The Man Who Loved Grapes
Organic Viticulturist Shares His Secrets
Interview: Lon Rombough
June 2004, Acres U.S.A.

   Lon Rombough is a self-taught student of grapes and a graduate of Oregon State. He has a master’s degree from the University of California, Davis. His self-taught degree was earned in the field starting at age 13, when he grew his first grapes. As a graduate, he found employment in grape growing, but this occupation was less rewarding than that of his wife, a teacher. It was then that Lon Rombough got serious about what he had learned in school. If anything, what his father, a naturopath, had taught him trumped parts of his formal horticultural schooling. Breeding grapes became an avocation, then a profession.
   “When I left school, the only jobs I could get in genetics were in places where I didn’t want to live,” Rombough told Acres U.S.A. He stayed put in Aurora, Oregon. There he started developing the first of approximately 200 varieties of grapes.
   He is now coordinator of Fruit and Nut Interest Groups, which consists of members who specialize, absorb new information, and pass it on. As coordinator, Rombough is in contact with growers in all states and many foreign countries. His book, The Grape Grower, recently won the 2003 award for “Best Talent in Writing” from the Garden Writer’s Association.
   “There was a man named George Mitsch who lived across town. He was growing and selling grapes. He had the biggest collection around. He passed away in 1963, the same year I planted my first grapes. . . .”
   Our interview with Lon Rombough picks up there.

ACRES U.S.A. There seems to be a wine industry and some level of grape industry in every state in the Union. What is the common denominator for growing grapes?

LON ROMBOUGH. I think it’s picking the right grape for the right site, and it also depends on how much effort the particular grower wants to put into them. For example, you can grow relatively cold, tender grapes up in Minnesota if you’re willing to bury them in the winter to keep them from freezing down, or you could grow varieties that are very cold-hardy and not have to do that. You can grow grapes in high-disease areas if you’re willing to spend a lot of time with disease control, or you can plant varieties that have high disease resistance and thus do a lot less disease control, maybe none, depending on the situation.

ACRES U.S.A. How much is disease resistance dependent upon the quality of the soil?

ROMBOUGH. In some cases it’s genetic, because you can find wild species that grow with absolutely no care — they won’t have any disease on them even though the disease is rampant in domestic grapes in the area. But soil is definitely an important factor. If you plant grapes in low, wet soil, you’re asking for more problems than if you plant them in good, well-drained soil — and of course soil includes all the soil microflora and so forth. If you give the vines really good care, with mycorrhizal fungi, compost and organic matter in the soil, you’re going to make a big difference. It’s all important — not just the kind of soil, but how you handle it, as well.

ACRES U.S.A. But it is a crop that requires the mycorrhizae?

ROMBOUGH. Well, it’ll get something of its own no matter what — people have been growing grapes for a long time without using mycorrhizal fungi, but I’m finding that improving the soil for grapes makes a big difference, no matter what.

ACRES U.S.A. How would you find out what grape varieties work best for the area in which you live?

ROMBOUGH. There are many factors involved. One is what you want to grow it for. For example, down in the Deep South, if you want to grow stuff that’s completely disease free or at least is unlikely to need much work, the first thing you’d probably look at would be something like muscadine grapes, which are native to the area. But they aren’t particularly high-quality wine grapes, at least by regular standards, although I’ve had some very pleasant sweet wines from them. The point is that the first thing to look at is where you are, whether you’ve got a lot of high disease pressure or whether you can grow a variety that might be considered relatively susceptible. You have to start putting a lot of factors together in order to know the right variety for your area. Another thing, of course, is that if you’re growing commercially, you have to be aware of who’s going to buy the grapes. Sometimes you’re kind of hemmed into what you can grow by what you’re going to be able to sell. I know varieties that can be grown in a lot of areas that make exceptionally nice wines; they’re healthy; they’re cold-hearty; they’re disease resistant, but the quality of the fruit for commercial wine-making isn’t that great. So what’s the point of planting them if you can’t sell them?

