How to Grow Grapes In Florida
Sounds idyllic, but while figs aren’t hard to grow in Florida, it needs 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 will be in for discontent and a lot of work. Over the next several columns I will cover the fundamentals of what you will have to deal with and what you can grow, dependent on how much work you wish to put into your grapes.
The 1st gigantic obstacle to growing grapes in Florida, or any warm, damp part of the U.S, is illness.
The southeastern U.S. Is where all the major fungal illnesses of grapes originated, including black rot, downy mold, powdered mildew, anthracnose, many kinds of blights and fruit rots, and more. Those sicknesses are bad enough in the summers of northwards areas, for example New York, but in the hot, humid climate of the southeast, they start earlier, reproduce faster, and have many more months to do their work. Even so, these diseases 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 illness ( PD for short ) is a bacterial disease. Rather than attacking the exterior of the vine, the way the fungal sicknesses do, it gets into the vine where it reproduces at a rate that clogs the vascular system of the vine, making it wilt and die, sometimes inside a few days. Severely influenced vines will look as if they were hit with a blowtorch, while vines with resistance might not show any apparent symptoms. In between are such stuff as slowed growth of the vine, scorching of the leaf margins, and death of some shoots. The significant factor in PD is that, while the fungal diseases spread by themselves, PD must be spread by a carrier, usually sucking insects like leafhoppers. This gives one of the means to stop the growth of PD, by stopping the leafhoppers that carry it. Not an easy 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 such as Chardonnay and other kinds of the old world grape Vitis vinifera soon find they made a heavy mistake. Plant Vitis vinifera outdoors without plenty of bug elimination and it will be a rare vine that survives its first year. In this example, a lot can imply spray or other illness control applied as much as 3 times per week.
Yankee grapes such as Concord or other northern-bred grapes having a modicum of illness resistance may survive a little longer, but they can succumb ultimately, too, without a LOT of work controlling disease.
With these types of nasties to deal with, it may seem like growing grapes in Florida might be more work than it’s worth. But take heart, there are heaps of techniques to get grapes WITHOUT spending all your waking hours on pest control.
