 Good morning, everyone. Yes, today I prepared some information about pruning your bunch grapes. So what is the grape production situation in Alabama? We have a lot of big number of native grape species, including Mascaninian grape that everybody knows about. But also our Alabama wineries and grape growers association now has 26 wineries and 125 members. And the number of wineries has increased by 3.7 fold since 2006. So within the 15 years, we had this huge increase. Also, in 2003, Alabama had about 90 acres of Muscadine grapes. And in 2012, this census determined that we were growing 519 acres of grapes. And this represents a 5.8 fold increase in acreage covered with grapes. On the other hand, we're having this global interest in wine tourism. And it is reflected in our own agritourism in the state. And we're also having new opportunities like those new farmers markets that are selling also some grapes and Mascanines, of course. And recent research done on health benefits of consumption of grapes is showing a lot of benefits in terms of a lot of antioxidants, high antioxidant content in those grapes, including resferotrol, ilagic acid, and other compounds that are very health beneficial. With that, I just wanted to make some distinctions and summarize the information about grape, which belongs to botanical family of vitacea. And this family has 1,000 species, and they belong to 17 genera. Within this genera, cultivated grapes of economic importance belong to genus vitis, which has over 60 species. And those grapes have like 38 somatic chromosomes. The other genus of importance is Moscadenia. But only three species of plants belong to these genus. Anyhow, they have 40 somatic chromosomes. What is the difference for us today is that all of vitis species are producing their crop on clusters, and clusters could be harvested. While Moscadenia grape, you know very well they need to be harvested berry by berry when each individual berry ripens. So I just wanted to make sure that we're going to address this. And let me talk about the plant itself. Grapevine requires some form of support to keep the shoots and the canes off the ground. And in the wild, the tendrils that develop along the canes attach to other vegetation, surrounding vegetation, and allow the vine to grow up off the ground. In intense cultural systems, there is no natural support for the vines. So that's why the use of various trailing systems to train and support the vine is needed. The use of trailing systems also facilitates other management practices in the vineyard. So it's very important to establish those trailing systems. I just wanted to go over some definitions to make sure that everybody understands what is pruning, what we call pruning, what we call training, and go with those terms. So pruning is removal of plant parts to obtain our horticultural objectives. Pruning is used to control the size and the form of the grapevine. Pruning also optimizes the production potential of the grapevine and help us maintain a healthy balance between the vegetative growth and fruiting or our crop load. Training, this is the arrangement of plant parts spatially. Training is done to develop a structure that optimizes the utilization of sunlight, also promotes productivity, and adapts to the characteristics of the grape cultivar that we're growing. Training also promotes efficient and sustainable vineyard management practices. So let me look at some grapevine characteristics. What is most important for today's message is that the dormant buds on one-year-old canes actually give rise to new canes on which the grape clusters are produced. And if you look at those pictures, this is one-year cane and this is one-year cane. And you can clearly see one, two buds that are developing here in addition to this basal bud from which we do not expect any clusters to develop, but just the vegetative shoot will develop from this one. And you can see on the next image here that those shoots are in early shoot development already. And this is where our canopy is going to be formed for this current season and also our clusters or our crop is going to be born on those shoots in this particular season. So because of this character that grapes produce on one-year-old canes, pruning mature grape vines consists of replacing all of the fruiting wood each year. So if you ask how often you need to prune those each year. Next, we will start addressing the question of how to prune your young grape vines. So grape vines can be trained with a single or double trunk. And on this picture, you can see our prominent grower Randall Wilson in his vineyard. And he decided to train those vines to a double trunk, even though this is not very typical training for the entire southeast. But yeah, training vines to a single trunk is the most common and the simplest method to start with. Double trunks are usually practiced in colder climates or places with marginally adaptive cultivars. And the goal for this double trunk is to probably use one term for production in case the other trunk is being injured or killed by the cold. So how do we prune our grape vines? According to the cane length, we can prune like in two different systems. And the first system addresses the long cane pruning. It is also called