ACRES U.S.A. You have written a book called The Grape Grower. How much of this do you cover in your book?

ROMBOUGH. I try to cover all of it, actually. I wrote the book because I had never seen one that puts together all of the hands-on information. There are books like General Viticulture that have a lot of good theory in them, that have a lot of information, but there’s always a lot of stuff that doesn’t get into a book like that. That’s a textbook, and it covers more of the theory than the actual hands-on practice. There are quite a few other books like that, written with a lot of theory but not much hands-on stuff, or if they do have hands-on, they’re written for one restricted area. For instance, in many states you can find universities that have put out bulletins on growing grapes, but that’s only for one area, and it doesn’t take in a lot of the possibilities. So I was attempting to put together a book that had as much about hands-on grape growing as I could put together. Additionally, while it does cover wine grapes, my aim was to put an emphasis on table grapes, because nobody has written much of anything about table grapes in a very long time. The last book I could find that covered table grapes in the same way my book covers them was written about 1926. So I figured that after nearly 80 years, it was about time for a new one!

ACRES U.S.A. Where does an aspiring grape grower start?

ROMBOUGH. The first thing you have to do is pick your site. If you pick a bad site, you’re going to be fighting problems forever after. As I mention in the book, there was a fellow in one of the New England states who had two different areas: a low, comparatively poorly drained area — not necessarily wet soil, but it had poor air drainage — and he had a higher slope. He planted Concord grapes in both areas. With the one up on the slope that had good air drainage and good air circulation and so forth — that didn’t have heavy, wet air sitting around the vines all the time — he could usually go without much disease control a lot of years. But with the ones down in the low area, where wet, heavy air tended to accumulate, he oftentimes had to deal with disease control many times each season — he was using spray — especially in bad years. He didn’t have very many years in which he didn’t have to deal with disease on those vines because the site was a bad one.

ACRES U.S.A. So the rule of the orchard seems to apply here as well — don’t get wet feet.

ROMBOUGH. Don’t get wet feet, have good air drainage — in other words, if you can put them someplace where they have good air circulation but aren’t going to get blown out of the ground, that’s exceptionally good. I’ve got two different vineyards on my place. I have one bunch that I planted early on, running north and south, and one bunch that runs east and west. Well, the prevailing wind is from the west here, or the southwest, so the vines that run east and west, if they get rained on, the wind goes right down the rows, and it tends to dry them off pretty quickly. On the other rows, where it’s against the wind, they don’t dry off as much, and I have a few varieties, for example, that are susceptible to cracking if they get rained on much. I get a lot less cracking and subsequent bunch rot in the rows that run east to west than in the ones that run north to south, and I have some of the same varieties in each.

ACRES U.S.A. What kind of varieties do you have?

ROMBOUGH. As I say, my preference is table grapes, but I probably have about 200 varieties in my collection. I started collecting grapes when I got through with school because I couldn’t find a job in grape breeding anyplace where I wanted to live, so I decided to start collecting varieties and doing it on my own, right where I live. I collected as many different things as I thought would work well for a grape-breeding program, and as it turned out, the climate here is a little too good, there isn’t enough harsh cold or severe disease to really select the grapes, because that’s one of the things you want to do when you’re breeding — grow them in an area where nature selects out the weaklings. As a result, I didn’t really have a situation where I was in the best site for doing breeding myself. However, people started contacting me looking for unusual grapes that they couldn’t find in other places, since I’d collected a lot of odd things, and I began to sell the grape cuttings. As far as the breeding, I didn’t have to quit that, it’s just that I don’t grow the plants out myself anymore. I’ll make crosses and send the seed to other people in other parts of the country, and then they plant them and grow them out in their conditions and pick out the strong ones.

ACRES U.S.A. Do they grow them from seed or from cuttings?

