Two years ago, we noticed that one block of Edelweiss had trunks that didn’t look very good. We had a lot of bull canes (vigorous, wild, fruitless canes) and vines were missing a left or right top arm in many cases. We decided to cut the vines off at the ground and let new suckers grow and become new trunks. This takes these 600 vines out of production for a year or two but it allows us to grow new trunks and then two new arms for each vine. Hopefully, it will also reduce the number of bull canes that suck energy from the vines without giving us any fruit, and it will dramatically increase production from these vines. We are now training up the trunks and removing excess canes and suckers.
We are spraying fungicide on mornings when there is no wind, continuing our mowing, replacing broken posts, and continuing to make sure that trellis wires are tight.
