Grapevine Cane and Spur Pruning Fundamentals

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- Grapevine pruning is a perennial management practice that retains select one year old grapevine wood to produce next season's crop.

Green shoots become woody in the dormant season and will contain buds that produce fruitful shoots in the next season.

Woody canes were green shoots in the previous growing season and will be roughly one year old when the growing season starts again.

The retained parts of these canes contain buds that will produce shoots that bear clusters.

One year old grapevine wood is light tan or cinnamon colored and can be contrasted from older wood that often has darker brown colored bark.

Grapevine pruning methods generally fall into two categories, spur pruning and cane pruning.

Spurs and canes refer to the portions of one year old wood that is retained when pruning.

Spurs are shorter and contain fewer buds than canes.

However, both spurs and canes contain buds that can produce shoots that contain grape clusters.

Spur pruning is generally associated with pruning and retaining two to four buds on one year old wood that originates across the length of the fruiting cordon.

This pruning method gets its name from the appearance resembling short spurs when finished.

Here, two count buds remain on this spur.

Spur pruning is usually implemented with cordon training.

A cordon is a horizontal extension of the trunk that is two years or older and runs along the fruiting wire.

Spurs originate along the length of the cordon.

With cane pruning, several buds are retained on one year old wood.

Canes are longer and contain more buds than a spur.

Typically several buds are retained per cane when cane pruning.

Cane pruning is usually implemented with head training which means that canes originate from just below where the vertical trunk meets the fruiting wire.

Tying grapevine wood to the fruiting wire is less frequently needed when spur pruning and cordon training.

However, with cane pruning, tying is a perennial practice as canes need fastened to the wire that will support the developing canopy and crop during the growing season.

Let's watch some footage of these different pruning methods in action.

Spur pruning may be thought of as repeatedly making a very similar pruning cut.

The majority of the wood that is cut out and discarded are the upper sections of canes which were green shoots in the previous growing season.

With spur pruning, only the bottom few buds on the one year old wood is retained.

It is important to retain spurs that are in line with the intended training system.

For example, in this case, the retained spurs should be vertical.

They should exist between the first set of catch wires to aid in shoot positioning.

Optimal spur position will be different and divided in high wire training systems.

For example, spurs are longer and are oriented in various directions in this high wire trained chancellor venue.

Regardless of training system, it is important to retain spurs that originate close to the fruiting wire or cordon as you see here.

Sometimes retaining a higher spur position is necessary to fill in missing production areas along the cordon.

Fewer cuts are made per vine with cane pruning when compared to spur pruning.

However, making one wrong cut can have consequences as an entire fruiting wire may be devoid of crop production if the wrong cane is removed.

With cane pruning, the entire section of wood that was tied down in the previous dormant season is removed from the fruiting wire.

This wood, trimmed and pulled out from the fruiting wire, is now almost two years old.

Several of the one year old canes that grew from that one year old wood are removed as well.

However, one or more one year old canes are retained in the head region of the vine.

Ideally these canes originate several inches below the fruiting wire and are positioned in a way that make the canes easy to train and tie to the fruiting wire in the intended direction.

Take note of the renewal spurs that are retained in the head region to ensure that shoots will grow and be trained from the ideal position in the next dormant season.

There are times when spur or cane pruning result in areas with missing production.

In these cases, cane or cordon renewal as by cane pruning provides the opportunity to increase production along the trellis.

Mechanical pre-pruning is often used to decrease the amount of manual labor needed to finish the most time-consuming task of dormant grapevine pruning which is pulling brush from the trellis.

For more information on dormant grapevine pruning considerations including bud density targets, pros and cons of pruning methods, pruning tool choices as well as cultivar specific considerations, visit the Penn State Extension website and search for grapevine pruning.

You can also email viticulture@psu.edu or psuwineandgrapes@psu.edu.

Thanks for watching and happy pruning.