 Okay, good evening, everybody. Welcome to the fourth and final session of the North Dakota State University Spring Fever Garden Forum. My name is Tom. It's a little wintry outside. Yes, it is snowing now in Fargo. But it is April, spring. I've heard it is coming and we're going to be ready for it this year. And that's why we're really happy to be here tonight to give you the latest information on gardening and landscaping from North Dakota State University out to all 53 counties of North Dakota. And we even let some people listen in from surrounding states too. So they're welcome here tonight also. Our format tonight is going to be the same as our other sessions. We will have three segments tonight. Each segment will consist of about a 20 to 25 minute presentation followed by your questions. And we encourage everybody's questions out there in the counties. Please type in your questions in the chat. Fight unforgiving and cruel to us. So it can be a challenge to grow grapes in North Dakota. Tonight, we have the High Value Cross Specialist of North Dakota State University, Dr. Harleen Haderman-Valenti. She's going to give us some tips on how to successfully grow grapes in our backyards. So let's welcome Harleen. Well, unfortunately, you guys are stuck with me. It was supposed to be Steve's second daughter, but he had another engagement. So I'll do the best I can. I have been working with grapes ever since the farm bill was passed that allowed commercial wineries in the state. And so that's been a few years and we've learned a lot in that time. But so as far as growing your own grapes, there's lots of reasons that you may want to be growing these. Fresh eating, unfortunately, we don't have a lot of, I mean, whenever it speaks about fresh eating grapes, you think of your Thompson seed list or your red globes. We don't have red globes or Thompson seed list. We have actually something that looks like a red globe, but it has seeds in. And nowadays a lot of people don't like to have grapes that have seeds in. So we don't have a lot of opportunities for your traditional fresh eating, but juice, wine, some things can be challenging. Of course, as Tom was talking about, everyone feels very rewarded when you go and you see all these clusters growing on this plant and comes harvest time. And it is exciting and fun. And I remember when we lived up in Pennsylvania, we went to a little commercial winery and we helped them harvest, you know, of course, by putting in a day's work. We got a glass of wine. We weren't too smart there, but I mean, but it was just being out there and doing something and it was very peaceful, relaxing and fun and exciting. So grapes, as Tom mentioned, have been around for a long, long time. There's drawings where you'll see with the Egyptians having grapes and wine and so more than 6,000 years as Steve has talked about here. There is even a 6,000 year old winery. I'm not sure that the wine inside would have been that great. But, you know, so here was in 63 B.C. where they were actually transferring some wine barrels across and so wine and grapes have been around for a long time. Now, as far as in our area, well, they have been growing since the 1800s, but what we have is vitus raperia, the river grape. It's native to North Dakota and we can go along the river and actually find it anywhere that we can. Now, look, because it is growing very abundantly and actually vitus raperia has a huge native range. And so there's vitus raperia that is growing normally down into Texas. It's a very easy to grow grape, but it has some drawbacks. Great thing attributes can withstand our winners, but the clusters are small, the berries are really small, and they're rather acidic. What we're trying to do with the river grape or vitus raperia is to go and get those attributes that make it really hardy to go and make a better wine grape. Vitus vinifera, of course, that is the true wine grape and it grows great in California, but it's only hardy properly to about if the temperatures go down nice and gradually, maybe to 19 degrees Fahrenheit. Wouldn't you like to have a winter that only got to 19 degrees Fahrenheit? I don't think it's happening here. So, plan B. So, with some of the work that has been happening, well, along quite some time, Elmer Swenson had worked on cold hardy grape varieties. He was in Osceola, Wisconsin, and, you know, as an amateur grape breeder, brought forth over a hundred varieties. And there's even more. He has now passed away. He was 90-something years old. And so, his farmstead, there's just a whole bunch of numbered cultivars that people are trying to see. Are they worthy of releasing and giving a name to? And so, I think there's still stuff that is untapped. But what Elmer did with his breeding, and we'll see later on, is something like you see in this picture, is he used the Concorde grape, Vitus lebrusca. And if anyone thinks about Welch's grape juice, that's mainly your Concorde grape, or Vitus lebrusca. And so, it has a lot of what they say, foxiness, kind of a unique taste to it. And so, a number of his releases, also, if you don't make the wine just the right way, or even if you do, has that kind of foxiness to it. The University of Minnesota has been breeding grapes for a number of years as well. And they have half-dozen releases. Very cold hardy, down to minus 35. We've