I love spring.  Bees are buzzing, the trees are flowering, and my grapes are beginning to bud, HARD.  Last year I let the grapes get acclimated, root, and I waited patiently to see if they made it through our Massachusetts winter in a raised bed.  BOOH YA! They came back!  Now it’s time to seriously begin training them along the trellis that I built.  In order to do that, I added some wire onto which the grapes vines could stretch their weary legs.

I used galvanized wire, eye hooks, and small turnbuckles from the hardware store to tension the wire.  I unthreaded the turnbuckles almost all of the way, wrapped the wire through the eyelets, and then tightened the turnbuckles until  the wire was taut.  I limited the tension that I applied, since the turnbuckles are only rated for 40 lbf.  The image below shows a close up of the setup.

Oh HELL yeah!  Now we play the waiting game. I’ll train the vines as the season progresses.  I even used some of the ends of the wire to help get the vines started.  In a few years, IT GON’ BE RAININ’ GRAPES, SON!

Peace, Gangstas.