How to Grow Grapes In Florida

Saturday, October 10th, 2009 Subscribe To Our Feed

Sounds idyllic, but while figs aren’t hard to grow in Florida, it requires a bit more planning and work to grow grapes in a Florida-type climate. It CAN be done, though you’d better do your homework before you plant or you will be in for discontent and a large amount of work. Over the next several columns I will cover the basics of what you’ll have to cope with and what you can grow, dependent on how much work you wish to put into your grapes.

The first huge stumbling block to growing grapes in Florida, or any warm, wet part of the U.S, is disease.

The southeastern U.S. Is where all of the major fungal sicknesses of grapes originated, including black rot, downy mold, powdered mold, anthracnose, many sorts of blights and fruit rots, and more. Those sicknesses are bad enough in the summers of northern areas,eg Long Island, but in the hot, wet climate of the southeast, they start earlier, reproduce quicker, and have plenty more months to do their work. Even so, these illnesses only stunt and damage vines and destroy the crop, and then only if untreated. Much more serious is the bacterial pest Pierce’s illness, which can kill vines altogether.

Pierce’s disease ( PD for short ) is a bacterial disease. Rather than attacking the exterior of the vine, the way the fungal illnesses do, it becomes into the vine where it reproduces at a rate that clogs the vascular system of the vine, making it shrivel and die, sometimes within a few days. Severely influenced vines will look like they were hit with a blowtorch, while vines with resistance may not show any apparent symptoms. between are such things as slowed growth of the vine, scorching of the leaf margins, and death of some shoots. The important factor in PD is that, while the fungal sicknesses spread by themselves, PD has to be spread by a carrier, usually sucking insects such as leafhoppers. This gives one of the means to stop the growth of PD, by stopping the leafhoppers that carry it. Not an easy task in a climate where the leafhoppers can have 3 or more generations a season, each bigger than the last.

These pests are the actual reason that unwary home growers who buy vines of table grape varieties like Flame Seedless or wine grapes like Chardonnay and other types of the old world grape Vitis vinifera shortly find they were regarded as making a serious mistake. Plant Vitis vinifera outside without a lot of pest control and it is going to be a rare vine that survives its first year. In this case, a lot can mean spray or other disease control applied as much as three times a week.

American grapes such as Concord or other northern-bred grapes possessing a modicum of disease resistance may survive a tiny longer, but they’ll succumb eventually, too, without a large amount of work controlling illness.

With these kinds of nasties to address, it may appear like growing grapes in Florida might be more work than it’s worth. But take heart, there are heaps of techniques to get grapes WITHOUT spending all your waking hours on pest elimination.

Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.