had them for almost nine years now, and many of them have survived minus 40, because they know we've been down to minus 40. And there's just Elmer, and some of his releases. Stegravada is used quite a bit in Quebec. That's their grape of choice. That's Swenson red that you see there. That's the table grape. Just wonderful tasting to kind of have those darned seeds in it. The Somerset Seedless is one that we call it somewhat seedless, instead of Somerset Seedless. What happens is you get some seed remnants in it. And so, which, when you make that into, you dry them as raisins, you never know the difference, because they're already chewy. And so, we really like Somerset Seedless as a raisin. Here's the University of Minnesota introductions. Their most recent one is a Marquette, which has a lot of Vitus vinifera in its background. And so, it has some good tannins. It's still a little bit high in some of the acidity, but much better than Frotnet. Another release that they have that has really no tannins whatsoever in it, but it's extremely hardy. Now, you see that there's a Frotnet and a Frotnet Gree. This actually is a mutation that came from Frotnet. And so, it makes more of a white wine, more of a straw colored, actually. So, some people will go and say, ooh, this is oxidized, but it isn't. And now they found another mutation, which is Frotnet Blanc, which has more of a white grape and actually makes them much better like a Chardonnay type wine. So, here is some Frotnet grapes that are growing in Glenelon at Ken and Mary Ann DePonge's place. And we were there for one summer during the field day. So, all parts of the state, Frotnet, does a wonderful job and nice, large, loose clusters. And you may wonder, well, is that, do we want a loose cluster like that? And that's really good because type clusters, if you get some rainfall, especially late before harvest, you're going to get a lot of rocks in there. We don't want that. So, having a loose cluster actually eliminates or reduces any kind of a pesticide set or disease problems that we might have. Okay. So, some things that have changed recently. This is the 1990 Plant Hardiness Map. And if you look at that, mainly we see that North Dakota was quite a bit in the four, that's the 4A and 3B are formed. And so, but they've recently updated it. And so now we see, instead of being 4A and 3B, now we're more of a 3A and 3B. And Steve actually, oops, I took that out. I actually had another slide that had it a little bit closer where you could go and see the division. So, I'm not sure what this means. Global warming, well, that doesn't really make sense unless you think you get more extremes. But so, what the Plant Hardiness Zone actually talks about is just how cold it gets, absolute cold temperature. And on this slide you can see the Fahrenheit. And so, 3B is minus 30 to minus 35, and 3A is minus 35 to minus 40. And so, now, but that's on a big average. And we know that, you know, averages really just go and just kind of mellow out the extreme bumps. And so, but I do think we probably do get those kind of temperatures. So, we're going to go in one of gold grapes. The first thing everyone always talks about is site selection, very important with site selection. Full sun, grapes, no matter even if it's a river grape, really like full sun. And as much sunlight as possible. I'm getting excited and probably a bit loud. Sorry. This is a passionate subject of mine. And so, you want to eliminate any kind of shade trees that you might have, buildings, fences that will go in and shade your grapes. Good dream each is important. But what we found, you know, this is, our hardy grapes have that Vitus raperia, a river grape. What we found, unlike Vitus vinifera, that really can't take any kind of water, not saturation, but even, you know, saw these soils, aren't these hybrids do pretty well. So, there are a lot more forgiving of wetness in your soils than Vitus vinifera, which is good, because we have these heavier soils that don't necessarily drain that quickly. So, slope is important for drainage, but also when you think about how to capture as much sunlight and heat as possible, you want something that is facing the south. You're going to get a lot more sunlight and get a lot more what they call growing degree days than if it was facing the north. Now, if we were further south, maybe a north facing slope would be better because they get, you know, more fluctuation in the temperatures in the spring. So, that might wake up the grapes. But here in North Dakota, we don't have to worry about that. You know, maybe in Kansas or Southern Nebraska, you know, they've been up to almost 80 degrees already. Just think about how much more heat if they're on that south facing slope. You get a few of those days and then you get back to 20, you know, quite an extreme. You also want to avoid bottoms of valleys. And the reason for that is cold air always settles down in the lowest part. And so, two things we have to worry about frost. Late spring frosts when our grapes have already woke up and are starting to bud out and those early fall frosts and freezes. When our grapes haven't completely ripened and if we lose all those leaves, they're not going to ripen any further. That's it. That's where they're stopping. So, if we can avoid, you know, early fall freezes and frosts or late