Grape Vines and Checklists

'Reliance' before pruning

Saturday, Leap Day 2020, was moderately windy, but otherwise a marvelous day on the prairie, February fleeing into the past with sunshine licking at its heels.  Another warm Saturday for Bella and I is now behind us and the aching to get outside ProfessorRoush got good and achy.  My garden muscles need a little bit of training yet this season.

I had some errands to run in the morning, so it was nearly 1:30 p.m. yesterday when I ventured outside.  I immediately realized that cleaning the front bed was not going to be feasible in the high winds, so I turned to other spring chores.  First and foremost was washing out the garage floor to remove the tons of mud carried in from the gravel road this winter on the cars.  There were actual dry mud piles stuck to the garage floor at each tire, and I removed a full three gallon bucket of soil from the floor before I turned the hose on the floor to wash out the rest.  I had it all done before Mrs. ProfessorRoush arrived home from her own errands, and nearly 18 hours later my loving spouse has yet to notice or acknowledge the improvement.  Next time I just wash the side where my car sits!

'Reliance' after pruning

I had been eyeing the asparagus patch for several weeks, knowing that I need to remove the dead growth, and that is where I turned next, readying the patch for those first green sprouts.  Next, I decided to check pruning the grapes off of my springtime bucket list, since pruned twigs won't blow into my eyes in the wind.  You can see the "before and after" shots here, this old massive 'Reliance' grapevine visibly relieved from several years of unpruned growth. 'Reliance' is our favorite grape around here and this vine produces well, at least during years I pay proper attention to it, 

One of ProfessorRoush's many failings is that once I rouse my slothful soul to start a project, I really hate to stop before I'm done, so I didn't prune the 'Reliance' and call it a day, I pruned ALL the grapes.  We have about 8 living vines, and you can see another line of vines I attacked with pruneers in the final picture, now readied for the rapid growth of early summer.  In my renewed determination to garden right or give up, I promise to make sure that this year they get sprayed at the proper times to prevent mildew and other fungus.  But that will be much later on in the year and today beckons right now, predicted to be warm, sunny and windless.  Garage, check. asparagus bed, check. Grapes, check.  Maybe I'll get another crack today at finally cleaning those front beds. 

Forsythia UnCut

As a general rule, I prefer to allow my shrubs to grow according to their own natural manner.  Stated in another way, ProfessorRoush is quite derelict in his efforts to force unruly shrubs to grow in unnatural and restrained fashions.  Or, even more simply put, I detest topiary in any form and I really hate to prune shrubs. 

The result from these efforts, of course, is an informal, devil-may-care feeling for much of my garden, but occasionally even the best-behaved child needs a haircut lest the grandmother (or in the case of shrubs, Mrs. ProfessorRoush), think we are bad parents. 



Take the 'New Hampshire Gold' forsythia pictured above both pre- and post-bloom.  It had a very nice, prolific bloom this spring, but, as forsythia are prone to, once the flowers are gone, I've got an airy, messy green blob squatting on my landscape.  This year, one of my planned spring garden chores was to prune the forsythia, and along the way remove the many suckers threatening to spread the bush on into Nebraska.

So, I'll ask you to make the call.  Pre-pruning is on the right,  post-pruning from the same angle on the left below.  Did I do a good thing this spring, or did I capitulate to group-think and ruin the natural lines of the plant?  Should I have gone further and made a box turtle or an elephant out of the unshaped mass?  Mrs. ProfessorRoush has already weighed in and is definitely on the "haircut" side, but then, she always wants my garden to be neater than I'm prone to keep it.

Most important to ProfessorRoush, of course, will be the effect my pruning has for the next bloom of this shrub.  I'm hoping that the experts are right and the shrub fills in and has more bloom and is more compact.  Time, as always in a garden, will tell.