How to Grow Grapes In Florida
Sounds idyllic, but while figs aren’t hard to grow in Florida, it takes a bit more planning and work to grow grapes in a Florida-type climate. It CAN be done, though you’d better do your homework before you plant or you’ll be in for discontent and lots of work. Over the following many columns I’ll cover the fundamentals of what you will have to address and what you can grow, dependent on how much work you wish to put into your grapes.
The first huge hindrance to growing grapes in Florida, or any warm, humid part of the U.S, is disease.
The southeastern U.S. Is where all the major fungal sicknesses of grapes originated, including black rot, downy mildew, powdery mildew, anthracnose, many sorts of blights and fruit rots, and more. Those sicknesses are bad enough in the summers of northwards areas, such as Long Island, but in the hot, damp climate of the southeast, they start earlier, reproduce faster, and have plenty more months to do their work. Even so, these illnesses only stunt and damage vines and destroy the crop, and then only if untreated. Much more serious is the bacterial pest Pierce’s illness, which can kill vines altogether.
Pierce’s disease ( PD for short ) is a bacterial disease. Rather than attacking the outside of the vine, the way the fungal illnesses do, it is getting into the vine where it reproduces at a rate that clogs the vascular system of the vine, making it shrivel and die, sometimes within a few days. Severely affected vines will look as if they were hit with a blowtorch, while vines with resistance may not show any obvious symptoms. between are such things as slowed growth of the vine, scorching of the leaf margins, and death of some shoots. The important factor in PD is that, while the fungal sicknesses spread by themselves, PD needs to be spread by a carrier, sometimes sucking insects like leafhoppers. This gives one of the means to stop the growth of PD, by stopping the leafhoppers that carry it. Not a straightforward task in a climate where the leafhoppers can have three or more generations a season, each larger than the last.
These pests are the main reason that thoughtless home growers who buy vines of table grape varieties like Flame Seedless or wine grapes like Chardonnay and other types of the old world grape Vitis vinifera soon find they made a serious mistake. Plant Vitis vinifera out of doors without a lot of bug elimination and it’s going to be a rare vine that survives its first year. In this case, a lot can imply spray or other disease control applied as much as three times each week.
Yank grapes like Concord or other northern-bred grapes possessing a modicum of illness resistance may survive a little longer, but they will succumb finally, too, without a large amount of work controlling illness.
With these kinds of nasties to deal with, it may seem like growing grapes in Florida may be more work than it’s worth. But take heart, there are heaps of techniques to get grapes WITHOUT spending all of your waking hours on pest management.
