The bumpy grape overlords have taken over, help the revolution! :p

[melissaNC]

Hi I would appreciate anyone's help on how to deal with my grapevines. I just bought my first house and the garden is out of control! Mostly the grapevines (3 in total) have taken over the fruit trees, the stairs, and merged with the over-fence along side my front garden and nearly a quarter of my neighbors garden. Is this the right season to trim them? My neighbor has been apparently staying with her son and I want to at least clear the part that's moved over to her side before she gets back. Also, unfortunately the whole system seems to be suffering from blister mites(bumps on leafs?). Nearly every leaf has it. What can I do other then trimming the vine and leafs? Is there something that I can spray the plant with? I would greatly appreciate any help. Thank you!

[scarey55]

Don't cut into any of the hard wood now but you can cut back some of the green stuff - check before you cut it back that you don't have any grapes already growing. I'm not really a grapevine expert but I know that, if you are in UK, you need to wait until the winter before you do anything radical.

Sorry, where are my manners, welcome to the Vine

[roitelet]

Welcome to the vine, could you put your location on please then the advice given will be more relevant. Do what Scarey says and then in the depths of winter prune HARD.

[bearded bloke]

Hello & welcome

Re blister mite control ....

If only a few leaves or shoots are affected by galling, these can be cut off and disposed of. If many leaves are affected, the presence of the mite has to be tolerated, as removing infested leaves will cause more damage than the mite.

Taken from .....Grapevine blister mite/RHS Gardening



In the UK there are no chemicals available to amateur gardeners to control the mite,other parts of Europe (Turkey ?) availability may differ

[BertieFox]

In a way you are lucky they are grapevines because they are things which are traditionally pruned VERY hard, and vines which are decades old are cut back to just a couple of buds on a five foot rod of hard wood in a productive vineyard.

As suggested above, I would leave it until late winter and then prune out everything back to a few buds above the graft (IF they are grafted, they may not be). You can then decide how you want to train them next year, and whether you are going to use them for wine or dessert grapes.

The one thing you need not worry about is killing the vines! I set out to destroy an old one during the winter here as I had replaced it with a Black Hamburg. But despite chopping off everything I could find, it is still coming up again! And in the forest near here, there are numerous vines that come back every year from when there used to be vineyards in the area. Yet they have been mown down, no doubt sprayed and all kinds of other bad treatment!

As for the blister disease, you will probably find that by severe pruning back you eliminate that.