ROMBOUGH. When you’re breeding new varieties, you grow from seed. Every seedling is like a different child of a parent — they’ll all be different. You might take, for instance, one variety that has susceptibility to downy mildew but good resistance to black rot, then cross it with something that may not be real strong in black rot resistance, but has good resistance to downy mildew and other diseases that the first one has a problem with. Then you hope that some of the offspring will combine the best fruit quality and have the resistance inherited from both parents, without the weaknesses.

ACRES U.S.A. So they take the seed and plant them in little pots to get them to sprout out? How is it done, exactly?

ROMBOUGH. The basic process is quite simple. You take the seed out of the grape and clean it, which is described in my book, but you can do it as simply as eating the grape and spitting the seeds out, if you want to, and put them in something like moist peat moss and then put them in the refrigerator to stratify, that is, out in the wild the seed would be exposed to cold, moist conditions, and that’s what helps it break dormancy, so that in the spring, it will be able to germinate and start to grow. You’re just doing the same thing, except that by putting them in the refrigerator they’re less likely to get eaten by mice or other creatures. Then you plant them in the spring, usually in flats or pots, and they won’t all grow, and there’s a lot of variation in how they grow, but the point is that you get these seedlings and plant them out in a nursery row, just putting them out in your garden if you want to. They only have to be about 6 inches apart.

ACRES U.S.A. You could do it in a greenhouse, too.

ROMBOUGH. You can start them in a greenhouse, yeah, but once the seedlings are up to about six leaves or so you want to put them outdoors. Then the selection process starts, because right away you’ll see seedlings that have disease on them, and you’ll see some that have poor growth, maybe they’re runts or stunted or something, and you begin to weed them out.

ACRES U.S.A. So you do it like the old corn grower — you pick the best and replant that.

ROMBOUGH. Right. In other words, after that first season, you’ve probably already weeded out a third to half of them, and then you take them out and plant them in an actual test row. You still don’t need a lot of room because you can plant them as close as 2 feet apart. Then you grow them up for a period — it varies on the grape, I’ve seen them come into bearing a year after the seedlings were planted out and trained up, and I’ve seen some of them take seven or eight years to come into bearing.

ACRES U.S.A. So if you’re a newfound farmer, let’s say you’ve been downsized out of work as a computer operator, and you want to grow grapes, you really wouldn’t want to start from seed, you’d want some cuttings, wouldn’t you?

ROMBOUGH. Right. Cuttings are the way you reproduce a variety true to the parent. The seedlings are the way you find new varieties, and that has advantages if you have the time and the place to work with them because it may give you a means to develop a variety that’s just exactly suited to your conditions. So, that method has its place, but if you want to put in a commercial vineyard right away, yes, you should start from cuttings.

ACRES U.S.A. Let’s take it from there. Let’s say someone is planting cuttings — somebody has contacted you, and since you have these 200 varieties, you probably could supply somebody with a variety that would be suitable for their general vicinity — what’s the next thing?

ROMBOUGH. Well, first you have to prepare your land, and that means going through and remove things like perennial weeds, you don’t want tree seedlings in the vineyard, you don’t want things like, as in our case here in Oregon, we have this introduced Himalayan blackberry, which is a horrendous pest, and you’ve got to get all of that stuff out of the land first. If you can prepare it in such a way that you need a minimal amount of cultivation, then you’ll keep your soil life and soil structure intact, but in most cases you’re going to have to do some cultivating, if nothing else to help level the land a little bit and break up the rough spots or whatever — it depends on the situation. There are places out here where you’d have to go through and pull stumps first. The point is that you get the land ready in advance. You can plant rooted plants, or you can plant cuttings. I don’t recommend that people plant cuttings directly in the vineyard. They should be prepared first.

ACRES U.S.A. Do you make available cuttings or rooted plants?

ROMBOUGH. I only have cuttings. I tried rooted plants at one time, but I wasn’t able to keep up with the demand for some things and the lack of demand for others. With that many varieties, it just doesn’t work.

