A Surprise Crop - Part One by Paula
I bought three grape plants from a garden centre here in the UK, a few years ago now, as they were reduced to £3 each. I was advised by the garden centre that I couldn’t grow them outside at all in our North West UK climate so, it was fortunate that I have a large greenhouse in which to house them.
They are the variety ‘Brant’ and according to the RHS they can be grown outside in sheltered areas and I have found that yes, this is true, but they simply ripen 2-4 weeks later - and the birds usually have the ones that have scrambled out of the greenhouse before I can say boo!
Vitis vinifera var. ‘Brandt’
Unfortunate broken panes of glass provide essential ventilation and rambling space for the grapes so long as all the broken pieces are removed safely of course!
The first two years I trained and pruned them diligently, and installed aluminium vine brackets and twine which they still ramble over. But after a while, I had to put them on the back boiler and neglect them for a couple of years. They went absolutely bonkers inside the greenhouse and also through every opening (including the odd ‘broken with a football’ pane of glass). I was really feeling hopeless about not keeping on top of the greenhouse as it had got so disorderly inside, the boys had kept on misfiring the football on occasion and breaking yet another pane of glass; and I was even considering getting rid of the grape plants entirely as previous years the birds had stripped the grapes, and, to us, they were too small and seedy, and useless…we thought..
“This turned out to be a good thing in the end, as even though I initially thought that I really did need to sort out the problem of not being able to access the greenhouse for anything else, the birds also couldn’t enter either!
”
The Grapes had overgrown that much they were blocking the birds from eating all the crop!
One day, my eldest (by 30mins) son asked me to help him get the lawnmower out of the greenhouse and oh were we in for a really nice surprise!!! We had never seen so many bunches of tiny purple grapes ever before ! There were too many to harvest all at once and fortunately some were still slightly red and under ripe, so we picked a large colander full of the ripest and brought them into the house ….
