variety, the selection is carried out according to negative signs.
Mass selection for a negative trait consists in marking lean, barren diseased bushes for three years (on the same plots) so that in the future those bushes that will be marked as lean or low-yielding for all three years in a row are removed from the vineyard, and put new ones in their place. From bushes that have not received a negative mark for three years, or have received only one negative mark, and you should prepare a vine for propagation.
Usually, with a mass selection for negative signs, the following bushes are to be marked, and subsequently removed:
- Completely barren.
- Low-yielding and undersized.
- Bushes disfigured by pruning, frost, hail, storms, diseases, pests, etc.
- Admixture of other varieties.
Mass selection on the basis of positive characteristics consists in the selection and marking of the best bushes in terms of yield, fruit quality and other economic characteristics. This selection is also carried out over three years, in the same area. For reproduction, vines are harvested from those bushes that have received positive marks for all three years in a row or two years out of three.
The technique of mass selection consists in the fact that one or several skilled workers pass through the rows of the vineyard and all bushes that are not productive (when selected for negative characteristics) or fruitful (when selected for positive characteristics) bushes are marked with a metal tag or oil paint. Mass selection is a very important agricultural technique that helps to increase yields and ensures the establishment of new vineyards only with pure-bred, fruitful and healthy planting material.
It is necessary to harvest cuttings in the fall after the leaves have fallen, but given that in the northern regions of Donbass the leaves do not always have time to crumble themselves before the onset of the first frosts, harvesting of cuttings here can be started earlier, making sure that the vine is quite mature, i.e. then, when the stalk of the leaf is separated from the vine by a cork layer and the leaves are easily cast.
The cut vine is cleaned of stepchildren and antennae, cut into cuttings 1, 20-1, 30 m long, at least 5 mm thick, tie the cuttings into bundles of 5-50 pieces with wire or strong twine, hang labels on them with the name of the variety and write down in a book or notebook, the variety and the number of harvested shanks.
Storage of grape cuttings
You can keep the vine until spring in basements and trenches. When stored in cellars, grape cuttings are stacked in stacks. Each row is sprinkled with moderately moist (so that it does not stick together when squeezed in the hand) sand with a layer of 8-10 cm. The temperature in the basement should not be higher than 4 ° С and not lower than minus 5 ° С. The best temperature will be 0 ° C without hesitation.
It is most convenient and profitable to store cuttings in covered trenches. To do this, they dig a hole 1.5 m wide and 1 m deep, and the length depends on the number of cuttings. Above the pit, a gable roof is made of boards, which is covered from above with scraps of vine, and then with a layer of soil of 0.5 m. For ventilation, air vents are installed that extend from the base of the trench through the roof.
Cuttings in these trenches are laid and stored in the same way as in basements. Small batches of cuttings can be stored in ordinary trenches, which are always located on the north side of buildings, so that there is no strong heating and temperature fluctuations. An ordinary trench should also be 1.5 m wide and 70-100 cm deep (picture above). The walls of the trench should be sprinkled with a 4-6% solution of lime, and at the bottom of the pit, scraps of vines should be poured, previously sprinkled with a 3% solution of copper sulfate. After that, bundles of cuttings are laid in a trench, sprinkled with sand, and if not, then with earth. From above, the trench is also covered with earth, lightly tamped and poured a gable hill, which should be wider at the base than the trench. A groove is made around the hill for water drainage.