ACRES U.S.A. So the cuttings — how should they be prepared for planting?

ROMBOUGH. To start a cutting is a simple matter of giving them the conditions they need to form roots. In most cases all you have to do is keep them warm and reasonably moist. It doesn’t have to be in a dark place — there are various ways to do it. For a very small number of cuttings, I’ve had people put them on the back of the refrigerator, because the heat comes up from the back of the condenser and helps keep them warm that way, you just put them in a plastic bag with some moist paper or something.

ACRES U.S.A. You don’t use the old classroom demonstration method of putting a sweet potato in water, do you?

ROMBOUGH. Well, I’ve seen some people root cuttings in water, but for the average person it’s not very good because they have a tendency to rot if they just sit in water. It’s better to get them to form some root callus, just a little white tissue around the cut area.

ACRES U.S.A. So if you wrapped the cutting in toweling or something like that and kept it damp.

ROMBOUGH. And keep it at least 80 degrees Fahrenheit.

ACRES U.S.A. Would it help to put a little seaweed extract or something on the toweling?

ROMBOUGH. You could try it. I have found, though, that that sort of thing doesn’t make a lot of difference until the roots are actually out. I’ve used mycorrhizal fungi, and in some varieties that will actually help speed the rooting a little bit, while in others it doesn’t seem to do a thing. Most of the time I get my best results after the roots have actually started. Once the roots are there, then they can take up all these different things and it will make much more of a dramatic impact on the plant.

ACRES U.S.A. Putting that plant out into the field now — what kind of spacing do you recommend?

ROMBOUGH. The spacing is variable according to what kind of growing conditions you have and how you’re going to do it, but an average spacing can be 8 by 8 or 8 by 10, in other words, the vines 8 feet apart in the row, and the rows maybe 8 or 10 feet apart. The differences come with things like, for example, wine grapes in northern conditions, where they may plant them quite a bit closer, maybe as close as 2 feet, and then train them vertically, that is to say, train them almost to what’s called a “vertical curtain.” The Germans do this quite a bit in order to take advantage of catching as much sunlight as they can in their northern climate. So there are a lot of different ways to do it. With table grapes, for example, you want to spread them out a little bit so that they’re supported and so that the weight of the fruit doesn’t pull the canes out of alignment.

ACRES U.S.A. Are these rows to be in line with the sweep of the sun?

ROMBOUGH. As I mentioned earlier, the best way to do it is to line them up parallel to the prevailing wind. That’s because if you have rain on them or heavy dew or things like that, the vines will dry off much faster, and fungal diseases will be less likely to get started. Also, if you have them parallel to the prevailing wind, it reduces the likelihood of shoot breakage, if you’ve got a particularly windy area or if you don’t have a good windbreak around.

ACRES U.S.A. What kind of support system do you like best?

ROMBOUGH. Again, that’s something that’s almost as individual as each grower. I use a basic system of two wires. The wires are horizontal, with one above the other. There are variations on that such as a cross-arm on the trellis, which provides some extra wires to support the shoots. You can grow grapes in almost as many configurations as there are grapes in the world. I’ve seen them trained up the sides of buildings, they grow well on arbors, and you can put them on almost any form that gives them proper spacing between the fruit and supports the shoots. That’s practically all you need, as long as you’re pruning them correctly, and by that I mean regulating the shape of the vine and preventing overcropping.

ACRES U.S.A. We realize that pruning is an art, but why don’t you describe that art as best you can?