Niffen system. And the second system is known as spur pruning to a bilateral cordon system. According to the cordon length, we also have two options. We are using high cordon, which forms this single or double curtain. And we can use low cordon with vertical shoot positioning for another bilateral system. What is important to remember today about pruning our vine grapes is that from planting through the third growing season, pruning and training practices are essentially the same for the various training systems. So no matter what system you're going to use, the training practices are the same and focus on training your trunk, which is your permanent part of the vine, during the first and potentially second season, and focuses on training or establishing your cordons during the second and third growing season. So I took this picture yesterday in a law store. And I think like if you're especially a home owner and you want to plant a grapevine like that, that's how you're going to purchase it. And I'm using this example just to illustrate that after planting, you need to cut the one-year-old canes back to three or four buds. And that's what it is. This is our one-year-old cane. And we're having one, two, three buds here. And we're going to obviously train this future vine to a single trunk. OK, we have planted the vine. What we do during the first growing season? Our goal, as I already mentioned, is to train the vine up to the desired wire, no matter if it's your top wire for a high cordon being all spaced six feet apart or mid-level wire for a low cordon for vertical shoot positioning. So this manipulation requires going through the vineyard several times during the season and tying up the canes to a supporting stake, like you see this bundle stake here, to keep the trunk or the future trunk growing very vertical. And if or when, like in this case, it already happened, the cane has reached the wire. You can see that we cut it about four inches below the wire. And the goal for this cut was to promote the lateral buds on the cane to begin to grow, from which buds we're going to form our future cordons on this top wire. Other things that we need to pay attention during the first growing season, we need to start removing any flower clusters on the shoots. And this manipulation needs to be in effect for at least two years, sometimes even in the third season we're removing or thinning out part of the clusters. Also, we need to develop straight trunk to the desired wire. And this is not a good example of a straight trunk right here. But what we have here, and that's why I use this picture to show you that our cordons, you can see that we probably cut it here, and we have our left and right cordons already growing and developing the structure of the vine. So we need to allow those cordons to fill in the cherry sling during the first growing season when they exist. So we're having different systems based on the cordon high, which I already mentioned. But for the high cordon single-curtain system, like the one that is illustrated here on this slide, we are using this high cordon single-curtain to train our trailing cultivars or cultivars with drooping growth habit. You can see that all of those branches were growing downwards. And we have this characteristic growing habit for our American species and many of the French-American hybrids that were growing around. And here is the single-curtain that is being formed. This particular picture is from Mascadine Sweet Home. But it is a good representation of this single-curtain form. The second system is the spur prune bilateral cordon used for the vertical shoot positioning type of training. And this is a log cordon. You can see it's only 40 inches from the ground. This is our catch wire. And we have three additional, sorry, this is our crop wire supporting the crop right here. And three layers of catch wires. As I mentioned, this is a log cordon with catch wires, vertical shoot positioning, being used for plants with upright growing habit. And this growing habit is characteristic for most of the vitis vinifera and for some of the French-American hybrids that are grown around. And this is an illustration of vertical shoot positioning trained vitis vinifera hybrid here in Alabama. You can see that on each cordon, we were trying to form like seven spurs. And on each spur, we retained up to two buds. And we are having this or the shoots that are developing this year. And the crop or the clusters will be formed on those shoots as well. So we're here at the first dormant pruning and the second growing season now. I also mentioned a couple of times that we're establishing the trunk number one task in any vineyard. So in the case, if the canes did not reach the desired wire during the first growing season, we need to prune back to healthy wood. That is at least 3 eighths of an inch in diameter or back to two, three buds and start the process of forming the trunk all over again. The selective canes should be tied to a temporary stake to promote the straight trunk. Here is our stake and our cane that is going to become a trunk. And what are the growing season objectives? We need to train the new canes to the wire to develop the cordon. This is the next step. Any shoots developing low on