This is my journey
The plant seedling
Looking for the grapes, I wanted to plant, I searched around Abuja for where I could get the grapes. I got some from a horticulturist along the airport road. I wasn't sure of the type of the species but I never minded. I just went ahead and bought it after all this was an experiment.
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Site preparation
For the site preparation. I got together a welder who put together an arbour. It was about 2.2 meters off the ground and had four legs placed in a square-shaped of about 2.5 meters by 2.5 meters.
For the planting ground, I dug a pit one meter in depth because I had read somewhere that the grape fruits, go really deep. I mixed together some cow manure and topsoil in a ratio of 1:4 in favour of topsoil and replaced the soil I had dug out from the pit. I then planted my small grape at the centre of this hole watered it.
Year one to two
I must have done something right with the manure because the plant grew very fast in the first year. In fact, it grew so fast at some point It was like, I could watch it grow before my eye literally. I knew I must have done something right to the soil. The first year It came off the ground with such vigour I had to trim it. What I did was to cut off some stems to make sure I had only two stems that were growing up. I wanted to be sure of how to direct the plant and I knew too many stems would mean that it was going to be difficult to handle at a later stage when it goes all up. So just I train them and left them in two different directions.
And the first year, I saw some little flowers and some fruits that fell off. I wasn't concerned because I knew usually plants exhibit this behaviour.
Year two to three
In the second year. I took the time to read up on how to prune my grapes and once the rainy season started, I made sure that I trimmed back aggressively to allow the old Vines to grow strong. Because grapes grow on older vines, I removed all new shoots.
And I must have done something right because, after that, I had a huge proliferation of grapes.
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I had serious challenges. In the first year, my grapes suffered some new diseases at never seen first. I suffered some bit of leave rust. I had some yellow coloured dust on the leaves and then they would dry up and crumble. I sprayed them with some chemicals for rush and hoped for the best. And I think that worked.
Later, some aphids disturbed the plants. What I did was I bought neem oil and mixed it with water and with vinegar solution. The actual details of the mix are available on the internet. That took care of the aphids.
The other problem I had were Birds. Birds would pick at it and eat it even when they are no done. And that is a problem, I've not gotten how to solve yet. What I intend to do is to cover the arbour with mosquito nets and hope that that would prevent the birds from eating them.
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Pruning and manure
I found out that the easy way of making the grapes come to fruition is to prune them hard and them back leaving only the major vines as the grapes are formed from the older vines and not fresh ones
In the second year, I applied NPK fertilizer of about 1 kg in a circle about half a meter away from the base of the plant. Also applied some cow manure which I applied some four months after the NPK.
I hope it helps.