ROMBOUGH. Grapes are quite flexible. Basically, with grapes it’s a matter of removing as much as 95 to 98 percent of the previous season’s growth — the reason being that all that new growth, every bud on that new growth has the potential of having fruit in it. If you cut a bud open and dissect it, you can actually find the little undeveloped clusters in it. If you left all of those shoots, you’d have much more fruit than the vine could carry, and the quality of the fruit would be lousy because the vine wouldn’t be able to produce enough food for it, and at the same time it would be so overloaded that it wouldn’t produce enough food to harden off its own new growth well. It would be susceptible to cold damage and so forth. So pruning is partly a matter of keeping the vine where you want it, because otherwise it can just keep on growing and expanding, and partly a matter of regulating the crop so that you have the same amount of crop or at least approximately the same from year to year, which keeps the quality up as good as it can be.

ACRES U.S.A. So you trim back to where it was the previous year — kind of a ruthless pruning, wouldn’t you say?

ROMBOUGH. A little bit — there are two main systems for pruning grapes. One is spurs, in which you have a permanent trunk and maybe arms off the trunk, and that is where all of the shoots come — they’re spurs, just like it sounds, like little short extensions. They can have from one to four buds on them, and each one will grow a shoot. At the end of the season, or the next year, when you go to prune, you remove most of those, and usually you will pick one of those shoots that’s in the right place on the spur and cut it back, and it becomes the new spur. With canes, the only difference is that instead of having a lot of spurs, you have only three to five spurs near the trunk of the vine, and instead of leaving just a short spur you leave a long cane, the shoot that grew the season before, because that’s the one that’s fruitful. I put that in the book in pictures to make it a little clearer. But those are the two basic differences in pruning — you prune some vines to spurs and some to canes, according to what suits them best. There’s a lot of variation in varieties without listing them one by one, but the Eastern U.S. Concord, for example, is usually trained to canes. They usually leave four canes on the vine, and each cane has about 10 to 15 buds on it. That’s a lot of fruit if you stop and think about it, because each bud can produce at least two clusters, so we’re talking about 60 buds on that vine, with each of them producing two clusters, you’re getting maybe 120 clusters of fruit from a good mature vine. That’s a lot of fruit! That can be anywhere, depending on the variety, from 20 to sometimes 40 or more pounds per vine. I’ll let you do the math as to how much per acre that comes to!

ACRES U.S.A. Do you do any grafting?

ROMBOUGH. Not very often because I don’t need to here, but grafting has value for many of reasons. For example, many varieties have susceptibility to certain root pests like phylloxera, an aphid-like insect, and the standard method of dealing with that is to use a root stock that has resistance to phylloxera and graft onto that. Sometimes you use root stocks for other things — for instance, there are areas where the soil may be quite alkaline, and the variety itself wouldn’t do well on its own roots, but if you graft it onto a root stock that has the ability to tolerate the alkaline soil, then you’ve got a vine that will take the conditions without having to drive yourself crazy for years correcting the soil. Of course, you can improve the soil as you go along, but I’m saying this is the way to deal with it on a major level while you’re fine-tuning it down the way. Root stock can also increase the hardiness of a variety. There are a lot of root stocks — or a fair number, anyway — that have the ability to make a variety harden off a little faster and a little earlier in such a way that it probably ripens earlier, and it will also be more cold-hardy. You can add as much as 10 degrees of cold-hardiness on a variety with the right root stock. That can make quite a bit of difference in a marginal area. There’s a lot of value to root stocks, and they haven’t really been fully explored.

ACRES U.S.A. Are root stocks commercially available?

ROMBOUGH. Oh yes, they’re sold commercially in many areas, although most root stocks are used by commercial growers. If you go to buy a vine for home use, chances are your average garden center or nursery is going to be selling vines that are on their own roots, partly because it’s expensive to graft — it takes extra time and labor, and you don’t get 100 percent success with any given batch — and partly because we have enough varieties that do well on their own roots that, for the average home grower, if they look around a little bit, they can find something that will do alright without them having to graft it.

ACRES U.S.A. And there’s a time factor, isn’t there?

ROMBOUGH. Yes, there can be a time factor, but not necessarily, because if you’re buying them pre-graft, then the nursery has done all the work. You can do it yourself, for that matter — it doesn’t necessarily have to take more time if you do it right, but it will take more labor and a little more care, at least at first — once the vine’s grafted and established it’s not a problem.

