Topic: Seedless white grape question

[Digeroo]

After nearly three years wait I have finally got some bunches of grapes. Nice flavour.  Bad news is they are full of pips, some with two per fruit.

Please can anyone please recommend a good tasty white seedless variety for a west wall.

[ed dibbles]

You won't go far wrong with Himrod which has large bunches of well flavoured seedless fruit. It needs to be cane pruned though.

Was the vine you have described as a seedless? Occasionally seedless varieties do make pips - not Himrod though.

If you don't want to eat them fresh you could juice them, straining out the pips, or make wine.

The skins and pips contain most of the grapes nutrition!

[Vinlander]

You won't go far wrong with Himrod which has large bunches of well flavoured seedless fruit. It needs to be cane pruned though.

I agree that Himrod is the best troublefree seedless "white" grape for the UK.

It is very early (some X labrusca genes) and gives good yields. If you don't mind a slight tartness it is edible as soon as it goes from primary colour green to pastel green, and then it goes on to get amazingly sweet - but I don't recommend leaving it to go yellow and honeyed as the berries have a habit of dropping off with 2mm of stalk attached - except the pests will have taken 90% of them by then anyway. These little bits of stalk also mean they aren't the best for drying to sultanas.

However I don't agree that cane pruning is the only way to get good yields from Himrod -  certainly in the first 10 years simple horizontal cordon pruning works extremely well and is dead simple (cf. ttp://www.lindenvineyards.com/who-we-are/articles/?articleid=16).

The simplest cordon pruning is to train to an T or inverted L shape tall enough to keep the bunches off the ground - NB. it's just possible to work it at 1m high if you tie the lowest bunches back up to the cordon. You then wait for the flowers and remove every bit of green shoot more than 2 leaves past the flowers. Flowerless shoots can be removed completely or taken back to just 1 leaf.

Job Done.

In say... August - one more round of trimming back the shoots to the original cuts will keep the vine nice and tidy.

Cheers.

[Digeroo]

Many thanks sounds good to me. Any suggestions on where to buy it. 

It is odd I am sure I chose a seedless one.  Cannot not remember where I bought it.   It was an expensive one with good graft covered in green stuff. 

I do not know about pruning it has taken three years to get some fruit, I do not feel like cutting anything off!!

[ed dibbles]

Deacons Nursery Fruits are said to have Himrod but I can never get the site to open so can't say for certain.

http://www.deaconsnurseryfruits.co.uk

Reads  have it available and in various pot sizes so you are likely to get a good sized plant translating into earlier fruit.

http://www.readsnursery.co.uk/seedless-grapevines/

Sunnybank, who have the national vine collection, offer one year old rooted cuttings as well as advice on suitable varieties for all uses.

http://www.sunnybankvines.co.uk

Grapevines must be hard pruned annually to get reliable quality crops. They will not die from being pruned.

In winter select two, or one, strong cane/s from the centre of the vine and prune everything else away. Bend the retained shoots, or shoot, to the horizontal. Each bud on the retained canes can produce two bunches of grapes so twenty or thirty buds means up to forty to sixty bunches.

Repeat annually.

Or prune to spurs although seedless grapes, because of their American ancestry, are not recommended for spur pruning.

[Digeroo]

Sunnyvines have bundles of cutting.  I really fancy grafting another onto the root I already have.   

Deacons rather suggest that Himrod is for a greenhouse.   I already had problems with frost getting the one I have got and the first leaves going yellow and then shrivelling.

Sounds like I had better prune my vine.  I did take off quite a lot of bunches of grapes and left about seven.  They have done well, and it has tripled in size this year.    I am not sure that it has more than one strong cane.  Thanks for the advise.