The first season of the vine

Oh, the plants are newly planted, the heat is around the corner and the season can begin! Here is a quick overview of how the development of the vine plant will, or is expected to, look like

The plant is placed against the plant support on the right in the picture and the anchor rubber band is attached to the plant against the support. A bunch of buds have started to appear in various places on the graft head. The graft, created to unite the grape variety with the rootstock, is found just below the top. The buds that you already know you do not want can be "blinded" at this stage, i.e. plucked away. Examples of these are the buds that develop under the top and which can be guessed to have a bad growth angle.

At this stage, all the buds from the previous example have developed into shoots and it becomes clear what the different angles of growth will be. It may be hard to imagine at this stage of your new grape growing life, but the shoots at the bottom of the picture will have great trouble carrying the responsibility of a heavy vine in the future.

Here, shoots that are not suitable for future vines are selected and two nice shoots, with a good growth angle straight up, are left. In this situation, you can choose to keep them both because it is difficult to choose and to spread the risk in case one of them does not survive the winter . The goal for the first season, however, is to manage to get at least one shoot to be at least one meter high and the thickness of a classic, yellow pencil . The chance of this is greater if you only choose one shoot on each plant.