Muscadine Harvest 2015

So, as expected, three quarters of this years muscadine harvest is represented in this picture. If you'll recall from April, or you can use the archive to check out the post entitled "Muscadines!" to help you recall, we weren't expecting much of a harvest this year.

The muscadines had not been trimmed in at least two years, possibly much longer. This past winter I trimmed them drastically and began the process of training them into a four arm kniffen style trellis system. I kept plenty of vines, unsure of their response to my trimming. All of them exploded into growth as soon as Spring hit. The muscadines, however, won't fruit on wood from this year, but will emerge from the one year old wood next year.

These three and one other muscadine on the same little vine represent the entire harvest, only because this one vine somehow managed to evade the drastic pruning this past winter. But it's cool to see what they look like!

These are Carlos Bronze muscadines (AKA Scuppernongs). This variety represents half of our vines. We haven't yet identified the other red variety of muscadines, but we aren't picky.

Next year we should see a ridiculously large harvest and then in subsequent years I plan on alternately pruning four of the eight vines more heavily in order to produce half the full capacity harvest annually, instead of a doubly large harvest biennially.