spring freezes and frosts, that would be wonderful. He'll close. I already talked about that. Okay. So, you know, as far as the slope, you know, having that one-and-a-half to three percent just helps that air move out. But the thing I want to talk about here is the wind. You see what I've written there, actually, Steve, is calm conditions can go and increase your temperature by 18 degrees. So, if you had some kind of a shelter belt, far enough away to go and slow down and, you know, stop that wind, you're going to go and because of that breeze not, you know, continually moving across those leaves, they're going to heat up more. And so, you can go and accumulate and capture more heat that way along with the clusters. So, having calm conditions is good now, people, but you're going to have more diseases. You know, we're in an area where we're not getting that, like, rainfall in the first place that we have a lot of disease problems. I'll talk about a few, but, you know, those can be controlled. You can't go and capture more heat any other way than to go and reduce the wind. And we know how the wind blows in North Dakota. So, here is actually a vineyard by Zenoa where they do have that south facing slope and, you know, where they can go and that cold air will go and move down towards the bottom of the hill. And when we visited out there, we did see that they did have problems with winter kill down towards the bottom. Because the cold air sat there. Here is a north facing slope. And so, you know, it can be done. Sometimes you're going, this is my land. I don't have a south facing slope. At Soraka where we have our grapes, we have no slopes. I mean, it's as flat as can be. We're still in the valley. And so, you have to go and, you know, when you get lemons make lemonade. And so, but if you have the opportunity, always pick that. Avoid too wet sites, of course. Anything that has a lot of clay, you're going to go and get, you know, potential hard pans and those. I've already talked about air circulation. If you can avoid chemical drift, you know, if you can avoid chemical drift, that would be wonderful. But grapes are extremely sensitive. If you're, you know, so even in town, a lot of homeowners will go and spray their dandelions. And they'll be, and they'll not even consider, well, it's windy out. This is ready to use. Just squirt. Well, I'm squirting from over here to go and fill that dandelion down there because I really don't want to walk all the way over there. And so, and then we needed some warm, really hot temperature when we're making those applications or a neighbor that your grapes are right next to them and they're, you know, spraying their dandelions. And that's what caused problems. Grapes are extremely sensitive to plant growth regulator herbicides. Your 2-4-Ds, Dicamba, MCPA, MCPP, those kinds of herbicides that do wonders on dandelions and red clover or sweet clover or white clover. But they also really can set back your grapes. That, I don't need to beat the dead horse. That near, you know, if you could be near a large body of water, I suppose around Devil's Lakes, you know, large bodies of water do do a wonderful job of really moderating the temperature somewhat. Now, if we were to buy an ocean, it'd be even better. But even up in the Singer Lakes, you know, they find, and I'm not saying Devil's Lake is going to be like one of the Singer Lakes. It does help moderate some temperature fluctuations. And that's the real thing that hurts any kind of production is when you have those drastic extreme changes in temperatures. When you go from, you know, something like that 70 down to the low-freezing plants don't adjust that well to it. I think I get to do two. You know, you probably want to go and make sure that you checked your soil for the various nutrients. Most of the time, if something's been growing there, it's probably not out of black. And you kind of understand what's been growing there. And if it's been really vigorous and whatever in the history of that soil, soil pH, we don't have a lot of extremes that occur. But you might have problems with dissolved salt and organic matter. You know, that can fluctuate a little bit. But now, if something's been growing there successfully, and it isn't something like kosher that really likes salt or a weed that thrives on extremes, then you should be okay. You can add sand and organic matter if needed. But with a lot of these hybrids, I don't think that's really needed. We do have problems with them having too much bigger because of the nitrogen. And so you might have to work with that. But it can be workable. Okay, let's get planting and establishing. The first year when you go and get your grapes, don't do anything to them. Let them grow. Let them get those roots growing and really get established. The first year is for establishment. With all the grapes that I planted, I bet you 95% have died all the way to the ground. I didn't die, but all the top growth died back. Important person as if it was, you know, herbaceous perennial. So if that happens, don't be alarmed. That's what happens. And what we want to do is we're working on getting that root establishment. You don't really care what's above ground because it's probably going to die back anyway. So the second year when you start to go and work on your vine architecture, you're going to