Grapes on the terrace

[eric]

Hi folks,

I am hoping someone knowledgeable will be able to answer this question. I am trying to grow a grape plant on my terrace one floor above the ground to provide shade. I can't plant it down below because the goats will whack it. So I am going to build a giant "flower pot" out of bricks and cement on the terrace and fill it with earth and compost and start from there to have it wend its way across the trelisses I put up. My question is how much earth/soil do I need for a viable plant? (expressed in cubic metres or yards)

The proposed size of the "flower pot" is 40cm X 40cm X 18Ocm giving roughly 3 tenths of a cubic meter of soil area to root in. Would this be enough to sustain the plant throughout its lifetime? presuming I'd be feeding it from above with compost every year, as I would ordinarily do in the garden...

thanks for reading this far,

eric

[Paul E. Lehmann]

You might want to check out this site for some ideas:

[David Hill]

If you intend to keep the vine for several years then you need as large as you can, with as much depth as you can get, I would use a mix of peat compost(To reduce the weight on your terrace) and soil (with water retention polymers added), and a good dressing of Hoof and horn added to the compost mix. Remember you don't want the vine drying out when you have grapes on it or they will drop or split. I have grown a vine for 6 years in a 2 gall pot but it was kept to no more that 5 ft.