Planting Muscadines

Muscadines are a small grape that is native to Louisiana and other Southern States. You can walk through the woods around here and see them growing wild, with vines stretching high up into the treetops.  They are tasty little grapes and folks around here use them to make jelly and wine.  Our neighbors to the east of us generally let us pick grapes off of their vines and we also pick grape leaves to make grape leaf rolls.

We wanted to get our own vines growing and Russ brought home a Muscadine vine from the Nursery that we works at during the summer.  I located a good place in the yard to start our little vineyard and planted it, adding some composted chicken litter to get it growing.  I was researching different trellises to see how I might build one for the vines to grow on, but in the end I opted for an inexpensive route.  Using an 8 foot section of a hog panel, I wired it between two T-posts for the vines to grow on.

In no time flat the vines took off, adding new vines, leaves and as you can see below, baby grapes.

Little Muscadines

It is hard to get perspective on the size of the grapes in the photo.  They are really small right now-about twice the size of the head of a pin, so there's lots of growing left to do, but they have a good head start.

Healthy muscadine plants

We'll check back in on the muscadine vine from time to time and we'll show the harvest and how we make a product called New Wine, that we learned from reading the Maker's Diet by Jordan Rubin.  It doesn't look like much, but it tastes great.  I don't know if we'll get enough grapes this year to make it, but we'll give it a try.