ACRES U.S.A. In terms of common denominator, what is your approach to fertility?

ROMBOUGH. In my particular spot, I’m fortunate because we have some exceptionally nice soil here, without rocks and good characteristics all the way around. But in general, the things I would tell a new grower to do: first of all is not to cultivate, in other words, don’t keep breaking up the soil because you’re going to keep disturbing the soil structure and the soil life that you’re trying to establish. I think one of the best examples of the overall system I would espouse is being done by a grower in this area. First of all, he mulches under the rows, that is, right under the vines themselves, he mulches with wood chips — I don’t mean the average stuff, he gets the chipped-up material from tree trimmers.

ACRES U.S.A. From indigenous trees — he doesn’t buy cedar from outside his environment?

ROMBOUGH. No, the people who trim trees in the area prune them and chip up the stuff they’ve pruned — he gets that material.

ACRES U.S.A. That’s what he mulches underneath the vines.

ROMBOUGH. Right. Now the advantage of that, first of all, is that when you get that material there’s enough twigs and small material that has nitrogen in it, you don’t really have to add nitrogen. The other is that the majority of the chips are large enough that they don’t break down rapidly, they break down slowly enough so that it doesn’t take anything out of the soil to do it — it feeds the soil life instead, it feeds the fungi and everything else as it breaks down. If a little extra fertility is needed, one of the things I like to use that works well for a lot of people is fish pellets — and we’re lucky in that we’ve got a good producer of them here in Oregon, there’s a place on the coast called Bio-Oregon — they have a website at <www.bio-oregon.com>.

ACRES U.S.A. There are a lot of very good products on the market that would give an assist in that direction.

ROMBOUGH. There are — I mention that one because I’m very fond of their fish pellets and the fact that they don’t go harvesting the wild stuff. They get all their material from processors of farmed fish, so they’re depleting things a little less that way. But anyway, I like fish because it has enough nitrogen to help the vines along and it’s balanced, it’s got all the other trace minerals and things with it. At the same time, it doesn’t give them too much of a jolt, so to speak, because you can give a grape vine too much nitrogen. If you overfeed them, then they won’t set. The mulch, the fish, and avoiding anything other than perhaps mowing the vineyard. This fellow I mentioned — he is actually getting his vineyard developed to the point where he expects to be able to take care of it without ever having anything more in the vineyard than perhaps a vehicle to carry out the fruit. He’s hoping to get it to where he won’t even have to use a mower any more. The way he’s doing that is to have his vines trained up high, and then he’s introducing short-legged sheep to go in and keep the grass eaten down. Their manure is not only good fertilizer — and it wouldn’t be applied at a level that would overload the vines — but it also happens to have very high potassium content, and here in Oregon potassium tends to be a little low because the rain leaches it out of the soil. So he’s worked out a system that looks pretty good. How well does it work? Well, usually you figure that a vine will have reached its maximum production by the seventh year. He has been keeping records on his vines, and finds that even in the eleventh year he was still getting a small but measurable increase every year in production. So he’s actually continuing to build the production of his vines by this method. In the winter his land is almost like walking on a sponge, it’s so springy because the soil structure has never been disturbed, and he’s feeding the soil life and taking care of it the way it should be.

ACRES U.S.A. So we’re really talking about a no-till approach, aren’t we?

ROMBOUGH. Essentially that’s what he’s working towards, yeah. It doesn’t work the same for every system because there are some cases where you’re going to have to do some tilling. For instance in the East, there are a number of insect pests that will require you to do some tilling because a lot of them will over-winter in the soil within a few inches of the surface, and if you go through at the right time and till, you can destroy all of them.

ACRES U.S.A. Freeze them out.

