Sounds idyllic, but while figs aren’t hard to grow in Florida, it requires a bit more planning and work to grow grapes in a Florida -type climate. It CAN be done, though you’d better do your homework before you plant or you will be in for disappointment and a lot of work. Over the following many columns I can cover the basics of what you’ll have to deal with and what you can grow, dependent on how much work you want to put into your grapes.
The first big obstacle to growing grapes in Florida, or any warm, humid part of the U.S, is disease.
The southeastern U.S. Is where all the major fungal illnesses of grapes originated, including black rot, downy mold, powdered mould, anthracnose, several kinds of blights and fruit rots, and more. Those illnesses are bad enough in the summers of northwards areas,eg Long Island, but in the hot, humid climate of the southeast, they start earlier, reproduce faster, and have lots more months to do their work. Even so, these diseases only stunt and damage vines and destroy the crop, and then only if untreated. Much more serious is the bacterial pest Pierce’s disease, which can kill vines altogether.
Pierce’s illness ( PD for short ) is a bacterial illness. Rather than attacking the exterior of the vine, the way the fungal diseases do, it gets into the vine where it reproduces at a rate that clogs the vascular system of the vine, making it shrivel and die, sometimes inside a few days. Severely influenced vines will look like they were hit with a blowtorch, while vines with resistance might not show any obvious symptoms. between are such things as slowed expansion of the vine, scorching of the leaf margins, and death of some shoots. The vital factor in PD is that, while the fungal illnesses spread by themselves, PD must be spread by a carrier, usually sucking insects such as leafhoppers. This gives one of the means to stop the spread of PD, by stopping the leafhoppers that carry it. Not a straightforward task in a climate where the leafhoppers can have 3 or more generations a season, each bigger than the last.
These pests are the actual reason that unwary home growers who buy vines of table grape varieties like Flame Seedless or wine grapes such as Chardonnay and other kinds of the old world grape Vitis vinifera shortly find they were regarded as making a serious mistake. Plant Vitis vinifera outside without a large amount of bug elimination and it will be a rare vine that survives its first year. In this example, a lot can suggest spray or other illness control applied as much as 3 times a week.
Yankee grapes like Concord or other northern-bred grapes that have a modicum of illness resistance may survive a tiny longer, but they can succumb ultimately, too, without plenty of work controlling illness.
With these sorts of nasties to address, it may seem like growing grapes in Florida might be more work than it’s worth. But take heart, there are lots of techniques to get grapes WITHOUT spending all your waking hours on pest management.