the trunk should be rubbed off when they are young because it's very easy to do this when they are young. Circles arising from the ground should be removed. And any grape clusters developing on the canes should be removed at bloom time. So I don't know how well you can see, but this is a cluster that is being formed right here. And we have a second clusters, of course, at the beginning of their development that is forming right here. We need to remove them to help the vine to establish a better root system. And this will provide a better longevity of our graves. So during the second dormant season and the third growing season, we continue establishing the cordons. We need to select the best lateral shoots to form the cordon based upon the position of the shoot, the vigor, and the shoot health. We need to pull back any lateral shoots developing off the one-year-old canes to a single bud. So here is an example. This is one-year-old cane. Before pruning, and we need to cut it right here and our next crop and next shoot will develop from this bud and the crop will be formed on there. So during the growing season, if the vines is good vigor, they can be allowed to carry a partial crop, but we need to continue ripping off any shoots that are developing low on the trunk and remove any suckers developing from the ground. So now we grew our grapes for three seasons and during the next season, they're kind of becoming already well-established. And for mature vines, we're practicing this balance pruning theory. This system is being practiced to maintain a good balance between the vegetative growth and your crop every year. The amount of the previous year's cane growth, which is one-year-old canes, determines how many buds you need to retain for the current production year. That's why we measure the amount that we cut down during every dormant season. And a base number of buds to retain for the first pound of pruning wood has been established for various cultivars based on their inherent vine vigor and production characteristics. And we address that we are having different growing habits, different species with different characteristics. So all of this information has been established. So to compensate for vine vigor, additional buds are retained for each additional pound of pruning wood that is removed up to a maximum of four pounds. So those are some major principles. And based upon the weight of the one-year-old trimmings, we need to determine the number of buds that we're going to retain per vine each year. And according to the balance pruning, we need to retain 30 buds for the first pound of pruning wood that we get from a vine. And we need to retain 10 additional buds for an additional pound of pruning wood for this plant. And we can go up to retaining like four buds that equal to four pounds of pruning wood. And this number is like 60 buds per plant is the maximum number that we can retain. 30 plus 10 balance pruning is applied to moderately vigorous cultivars in general. And they could be French-American or just French or European grapes as well. And we have the other theory, 20 plus 10 balance pruning method is being applied for high vigor cultivars. And those are mainly belonging to Vitis vinifera or European grapes. So removing any extra buds is needed to obtain the desired bud number for the vigor of the vine each year. And on these images, I just wanted to highlight how the high cordon single curtain training system might look shortly after pruning, after the dormant pruning, you can see those buds that we have left along the cordon and the early shoot development has already started on this vine. And this is later in the season when all of those shoots have grown and they are reaching the ground. So high cordon single curtain training system. And the second system that I wanted to address, this is the vertical shoot positioning system with our medium low cordon and with our seven spurs on each side, on each cordon and with two buds per spur, we're looking at about 30 buds per vine for this plan. And here is during dormancy, just prior to dormant pruning. So we're having those seven spurs on each side and the two shoots that grew last season and then produced our fruit. So we're going to remove most of this and train the spur to only two buds. Okay, and I just wanted to share with you that we are currently looking and evaluating vine development on a relatively new training system that is a modification of the vertical shoot positioning system. This is called like a divided canopy vertical positioning system. And it has been developed by a grower in Texas and the name of the gentleman is Watson. So this is the Watson system that provides or facilitates a lot of operations in the vineyard and also provides for better air movement for better spray penetration and for ease in thinning our shoots, thinning our clusters when needed and harvesting the crop. And with the last slide, I just wanted to let you probably enjoy some of the crop on the Watson system. This is 94% white is vinifera pierces disease resistant grape that we got from the University of Davis, California. And this is a representation of our crop in the previous season. With that, thank you for your attention and can take any questions you may have.