ROMBOUGH. Well, not freeze them out, but just kill them by rototilling or churning them up. In most cases you don’t have to till real deep, it’s just a matter of a few inches to do the job. It’s something you have to tailor to each situation according to what you have to deal with.

ACRES U.S.A. What about the phosphate connection?

ROMBOUGH. Phosphorus is not a problem here, and one of the reasons I encourage people to use mycorrhizal fungi is because several years ago I went and saw the work of Dr. Robert Linderman with the USDA and who works at Oregon State University, and then I got to know Dr. Elaine Ingham. In both cases, one of the things I found out was that plants that have good mycorrhizal fungi don’t have a problem with phosphorus. The fungi makes the stuff available to them even in low-phosphorus situations. They’ve found that plants in low-phosphorus soils with mycorrhizal fungi would actually do better than plants with normal amounts of phosphorus but without the fungi on their roots.

ACRES U.S.A. You mention Elaine Ingham and mycorrhizae, and of course she takes the position that the forest crop is quite different from the field crop, such as corn. So your emphasis on mycorrhizal fungi would put the grape in the category of being more of a forest crop, right?

ROMBOUGH. Yes, in the sense that it’s a perennial, as opposed to corn, especially because a lot of the fungi need a perennial host to keep going, and also because there seems to be a sort of succession in the soil with many of these things.

ACRES U.S.A. You mentioned that there are a lot of books on philosophy and generalizations and so on, but this manual you have written, The Grape Grower, is really a step-by-step, hands-on, isn’t it?

ROMBOUGH. That’s what I tried to make it. I tried to include as many of the things that I’ve learned over the years, things that, as I say, don’t get into the regular books. For example, when I was doing my graduate work at the University of California at Davis, when I tried viticulture classes there, I learned more things from the field crew, as far as the practical care of the vines, than I learned from the professors, because the field crew had been out there and knew all of the little tricks and the things that were necessary to work with the vines and make it easier, while the professors never put that in the book — they just discussed the theory, but they didn’t tell you how to apply it. That was one of the things I was trying to do — to put all these little bits and pieces together so the average person could see them and understand what to do and why to do it, but not just a theory and then let them try to figure it out based on whatever the theory was.

ACRES U.S.A. So the field crew in effect helped you to prevail over the elusive erudition of the professors?

ROMBOUGH. That’s one way to put it! One thing they showed me out in the vineyard that wasn’t covered in the classroom was the simple idea that you prune a grape vine the reverse of how you would a fruit tree, that is to say, when you have an apple tree with a weak shoot on it, you leave it unpruned to try to encourage the tree to put more energy into that shoot. With a grape vine, it’s just the other way around — if you’ve got a shoot that’s weak, you prune it real short. The reason is that if it’s weak, you don’t want it to carry a lot of crop, which would weaken it further, so you cut it down to one bud, and then it puts all or most of its energy into the shoot from that bud instead of trying to take care of a lot of fruit that would have come out of several buds. You do it that way, and the next season you’ll find that you’ve got a nice, big, much stronger shoot there in that location to work with. That doesn’t sound like anything earth-shaking, but it’s the kind of little thing . . .

ACRES U.S.A. That you get from the field hands, and the professor doesn’t have it!

ROMBOUGH. Right! There’s a million and one little things like that that crop up, and as I say I tried to include as many of them as I could in the book, plus adding things that people commonly ask about.

ACRES U.S.A. Your book is well illustrated with line drawings as well as photographs. Who did the artwork?

ROMBOUGH. I did the sketches, and they were put into finished drawings by a staff artist at the publisher.

ACRES U.S.A. Why don’t you walk us through your book quickly, sort of a summary, a precis?

ROMBOUGH. Some of the things we’ve already mentioned. The first thing is the structure of the vine — giving the names to all the parts of the vine and how they work and what’s going on when you tell them what to do. The second part is getting started, the site, the soil and planting — in other words, choosing the right place to plant, or if you have a limited number of places to choose from, how to compensate for some of the weaknesses. Pruning and training we’ve talked about — that’s the one people have the most trouble with. Then I discuss growing grapes organically — again, that gives you a lot of things you have to consider according to your own situation.

