How to Plant Grape Vine Video

Felix from Gurney's demonstrates how to plant grapes out in the garden, talking you through the various steps involved, including site preparation, digging the hole, sowing and watering.

Hi everyone, Felix with Gurney's here and today I'm covering basic grapes planting, and I have here a standard bare root grape, as you can see, we have a nice root system, a shank here and an area where you're going to get your bud initiation. So point one is that we have here our plant out in the field or out in our garden and I'm providing a little burlap here, a wet burlap around the roots, so those roots don't dry out. It's a little windy today and there's always time between taking it from the home back to the back yard, and you want to make sure you have it wrapped in a plastic bag or in a bucket of water or even if for a short period of time, an hour or so, you can have it in a bucket of water, absorbing that moisture before you get it in the planting hole. And so I've just dug a hole and I want you to note that we have the weeds cleared away from this area prior to actually digging the hole which is helpful. And then I've basically dug my hole deep enough so that all the roots are going to be below my soil line, which is right here, so we're going to have our roots actually below that soil line. That's the key, and I also have positioned the hole close to this bamboo that I have in place, which is what I'm going to trellis these shoots up on during the growing season. So those are the key points once you have that done, and you just want to make sure that your soil is nice and pliable like this, so it will surround those roots after we water these in. So nice good soil, as we have here. If your soil is a little weaker, you can always add some organic matter, which is extremely helpful, so you have good soil texture. This is a little wet right here, but it's breaking apart nicely. Much preferable to water, you're planting heavily after you put the soil on nice and loose and the water will suck that media around your root system. There's no real need to tamp and pack this for spring planting, better just to let the water take care of it and make sure that you get that done. If you can't water your plant in for whatever reason, then you might pack this a little bit. But it's much preferable to just water in heavily, which is the last stage here, we'll show you. Alright, the final step here is generous watering in of our new grape plantsand you'll see here you can see the soil moving down, the air pockets are dissipating. A really generous watering, in here you can see our little mound of soil has settled in and as it rains again, and this gets further watered in and you'll get some settling there. Your perfect scenario for your grape. That's all there is to it folks, planting the grape and then we'll show you here in a couple of other videos how to train your initial shoots into your vine establishment.