Muscadine grape, Vitis rotundifolia, is one of my favorite useful plants. Muscadines are southeastern natives and occur in their wild forms from the coastal plain into the mountains.  We find wild vines on our land at about 2000 feet elevation and Debbie has seen them in Madison County, NC.  I suspect they are hardy throughout zone 7 and up to about 2500 feet elevation.  We really don't know what their upper elevational limits are, but that would be interesting to discover. Adventurous fruit explorers take note.  Once established, muscadines can live for a very long time. A bronze fruited muscadine plant on Roanoke Island, NC, called the "Mother Vine" has been in cultivation and producing grapes since the 1500's!  It is the nation's oldest cultivated grape vine.  

Muscadines easily make my top 10 list of useful plants for a number of reasons.  They are easy to grow, have beautiful foliage, and don't seem to have any serious insect or disease problems, making them suitable for easy organic production.  Even Japanese beetles don't bother them.  Muscadines are also quite drought and heat tolerant once established. They are smart plants that leaf out late and don't flower around here till late May or early June, way past any danger from frost or cold.  They come into production quickly, and are capable of prodigious production as a mature plant if managed well, producing 60 to 200 pounds of fruit per plant annually. Muscadines are also amazingly nutritious and medicinal.  There is even a whole book, titled "Muscadine Medicine" devoted to their healing and nutritional qualities.  

Muscadine grapes' purple/black or bronze-colored fruit is sweet, musky, and delicious. Their thick skins are very high in beneficial antioxidants, polyphenols, flavonoids, Resveratrol, and anthocyanins (in the purple/black varieties) that are valuable for optimal health and disease prevention. Their grapes are wonderful fresh or they can be frozen, dried, or processed into juices, wines, meads, pies, or fruit preserves.  Our best meads usually have muscadines as a component.  

Muscadine culture: Muscadines prefer well drained soil, so if you have poorly drained, heavy soil be sure to add plenty of pine bark soil conditioner to a wide hole and plant high, above the existing soil level, incorporating phosphate rock and greensand into the planting hole.  Keep adequately watered during establishment and for the first year. Top dress with a blended organic fertilizer twice a year during the first couple of years and then once in mid-spring thereafter.  Mulch the vines and keep competing weeds and grasses out of the root zone.  A heavier winter mulch will protect the vines roots from cold if you're growing them toward the northern limits of their tolerance. Yields can be enhanced with drip irrigation during subsequent years or during drought.   The vines can be planted on either trellis, arbors or fences.

 

 

 

Plants are experiencing drought stress when it’s been as hot and dry as these last few weeks in Western NC. Even the forest tree species are dropping some leaves to reduce respiration surfaces.

 

The obvious and simple strategy is to make sure that plants are adequately watered. Less frequent but deeper waterings are better than shallow waterings. Some plants will require more than others. For example grapes are drought tolerant. Blueberries are variety specific in their needs for water: rabbit eyes are more tolerant than northern high bush varieties.

 

The best thing to do is to watch the plants themselves for drought stress. Leaves will become less lustrous and more droopy. This indicates that the plants have lost their turdor, which means they are having a hard time pumping moisture to the leaves.

 

Well-established plants will survive drought but the importance of watering during drought at this time of year is to ensure the quality of the fruit. The fruit will be smaller and dryer in times of drought.

 

Installing drip irrigation is always an effective long-term strategy which takes less water and brings water directly to the root zone which keeps the plants in regular growth.

 

A rule of thumb is to make sure your plants get 1 inch of water per week. If the drought is severe, combat drought stress by soil drenching with or foliar spraying with a seaweed concentrate like Nature’s Nog.

 

Also, make sure the plants are mulched 2” thick around the entire drip zone. Most plants are undermulched in terms of diameter. It must circle out to the edges of the roots. Apply a layer of cardboard or newspaper before adding mulch in order to suppress weeds.