March 22, 1883. ] JOURNAL OF HORTICULTURE AND COTTAGE GARDENER. 
229 
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23rd 
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Good Friday. 
24th 
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25th 
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Easter Sunday. 
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Bank Holiday. 
27th 
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Royal Horticultural Society’s Fruit and Floral Committees. 
28th 
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Royal Botanic Society's Spring Show. 
THINNING GRAPES. 
forty years have elapsed since 
was initiated into the art of thinnin 
i 
thinning 
Grapes. My tutor -was a sturdy, hard- 
headed, hut good-hearted representative 
of the “old school” of gardeners, 
who thought as much about wall trees 
and Onions as he did about Vines, while 
for “pottering about” among flowers 
he had a profound contempt. When the bed¬ 
ding mania came in Lobelias had to be raised 
in thousands, and occasionally my chief was 
almost obliged to assist in pricking out the seedlings, 
but never without, as he said, feeling ashamed of him¬ 
self, as he was convinced that there was a great waste 
of force in an able-bodied man weighing 18 stones 
lifting plants that he could not clearly distinguish 
without his spectacles. This he regarded as work for 
the lads, and he held much the same views on the 
matter of thinning Grapes : hence the “lads,” of whom 
I w T as one, had an opportunity of engaging in that 
occupation in early years. 
At the age of eleven I was often perched on the top 
of a pair of steps at four o’clock in the morning prac¬ 
tising ; and the following year I was considered fairly 
competent—in my own opinion very much so, and was 
entrusted with the thinning of nearly all the bunches in 
a range of vineries 120 feet long. How many bunches 
of Grapes I spoiled I shall never know, but I may 
venture to assert that there are few individuals who did 
more damage in this respect before the age of fifteen 
years than I committed. Rubbing the Grapes with the 
head, fingering the bunches to get the work over quickly, 
piercing the berries with the points of the scissors, 
cutting out those that ought to have remained, and 
leaving others that ought to have been removed, were 
common errors and delinquencies, but not the worst 
by any means. 
Possibly there may be a solitary reader of these notes 
unable to imagine any malpractice in the work under 
notice more serious than those enumerated ; yet there 
is one, and it appears all the more necessary to point 
it out, since, although many gardeners must know of it, 
I do not remember ever to have seen it prominently 
alluded to in print. I have seen this greater error 
committed times out of number, and not always by lads 
alone or young men, but by amateurs, and even gar¬ 
deners of mature years, in happy ignorance that they 
w r ere acting otherwise than in the most safe and proper 
manner. In a word, they were complacently satisfied 
they were doing perfectly right when in reality they 
were doing what was utterly wrong, and were surprised 
when the berries did not swell regularly, also that some 
of them, even who e shoulders, shanked. 
“Shanking!” does someone soliloquise. “Surely 
nothing in connection with thinning the bunches in 
spring can affect the berries injuriously in the summer 
and autumn.” Bur, there is something that can and 
does limit their size and impair their quality, and in 
the case of Vines predisposed to shanking unquestion¬ 
ably aggravates that evil. What is this something ? 
It is the very simple and very much too common and 
thoughtless habit of twisting the stalks and shoulders 
of bunches for reaching the opposite side instead of 
shifting the step-ladder or position of the operator. 
A slight turning of a bunch or portion of a bunch for 
convenience of thinning may do little or no harm, but 
twisting violently, as hundreds of bunches are twisted, 
so as to rupture the sap vessels, is an evil that can 
never be repaired 
The shanking of the Grapes in the vineries, where 
in my early days I thinned the bunches with lad-like 
recklessness, was grievous. The twisting of the stalks 
was not by any means the sole cause of the deplorable 
condition of the fruit; but rupturing the sap vessels, 
and consequently obstructing the free supply of food, 
without doubt intensified the evil. This was not, of 
course, thought about at the time, and in fact not until 
some years afterwards, when experiments were made 
with the object of ascertaining the effects of such a 
rough process of handling the fruit and twisting the 
bunches at a time when the tissues of the stem were in 
a peculiarly tender state. 
On Vines where there were invariably more or less of 
shanked Grapes the bunches maltreated in the manner 
described were always the most seriously affected, and 
on shoulders that had been purposely violently twisted 
not one berry ripened, but all shanked. The experi¬ 
ment, when tried on Vines that produced no shanked 
fruit, always resulted in irregular-sized berries, some 
swelling much less freely than others, quite spoiling 
the appearance of the bunches in comparison with others 
that had not been injured in the thinning. Twisting 
the laterals of Vines or fracturing them in tying is bad 
enough, but the injury resulting from fracturing the 
stalks of the bunches is more marked. Let anyone 
observe closely a bunch of Grapes on a lateral that has 
been rather seriously “cracked” in tying down, and 
if all the berries sw r ell with the same freedom and regu¬ 
larity as those on laterals where there has been no 
obstruction to the flow of sap it will be little short of 
a miracle, and will denote that the Vines are remark¬ 
ably and unusually vigorous ; and still more marvellous 
will it be if the berries on ruptured bunches swell 
evenly and become full-sized and regular. 
Thousands of bunches of Grapes will be thinned 
every day now for some time. Let great care be exer¬ 
cised in this important work. Rubbing the fruit with 
the head or the hand cannot be done without, the effects 
being seen by the educated eye of the master; punctur¬ 
ing the berries with the scissors will in a few days be 
perceptible; but twisting the stems or shoulders of the 
bunches leaves no immediate marks to arrest attention, 
yet the man, be he old or young, who permits himself 
to make such an egregious mistake after he knows the 
evil of it, is none the less culpable and ought never to 
be permitted in a vinery. 
Instead of twisting a bunch to bring its opposite side 
round to the operator let the man go round the bunch. 
No. 143.— Vol. VI., Third Series. 
No 1799 VOL. LXlj:., OLD Series 
