Photo: Samuend — CC BY-SA 4.0 · source
Survives zone 8 through 9
Harvest calendar
Best planted in early spring after your last frost, or in fall before the ground freezes, depending on your climate.
Fruit is sweet and good fresh once fully ripe, among the best-flavored of Florida's native wild grapes, and used locally for jelly and wine. Distinctively felted, silvery-white new growth and leaf undersides make it easy to identify even before fruiting.
- Hardiness
- Zone 8–9
- Habit
- Vine
- Edible part
- Fruit
- Ripens
- July–Aug
- Mature size
- Climbing vine to 6–9 m with support
- Light
- Full sun
- Soil pH
- 5.5–7.5 (acidic to neutral)
- Environment
- Subtropical
- Native range
- Florida and coastal Georgia — pinelands, hammocks and disturbed sandy ground.
- Status
- Wild
- Years to fruit
- 3–4 yrs
- Growth speed
- Very fast — 2–5 m of cane in a season once established
- Spacing
- 200 cm (79 in) apart — about 4 m² (43 sq ft) per plant
- Leaf shape
- Ovate to cordate, 5–10 cm, undersides densely felted white to rust-colored
- Root system
- Well adapted to deep sandy Florida soils, with good tolerance of both drought and nematodes — traits that make southeastern Vitis useful as rootstock parents in that region.
- Fruit description
- Purple-black grapes, 10–15 mm, sweet, good fresh flavor
- Propagation
- Hardwood cuttings in winter, or seed (needs cold stratification).
- Pollination
- ⚠ DIOECIOUS — needs male + female (a vigorous fruitless wild vine is usually a lone male)
The edible parts listed above are a starting point, not a field guide. Identify a plant with certainty — ideally against a local authority — before eating any part of it, and read the full disclaimer. Spotted something wrong? Report it.
Growing guide
Growing tips. One of the more heat-tolerant wild grapes, thriving in Florida's sandy, well-drained soils. New shoots and leaf undersides are conspicuously white-woolly, fading to rust as they age.
Grow journal
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