Rough Pruning

We finished rough pruning in the vineyard a few weeks ago now. In parts of the vineyard, we do rough pruning and come back and do finish pruning later, but some parts we just do the final pruning and skip the middle step. Rough pruning is where we cut the shoots of the vine back down to about 12-15″ above the cordon so that we can pull the long shoots outs without damaging the buds that we leave for the next year’s growth. In some parts, we will just do all of it at one time in case we need to make decisions for new plants or plants that we need newer shoots to lay down for the cordon. We use a Stihl Trimmers with a hedger attachment. This allows us to walk the vineyard and rough prune without having to take pruners and do this by hand. It speeds the process up, but doesn’t allow for plant/shoot-specific decisions, which is why we do some pruning differently depending on the variety and where that plant is in its life cycle.