ACRES U.S.A. The first order of organic growing is to have a proper level of organic matter, isn’t it?

ROMBOUGH. That’s certainly a very important step, although grapes are one of the few plants that will grow in surprisingly poor soils. It’s not a matter of having a fertile, rich, deep soil, as long as you can supply them with what they need, even in relatively poor soil.

ACRES U.S.A. In Italy at the Villa Banfi vineyards, one of the growers showed us where the grape vines were etching nutrients out of what appeared to be solid rock — it would just start eating its way into the rock.

ROMBOUGH. I’m sure it probably would, and I’ll bet that if you could examine the plant you’d find that it had some pretty good mycorrhizal fungi with it.

ACRES U.S.A. Even though we were up in the mountains, everywhere they had done some tilling or planted posts, they turned up seashells, so that ground was under the sea at one time.

ROMBOUGH. Yeah, they’ve got plenty of trace minerals in the soil there.

ACRES U.S.A. All the 90-plus trace minerals that are available in ocean water.

ROMBOUGH. I’ve tried fertilizing plants with diluted seawater from time to time, too, and it works if you have access to seawater. Of course, when you have table grapes, you want to get nice, big, juicy attractive looking fruit, and they will take a little more nutrition. On the other hand, wine grapes want to struggle a little bit. I don’t mean that they have to be undernourished, but you don’t want to give them the most water, for example, you want to have grapes that are more concentrated and a little more intense in their flavor and character. Not necessarily big, pretty things.

ACRES U.S.A. Let’s get back to the walk-through of your book.

ROMBOUGH. Yes — I also discuss the diseases of grapes, with a kind of an encyclopedic list of the kind of things you might run into. The same thing with insects of grapes. With diseases and insects, one fortunate thing is that you’re not going to get the same collection everywhere. You won’t have all of them hit you all at once. You usually only have to deal with just a few of each. I discuss animals and bird pests, too. That’s what everybody has to deal with in one way or another. It comes down to deer, rabbits, things that eat the vines and things that eat the fruit. Next is propagation, starting your own vines, grafting.

ACRES U.S.A. So you pretty much have a full package here.

ROMBOUGH. Yes, there’s a chapter discussing root stocks — we were talking about what root stocks can do. I also went through and listed a collection of varieties, mostly table grapes, but a fair number of good wine grapes, and what their characteristics are, their ripening times, their quality and so forth, and what you might expect out of them, to give you some kind of idea of what to try in your area. I also treat grape species. That’s a little esoteric for the average person, but there are a lot of wild grape species in America, in fact we have more wild grape species than any other part of the world. A lot of them have hidden talents that have never been explored. There are varieties with tremendous cold-hardiness, like Vitus riparia — there are forms of it that can take -70 to -80 F. There are species and varieties that will grow down in central Florida in places where the humidity and the climate will absolutely eat alive any other grape that isn’t adapted to it.

ACRES U.S.A. So the bottom line is that you’re not going to get anywhere being a dilettante in this field. You have to really study your material and know where you’re going. Is that a correct assessment?

ROMBOUGH. Well, that could be said, but at the same time it depends on what you’re willing to do and what you’re willing to settle for. If you’re going into it commercially, then yes, you better know your stuff. If you’re a home grower you can get by with a surprisingly limited range of information, if you’re only growing one or two varieties and you’re willing to work at it a little bit. But it helps to know your stuff, just as with any endeavor.

   Lon Rombaugh can be contacted at P.O. Box 365, Aurora Oregon 97002-0365, phone (503) 678-1410, e-mail <lonrom@bunchgrapes.com>, website <www.bunchgrapes.com>.
   Rombough’s The Grape Grower is now available from the Acres U.S.A. bookstore.