Lateral Shoot Removal

So now that the vines have bloomed, it's time to open up the canopy in the 'fruit zone' (where the grapes will grow and hang). In order to do this, we need to definitely remove all lateral shoots in the fruit zone, and eventually consider removing additional leaves that would get in the way of the fruit being able to develop, and the spray to effectively get int the canopy.

Back to the lateral shoots: they're the shoots that emerge just above one of the main leaves on an inital shoot. Here's a before/after picture (the after picture shows no lateral shoot).

It's pretty tedious work to remove all of those, but we've been doing a row a day. Meanwhile, I'm collecting petiole samples, which is the leaf stem *opposite* a blooming cluster. We'll dry them out and take it to Soil & Plant Laboratory in Santa Clara for analysis.