Grape

Before bud break, remove most of last year's growth and leave selected canes or spurs on the trained cordon. Grapes fruit on new shoots from one-year wood and need heavy dormant pruning for quality clusters.

In late winter, cut side shoots back to short spurs along the cordon and remove tangled old growth. Annual pruning keeps muscadine vines productive and prevents arbors from becoming unmanageable.

When the first green shoots push from the spurs, broadcast 3 to 5 pounds of 10-10-10 per established vine, spread in a circle out to the edge of the vine's spread rather than piled against the trunk. Young vines get far less and get it in three passes: a first-year vine takes half a pound of 10-10-10 once it has settled in, then 2 ounces of ammonium nitrate about two months later and 2 ounces again about six weeks after that. Double every one of those rates in the second year. A third-year vine takes 2 pounds of 10-10-10 at budbreak and 1 more pound about two months on. Muscadines carry their crop on shoots that grow from this year's buds, so the nitrogen has to be in the root zone before that flush of shoot growth sets the number of flower clusters the vine can fill.

When new shoots reach 1-2 inches, start black rot protection with mancozeb, captan or myclobutanil (Immunox). This is the spray people skip and it is the one that matters. Black rot overwinters in mummified berries and infects the youngest tissue first; by the time you see it on the fruit in August the infection happened months ago.

Spray immediately before bloom and again as bloom finishes. If you only spray twice all year, make it these two. The berries are most vulnerable from immediate pre-bloom onward, and this is where the season is won or lost - black rot is the number one cause of a lost grape crop.

Roughly ten to twelve weeks after budbreak, with green berries sizing on the vine, give each established vine a half pound of ammonium nitrate. If the older leaves show yellow between the veins with a green border, add 4 to 6 ounces of Epsom salts for magnesium (2 to 4 ounces on one- and two-year-old vines). The vine is filling berries and building next year's buds at the same time, and a mid-season nitrogen top-up carries it through that double demand without the surge of soft growth a single heavy spring dose would cause.

Keep covers going every 10-14 days for about 3-4 weeks after bloom, then stop. Use captan rather than mancozeb once harvest is inside 66 days. Around 3-4 weeks after bloom the fruit becomes resistant to infection and further black rot sprays do nothing - spraying into August is treating a window that has already closed.

Only if rot has cost you fruit before, start captan once the berries are set and repeat about every two weeks through the green-berry period. Muscadines are far more disease tolerant than bunch grapes, and many home vines need no fungicide at all, so let last year's losses decide. Follow the rate and maximum number of applications on the label of the product you buy. Bitter rot, black rot, Macrophoma rot and ripe rot infect the berry while it is still green and hard, then sit latent and only collapse the fruit once sugar rises at ripening, which is why a spray at the first rotten berry is already too late.

Check leaves and clusters for white powdery growth and open the canopy with timely shoot and leaf removal. Early scouting and airflow make mildew easier to manage before clusters are damaged.

In the weeks after fruit set, while the berries are still green and hard, scrape the soil surface within a foot of the trunk and look for brown papery pupal cases pushed up out of the ground, which is the proof adults are emerging from your vines. A pheromone bucket trap hung in the planting, checked weekly, will confirm it. Mound about ten inches of soil around the trunk base a couple of weeks BEFORE you expect emergence, then pull it away in late summer; this blocks up to ninety percent of the moths. In the Southeast emergence runs late June into early July, so the mounds go up in mid- to late June — adjust to your own trap catch, not to the calendar. The larvae spend nearly two years tunnelling the roots and crown below ground where nothing reaches them, so the brief window when adults emerge at the soil surface is the only point in the life cycle a grower can act on.

If you find a white powdery film on leaves or young berries in summer, spray wettable sulfur and repeat as the label directs while the growth is still expanding. Powdery mildew is the one common muscadine disease captan does not touch, and unlike the rots it spreads in dry warm weather rather than rain, so it can build during the very spells that look safe.

Muscadines ripen unevenly and hang in loose handfuls rather than bunches, so go over the vine every few days and take only the berries that separate from the stem at a light touch. Fruit that resists is not ready. A gentle shake onto a sheet under the vine collects the ripe ones for juice. The berry releases from its stem only at full maturity, so the vine itself tells you which fruit is ready, and a single vine will keep offering fruit over several weeks rather than all at once.

After the last picking, clear any shrivelled berries left hanging and the dried fruit stems still attached to the spurs, and rake up fallen fruit beneath the vine. Bury or bin it rather than composting it near the planting. If you miss the window, this cleanup still pays off any time before growth resumes in spring. The rot fungi overwinter inside those mummies and old stems and release the spores that start next season's infections, so this cleanup removes the inoculum before it has anything to infect.