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Late winter prime time for pruning muscadines If you want your backyard muscadines to grow lots of grapes and not become a jungle, a University of Georgia scientist says it's time to help them out. Late January and February are prime time for muscadine pruning, said UGA Cooperative Extension horticulturist Gerard Krewer. "You can prune muscadines anytime they're dormant," he said. "But in late winter the vines are less likely to be cold-damaged after you prune." Muscadines, Krewer said, produce fruit on the shoots that develop this year from the basal buds of last year's shoots. The part of the vine that grew after those first two to four buds of last year is unneeded growth. Cut that off. How to do it Start at the tip of each shoot, Krewer said, and follow it back to the first raised bump on the stem, the "collar" that marks where last year's growth began. That should be anywhere from 6 inches to 5 feet from the tip. When you come to the "collar" where the 2006 growth begins, back up to the second to fourth bud and make your pruning cut. The vines may "bleed," or ooze sap, Krewer said, but that won't harm the plants. Besides keeping your vines from getting unmanageably tangled over the years, pruning will also assure you of more reliable crops of grapes. "If you let muscadines go unpruned," Krewer said, "they tend to produce too heavily, which leads into alternate bearing seasons. That becomes a feast-orfamine kind of production." Each year, he said, "be sure to cut the previous season's growth back to two to four buds to keep the arbor from becoming overgrown again." If you've let your muscadines go unpruned long enough that they're a tangled mess already, consider cutting them back to the original arm running down the wire. If you do that, though, you won't have grapes next year, since next year's grapes will grow only on shoots that emerge from last year's buds.
On overgrown arbors, where you have seven or eight major branches, "you might want to take out one or two large arms each year," he said. "That way, you can completely renovate the arbor in a few years."
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