start to try to develop your trunk, depending on your training system. Some will go with one trunk. Some will go with two. So I've seen five trunks at one time because that's bigger and the things are growing all over the place. And so usually you go with trying to develop two trunks and you want to kind of keep them as straight as possible depending on, again, what your training system is. Then you're going to go and start working on your three, your two, you might get a few grapes that actually go away and come on because grapes will form from previous years would. So one year old buds will go in and actually be fruitful. And so you might have what you have coming up. These dots was, you know, everything died back, but this much. But there was two buds that close to the ground. And so then you see, you know, maybe two, three, maybe four clusters right there down at the base of the plant. Don't let them be there if you see anything. And even if the thing did die back and you had clusters your second year, you don't want to take away from that plant really becoming thoroughly established. So you go and pull those off the sooner the better. Don't let the plant go and put too much energy into those. The third year, you should start to have your, you know, trunks and cordons if you're going to go with a spur of pruning and depending on your system, you should have that established and you could probably allow half the fruit. Again, now this depends on what's your purpose for growing this. If you're growing it for wine, if you're just growing, I want to make jelly. Well, you could probably leave a few more buds because you don't have to, with jelly, you don't have to get those clusters completely ripe. You'll get some of that fruitfulness and taste, but you can always add sugar. Wine makers, you know, really aren't supposed to be adding sugar. And so what they're supposed to work with is what the grape has to offer. So as far as planting space, usually, you know, you'll want to go and as far as row spacing, six feet or more plant spacing, usually six to eight foot. And what we do with that is, you know, generally you want to have that row facing north to south because if it's facing north to south, you get the better coverage with sun. And so you don't have to worry about as much shading. And by having them about eight foot apart, what we find then we have cordons going four foot on each side and it works out quite nicely. As far as grow tubes, we actually did some research in grow tubes. The only thing they'd be really beneficial for is if you have deer that like to go in and they love grapes. So grow tubes do a wonderful job of kind of deterring the deer until they pop up above the grow tubes. The other thing is if you're going to be spraying anything down at the base, it's a physical barrier. And so but as far as having that greenhouse, it's not really working there. As far as planting like that, yes, a lot of times there's a lot of nurseries in Minnesota that you can go and get plant material from which probably nurseries around here as well that you can buy either potted plants. But if there was a large number, you'd probably want to get bear root plants pretty straightforward. First year, like I said, don't do anything. Second year, oh, Steve included this mini-J. If you really wanted to go and had the ambition that you really wanted to go and try to grow something like a vinifera, great. This is what the U of M uses to go and grow their chardonnay at their station. And so they use this mini-J system. So they kind of train the trunk to kind of grow on the ground and then they bring it up and they'll actually do a BSP in which at that low water they'll then allow all the cordons. And what they do then is every year they take them off those wires and they bury them with soil so that they would survive because soil is a great insulator. I know a grower west of here, he had some Swinson Red, which is kind of marginally hardy. And they probably work better in town where you can get these microclimates than they would out in the rural areas. And anyway, so the first year he was wonderful about laid them all down, covered them up with soil, you know, did all that in spring, on earth, all the soil, put them back up on the lines. Second year, he gradually did that, laid them all down. Third year, he decided that the tough ones live. Fourth year, he had only a couple. So, you know, if you're going to go and want to do this, you've got to be willing to put that time towards helping them survive. I mean, you have ten minutes left in this segment, so you can find minutes on your desktop and then find this question. Perfect. Now, as far as the pruning, I've already told you about the pruning in which you go and you, you know, once they get established, you always prune back at 80%. And it's only the year old wood. You probably even the, it says here, it talks about two 80% or more of the second year old cane. Well, the second year old cane, you know, really are the one year old wood. And so, last year, they were the primary, the cane that came out and they were green. And so, those, you prune back to 80% or more. Each one of these buds puts out two clusters. So, a lot of times with wine grapes on a typical plant, we'll leave about 30 buds. And so, if you're going for juice or jelly, you can probably double