Brooks, GA |
Among the rows of vines stretching across forty acres in Brooks lies a family story that spans generations. Founded in 1934 when the first plant went into the ground, Ison’s Nursery and Vineyard is now the largest and oldest grower of muscadine vines in the country — a distinction owner Greg Ison takes quiet pride in carrying forward.
“My grandfather started growing a few muscadine plants on the side for family and friends. Then in the 1960s, my father thought there was an opportunity to commercially grow muscadine vines and sell them all over the country — so he started growing them, and we began shipping them all over the Southeast,” Ison said. “We’re proud to continue that tradition today.”
A lot of time and careful work goes into cultivating the more than thirty different varieties of muscadine vines offered by Ison’s — long before a single plant is ready to ship.
“It’s an eighteen-month process on the plants. We take cuttings in the summer months, propagate them, place them in a one-gallon container, and grow them out for an additional year,” Ison said. “Most planting is done during October through April, but depending on where you are — South Georgia, Alabama, Florida — you can plant any month of the year.”
As for the fruit itself, muscadines have a natural advantage in the Georgia climate — one that makes them remarkably forgiving for growers of any experience level.
“Muscadine fruiting plants are one of the easiest plants to grow. They’re very forgiving,” Ison said. “And one of the great things about muscadines is they bloom so late — mid to late May, early June — that we never run the risk of catching a late frost on the blooms. So they will always have a crop on them.”
Harvest, however, has brought its own set of challenges this season — particularly during the prolonged heat and drought that have defined much of the summer.
“Our guys will go from picking twenty pounds an hour to as much as a hundred pounds an hour depending on the season, but it is very labor intensive. When you’re doing fresh market sales like we do, you have to pick by hand,” Ison said. “The challenge has been that we’ve been extremely hot and extremely dry — we have not turned off our drip irrigation systems in the vineyards for over a month. We’ve been pulling the guys out of the fields sometimes at two-thirty or three o’clock in the afternoon just to keep them out of that heat.”
Once the muscadines are off the vine, they don’t stay on the shelf for long. Ison’s sells their fruit four different ways — including a popular roadside stand and nationwide shipping for former Southerners who miss the taste of home.
“We actually ship fruit all over the United States to a lot of people who lived in the South and no longer do, but want to enjoy muscadines. We’ll ship them second-day air — and we ship a lot of muscadines to people who have never had them before,” Ison said.
For Ison’s Nursery and Vineyard, ninety-plus years of growth have been built on something simple: a belief that the muscadine, Georgia’s own southern delicacy, is worth sharing with the rest of the country — one vine and one shipment at a time.