Dallas Fruit and Vegetable Grower

Grape Trellis in Dallas

In a small side yard to our house, we keep our compost bins and air conditioning unit.  It is an eyesore and needs to be landscaped.  But in the meantime, we have planted a small "vineyard" of 12 grape vines supported by a trellis.  Behind the trellis, we have planted several pluots, apriums, plumcots, persimmon, and navel oranges which I plan to espalier along the fence.

I originally had a three tier trellis with the top tier at approximately 7 feet off the ground, but this year, I decreased it to a two tier system.  With only two tiers, there is less pruning, and it affords more light to the fruit trees behind the trellis.  In the photograph above, you can see how the trellis looked earlier in the Spring.

The vines are much more robust, now after a few more months.  These plants grow like crazy, and I have to prune them at least once every three weeks.

In return, they are producing like bonkers.

These are the table and wine grape varieties that we are growing:  Himrod white seedless, Mars blue seedless,  Saturn seedless, Ruby seedless, and Chardonney.

 Photo of immature grape cluster taken a month or two ago.

 

Ripening clusters of grapes

Bloom Report for March 27th

Things have been blooming like crazy during the last two weeks.   The photograph above is of a few of our blueberry blooms.  We have about sixty very immature blueberry bushes that are loaded with blooms.  It has been a very dry spring, so I have made sure that they are getting enough moisture through the driplines.  Assuming the birds don't get to them first, I am hoping that we get a good crop of blueberries this year. 

I planted three Goumi bushes this winter, and they also started to bloom last week.  I planted 2 Sweet Scarlet and 1 Red Gem from One Green World.  All three are blooming.  They have such small, unusual blossoms.

We have a lot of everbearing and june bearing strawberries in our front flowerbeds.  As I previously posted, the Eversweet were the first to bloom and form little green berries.  All of the other everbearing varieties seem to have started blooming this week as well: Seascape, Ozark Beauty, Quinault, Tristar, Ogallala.  Last year, we planted some june bearers, and they also are blooming:  Lateglow, Jewel, and Allstar.  This spring, we also plan on planting some Earliglow june bearers.

However, the first strawberry plants to start blooming for us were the musk strawberries - the Profumata di Tortona.  The photograph below is of a musk strawberry plant.

Our honeyberries also started blooming a few weeks ago.  We have several types of honeyberry - Kamchatka, Blue Velvet, and Blue Pacific - but I cannot tell one from the other.   These plants are two years old, but they have been slow growers for us.

We also have several hardy and fuzzy kiwi plants of several different varieties.  These plants have been in the ground for three years and have not produced blooms or fruit yet.  Kiwi have a reputation for taking approximately 7 years before they come into production.  The plants that I purchased looked like they might be 2 to 3 years old, so I am hoping that this may be my lucky year.  The female plants require a male polinator, and I think our male fuzzy kiwi is about to produce some blooms.  The following photographs are (1) of what I think is the male bloom bud on a fuzzy kiwi; (2) a bud on a hardy kiwi; and (3) of two fuzzy kiwi plants.

 

Finally, our grape vines have leafed out and are starting to form their little flower buds.  It is fascinating to think that these unusual looking flowers can actually turn into a cluster of grapes.