that and be okay. And some of these, though, you really have to watch. And if you're not getting those warm temperatures and things aren't ripening, then you might have to drop some clusters to go and get your sugars up. Here's the fact about, you know, how you have this cord on. What you see here is, you know, this is almost like a permanent trunk. So, here's where all our buds are going to be. And you can see, you take out quite a bit of that wood for pruning. And so, well, why trellis? That's a good question. There's more to that, though. It's a vine. It needs support. You need it to get, you know, the river grape. It climbs up and climbs over shrubs and climbs up trees and gets to the sunlight. So, it needs, you know, it wants to need that sunlight. So, we're just providing support and an ease of going and harvesting and doing all those things. So, here's trellising. You have this. This is more for a larger system where you're going to go and have one of those big 6-inch or 8-inch posts. You really, on a backyard, you probably wouldn't go to that kind of extreme. But you have to realize how heavy these grapes actually get. A lot of people, as far as trellising, then, there's a lot of them will go, well, in a backyard, I don't think you'll see a lot of VSPs. You won't see very many double curtains, which is just kind of like I call a close wire. But you will see a lot of arvers. And so, basically, with an arver, you just let them grow over. I had a friend in Morehead, she had an old dog cage. And so, we planted a marquette and she left it grow over it. And I said, now, remember, you might have multiple trunks. You've got to go and prune back 80% of that one-year-old wood to go in. And you'll have plenty of fruit to do that. So an arver is probably a nice way of doing that, all kinds of arvers. And, yes, the lack of pruning could be a problem with an arver, depending on how it is. You can see here, they've pruned back quite a bit on that the way you should in the springtime. And then they have just a few coming out. You can get it stravagant. And now, here, they really didn't care probably so much about the fruit. They wanted the grapes for the shade. So you probably wouldn't care about how much pruning you would actually do. This is a concord vine. And concord is somewhat in that not-so-hardy area. But it's been growing there for 30-some years. And it's just huge. Actually, it's planted in the front of the house and goes all the way to the back of the house. And then onto this arver, one plant covers a huge area. So varieties. You have here a list of really good ones as far as for juice, jelly raisins, and table wine. I've talked about a lot of the Minnesota ones for wine. Animals. I don't think you're going to, the only thing you're going to have to worry about as a homeowner is going to be, not these guys, birds. Bird netting is essential. I don't care if you have juneberries in your backyard or three grapes. If you want to ever get any grapes, you better go and put some netting over them. Because I have over a dozen juneberry plants in my backyard. I've never gotten a single juneberry off of them. Those birds won't even let them get purple. And it's like, OK. And it's like, I have a dozen. And we don't have any trees. And boom. I come home. They're all gone. Same thing will happen with grapes. And so bird netting is very important. And if you have a red grape, the minute it starts turning color, that's the time to go and get your netting on. And so with that, some of these things, pretty cosmetic diseases. I don't think you're going to see a lot of this as a problem. And if you do, Todd would be the person that would go and help you out with that. I haven't seen anthracnose. We've seen more herbicide injury, something like this from the 24D. And so. And this perasion is just when you get that color change. It's really hard to see with those white grapes because they turn from a green to like an off green to maybe a little more of a yellow. And so much more difficult to tell than with a red grape. And then I heard someone saying about, you know, not here. He said, don't pull, cut. Well, the thing with that is, you know, when you pull those berries off of that cluster, then you're opening that up. So unless you're going to be using those right away, you really don't want to, you want to cut that whole cluster off, and then you pull your berries off when you need. So that was the reason why Steve says don't pull the berries off the clusters First of all, can you recommend a variety that's good for snacking? Well, I do think that Somerset Seedless, if you can get over those occasionally finding a seed remnant, there is another Elmer Swenson somewhat seedless. It's a larger berry, but we haven't seen that. Somerset Seedless is probably our hardiest one. Swenson Red, if you're okay with true seeds, those will be true seeds, but very, very tasty. Boy, when you taste those, those red gloves, they don't have anything for taste compared to these. Okay, speaking of Swenson Red, are Swenson Red and King of the North hardy in northern North Dakota? Swenson Red, you're going to have to really protect and probably do as I said, lay them down, cover them up, do something. They aren't hardy by themselves unless you have a very, very unique microclimate. King of the North is, but if you want an acidic