Not The Grape-est Harvest

Day 10: Pruning grapes is an art I have yet to master. My fishing buddy's brother-in-law Eddie tried to teach me, but his instructions were so heavily inflected with swear-words and backtracking (amusingly so) that I was never able to pick the principle out of the verbal detritus. I've succeeded in getting a good crop two or three times, but it's been only by sheer luck or accident. I know that grapes fruit on last year's new wood, but identifying it in winter is not as easy as it sounds, and I usually resort to simply leaving two nodes on every cane regardless of its age. While in principle you might think that would result in a success rate of 50%, it never seems to do so. Admittedly, weather plays a role and our cool early summer may have come at the wrong time to set fruit, but I really had to hunt high and low among the leaves to find a second cluster of grapes equivalent to this pitiful offering.