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Sunday, August 06, 2017 RyanH Eganville, Ontario

Entry 45 of 69  
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It's been a while since I've posted.


There must have been a slight East breeze when I sprayed round up because the right side of this plant lost almost all secondaries, the left side maybe a third. I have mostly third stage growth on the right side and even some fourth stage growth. Some vines are actually forked (doubled) to fill in dead spots.

Since this year was dealt the set-back, I wanted to try something different by trying to have all the plant behind the fruit. You can see that I still have 17 secondaries running up the garden. Nothing to the outside, they were all curved to go parallel with the main vine. I'll walk in along the main vine this year instead of along a secondary from the outside of the patch. I still have a good 8-12 feet to grow secondaries before they reach and fill the 1200 square feet. Of course, the fruit growth is slow. This is my first Day 30 under 300 pounds in a while. It's to be expected as it's just an experiment to see the late season growth that I get. I believe I'm too far out of the perfect pruning point, but I want to see how this does. I have only dead headed the first secondary on each side, all others are running and growing. In a perfect world, I'd probably dead head the first 4 to 8 and then fork the others up the garden. Like I said, this will be a test. I don't think it's the best way to go, but I also don't think stopping all vine growth at pollination on a puny plant is the way to go either, like some say.

This plant in the 2066 Geddes which has my good friend the 1625 Gantner on both sides of the parents. Plus, this one looks round and orange, so there's that.

Another change this year is that I'm using up all of the growing supplies in my shed, ha. I figure my vine burying mix has times the materials in it. I'm sick of looking at half full bags and pails of product, so this year they're all gone. That alone may end my season, but I'm going down swingin'.
 



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