grape, that one always peaks up as being our most acidic grape. So it's one of those that's really going to, when you taste it, you're going to go, wow, that was pukery. So you need a lot of sugar to make that blend balanced. Okay, and just to be clear about our zones here, those maps that we saw were far away and those shades are hard to see, but the way our new hardiness zone maps are is the top one fourth of the state is zone 3B, and the bottom three fourths is 4A, right? Or we're getting warmer, global, our winters are getting warmer over the last 20, 25 years. So there's, is there a whole PS? So most of our, almost most of our, well, 75% and 80% of our population is in 480. Okay, I mean it only gets to be about minus 25. No problem, huh? Okay, how about just a couple more quick questions. This person has grapes that puts on too many clusters for the plant to support. You said all grapes, and you saw when and how many should you leave? Well, so if you think there's too many clusters for it to support, then the sooner you, you thin those out, the better off, because when that grape is trying to ripen everything, it's putting out nutrition to all those clusters. And so if they're really small and you take that away, then it's going to put that energy to those other clusters and to help ripen those. And so the sooner you can do that, the better. Now with wine grapes, we, we generally, you know, so if we're on average going to about 30 buds per, per vine, to, you figure two clusters per bud, about 60 clusters per vine for wine grapes. I think with juice, you know, you can probably increase that one and a half, two times and still be okay. Okay, those are good guidelines. How about, is there any information on how the spotted winged cassava will impact table grapes? I haven't seen anything yet. From what I've seen happen is they really like our cherries and raspberries. And these, you know, Kathy Wideroldt and Carrington, she had grapes in the same area where she had cherries and raspberries. The grapes, she didn't have any problem with them. And so. Okay, Harlee, how about pruning? What's the best kind of prune grapes? Excellent question. So what we like to do is we like to wait until we get just to that early buds well stage. Because when you start pruning, you tend to wake up the vine, unless you're doing it way early. Also, with our winners, this gives us a better assessment of what kind of winter kill we, we actually had. And so if we thought we had a mild wear, but then also we don't see this bud swelling occur, then, you know, we're going to leave more buds because they're not in as good a shape as we thought they were. So we wait until we start to see buds well. But the bad thing about that is those buds are really sensitive and easy to go and rub off. So you have to be really careful. So people go and do a double pruning. They'll do a long pruning where this time of year they'll go out and take just, and they'll leave probably a foot, two foot on the, on the cane that they're going to prune back to maybe two or three buds. And, you know, so they'll leave six or eight just to kind of keep things where they don't have to worry about knocking off some buds. And they'll do that. And then they'll come back and do another pruning and do a more meticulous pruning to get to their, their final count. Okay. How about a question from Southwestern North Dakota? Is pipe water okay for the watering of grapes, fruits and vegetables? Pipe water. Maybe they should be more specific. Maybe just in general, get your water tested. Yeah. If you think you have soluble salt problems, you know, that, that would be the only concern that I would have. And so you could probably see that from previous watering if you start to see the crystallization on the surface that you have high soluble salt in that. I think that grapes are not especially sensitive more than other fruits. They're all a little bit sensitive. Okay. Okay. Last question. Are grapes self-pollinating or do you need two different varieties for pollination? Okay. So that depends on the grape. Your vitus repairia there is talking about your riverbank grape. It actually has male and female plants. So the only way your female plant is going to go and produce fruit is if it gets pollinated by the male plants pollen. Most of the grape cultivars are perfect flowers. So they have the male and female and so they're self-pollinated. There is an exception. Pepin you might have heard. And that one is pistilate. And so you have to go and you wouldn't go and plant a whole vineyard of St. Pepin without something else. You know, because you have to get your male pollen from someplace. So what they do with that is they'll usually put a row of St. Pepin and then a row of anything else because those are perfect flowers. The others are perfect flowers. So they have male and female on them. Okay. Okay. But that's the exception, the most valiant or common grapes that are self-pollinated. Okay. Good. Thank you, everybody. Thank you, Harleen. Let's thank Harleen for her presentation. We're going to take a five minute quick break and then we're going to shift their schedule because Harleen has engagement after this. So we're going to get her right away talking about low maintenance perennials. So come back in five minutes and we'll get started with that. Thank you, everybody.