Well, it is once again spring in Mississippi and the birds are chirping and the buds are blooming. I almost didn’t post anything about grapes this year as I exhaustively documented growth last year…however, I decided to plant more grapes this year and wanted to share a little about them.
The Catawba grapes did well last year in 2025 and I was able to harvest and can a good sized batch of grape jam. I don’t recall telling about how that turned out, but if I haven’t I may go do another post for that. Regardless, they did have small seeds and so I wasn’t terribly happy about just eating the grapes. I want to be able to pluck a bunch off the vine and eat them right then. NO SEEDS. yuck.
I did a little research (muy un poco) and settled on a nursery out of Georgia called Ty Ty Nursery. They had a great variety and were fairly close to me in Mississippi. They provided shipping of live plants and since it was early spring I jumped ahead and ordered some.
I settled on the Reliance Seedless Grape Vine due to it being developed for the Southeast US out of Arkansas. Simply because I don’t know better and all, I ordered two vines that came in pretty quickly. I think they took a week to ship in to me. I’ll probably do another separate post specifically about them.
I, of course, forgot to take photos of them when they first arrived, but they did a great job of packaging. Luckily I was free that afternoon and was able to immediately dig and plant the new vine. The week of waiting for them gave me time to identify the new trellis location and layout the digging spots. They are now planted and growing and I’m gathering materials to start installation of the new trellis they will grow on.
March 2026
This first photo is from March 10th as I was resting from planting and watering. The others are from March 27; just a couple of weeks later and both root stocks had buds blooming and starting new shoots.
April 2026
Here are the leafy shoots emerging on April 1.
Here’s an update from April 5th. These leaves are velvety and beautiful. These are really different from the Catawba’s which are more similar to the native Muscadines and Scuppernongs.
Update from April 17th. This is about one month in the ground and both are doing great. We’ve had a little rain, but I am also consciencely keeping water on them.
At this point I want to interject that I’ve been watching through a wonderful seminar series on Grapes on YouTube. The playlist is called Viticultural Information and has 47 videos that teach about caring for a vineyard. There is a great many training systems discussed. I have gleaned from that information that I probably should not grow these table grapes in the same manner that I had the Catawba and had originally planned for these new ones. I set the Catawba’s up using a Geneva Double Curtain trellis of two parallel wires. They aren’t really “curtaining” down like I had hoped, and it’s probably because I don’t do shoot / bud placement as well as I should in winter pruning. So they are growing along a cordon & spur system (which probably isn’t the best for Catawba either). I think I will be building and training these new Reliance Seedless to a modified Munson training system. This means they will grow up to a head region on a top wire and I will replace the primary spur canes each year after winter pruning. Each spring the new fruiting shoots will grow horizontally out away from the head region and be tied out to a set of outside wires. This should require more work for me, but should also allow the fruit to hang freely to develop prettier bunches.
Next update will probably be trellis installation.