Picking a few Muscadines

Walking around the yard yesterday afternoon, I first watered the pumpkins and cow peas and then watered the muscadine vine that I have growing on a trellis made from a hog panel supported by two T-posts.  Over the course of the year, it has put on lots of new growth.  Once the fall gets here and the vine goes into dormancy, I'll have to read up on how to prune a muscadine vine and try my hand at pruning.

Muscadines are native to the Southeast portion of the United States.  We have lots that grow wild in the woods and provide food to birds and other animals.  We planted this one here in the side yard and it is happy in its location and seems to be growing nicely.

Muscadine Vine

It is putting on a fair amount of fruit this year, considerably more than last year, but still not what I would consider quantities that would enable us to make jelly, grape juice or new wine.  Next year will be the year that we get the bumper crop of muscadines.

There are many different cultivars of muscadines.  We actually bought this one at a local nursery, and unfortunately, I don't know the name of this one.  If you look below you can see some of the fruit that it is putting on.  I notice that the birds may have shared a little in our crop this year, but only an immaterial amount.  Next year I'll likely put up something to scare off the birds, or I may get Benjamin to position himself nearby with a .12 gauge shotgun to thin out some of the feathered thieves.

Some muscadines turn a bronze color when ripened, while some turn a reddish-purple color, and some stay green.  This particular variety turns a reddish color. The fruit ripens at different times, so each day we walk out and pick those that are ripe off the trellis.  Muscadines are VERY sweet.  The skin is tougher than normal grapes and they have three or four seeds in each grape.

I like to pick them and eat them right off the vine by piercing the tough skin with my teeth and letting the warm muscadine juice fill my mouth, spitting out the seeds and then chewing up the skin and flesh of the wild grape.  Sweet.  Delicious.

Some are ready to pick.  Some need to ripen in the sun for a few more days

We pick a bowl each day and put in the fridge and snack on them.  It is a good, healthy snack and everyone at our house enjoys eating them.

It won't take long for the bowls of muscadines to disappear, but next year, if the Good Lord's willing, after pruning and fertilizing, we'll have a nice quantity harvested so that we can put up some muscadine jelly and possibly make some new wine like we showed you in THIS POST, only with our own grapes!