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🍇 Grape

Soft Fruit Plants · growing reference

When to plant

In USDA zone 6, for example: Plant around Mar 4, while the stock is still dormant — bare-root wants to be in the ground before it leafs out.

Dates are the typical window for each zone's average frost dates — your own last frost can differ by a couple of weeks. Zone 10 and warmer is effectively frost-free: plant to the season, not the frost. Southern Hemisphere: shift six months.

Grape Types

• Table & Juice · ~3 years · 10–20 lbs/plant — Eaten fresh or pressed for juice and jelly. Concord and Niagara (V. labrusca — slipskin, seeded, foxy, zone 4 and disease-tough), or the seedless kinds: Thompson and Flame (vinifera, zone 6+), Himrod, Mars and Reliance where you need cold hardiness. Wine grapes live in the Vineyard.
• Muscadine · ~2 years · 20–60 lbs/plant — V. rotundifolia — zone 7–10 southeastern native: thick-skinned, immune to what kills the others, and vigorous (20 ft apart). Both a porch grape and a wine grape, so it lives in the fruit AND the Vineyard alike. Some cultivars (Scuppernong, Fry) are female and need a self-fertile pollenizer.