You may have to wait until next year to be sure, but you can separate Dixieland and Darlene by the flowers. The self-fertile flowers will have upright stamens, and the female flowers will have re-curved stamens. Some muscadines will re-bloom in fall, which may be more likely in your climate, so keep your eye on them and look for any blooms.

I'm coming to this conversation a few years late. The story of my life, LOL! Anyway, I live in the heart of Muscadine country, SE Georgia and have twelve vines in all. Three of them, Ison, Supreme, and Pam are beginning their third year of production. (They have bloom buds and will be blooming soon that is.) Two other varieties and a second Ison, will enter their first year of production this year. (Yes, I liked Ison enough to get a second vine.) The reputation of the Ison muscadine is that it's not very cold tolerant in comparison to some others. However it is one of the earliest black varieties to bare fruit, so if you succeed at taking measures to protect it in a colder climate, you have a better chance of actually getting fruits with Ison than you would with say Late Fry which has better cold tolerance but needs a much longer growing season to ripen fruit. If you like the white muscadines, maybe you should try a brand new one that has just come out called Hall. I don't have this one, but Hall is supposed to be very cold hardy and an early season variety. It's also self fertile like Ison, so you only need one vine. Lane is another new early season self fertile variety that has just come out. The subject of Lane raises another consideration when picking a muscadine, and that's skin qualities. One of the big improvements in muscadines is the skin. The skin of Ison is not as tough or bitter as some of the older varieties. But the skin of the still newer table varieties such as Supreme, Black Beauty, Late Fry, Lane and a few others is crunchy and sweet. So the lady who mentioned her daughter eating the skins, well, if its from one of the newer varieties such as Supreme, I don't blame her. Ison is a great muscadine bred expressly to have a lot of the flavor characteristics of wild muscadines. It's really meant for making jam and yes some wines where you have an especially strong "musky" muscadine flavor. As a result, some folks will tend to prefer the flavor of some of the table varieties that aren't so musky. Most of my vines are on trellises for fruit production. I planted my second Ison to go on a swing arbor. I was impressed with the way Ison has a long lasting two tone red green color phase on it's ripening grapes which I find very attractive. I planted the second vine on the swing arbor for aesthetic reasons on account of that characteristic. Last comment, someone mentioned the red pigment of black muscadines being unstable. Yes, that's true, but the variety Nobel, has the most stable pigmentation and therefor most commercial red muscadine wines will have at least some Nobel grapes in them. If the wine maker is going for a strong musk flavor, they will do about a 70% Ison and 30% Nobel mix. God bless. Marcus

Hi, I'm a home gardener with five production size muscadine vines. My vines are youngish so I'm still experimenting with things. There are a number of desert recipes for them online. I make muscadine jam with them and then use the jam in savory recipes. I have also downloaded some Asian plum souse recipes and made "muscadine sauce" with them. When processing muscadines there are a few tricks that you might find useful for ext time. If it's a traditional slip skin variety, start by separating the skins from the pulp. Just squeeze the pulp into a bowl and put the skin into a separate container. The best tasting juice is in the skins. That's also where the vitimine and nutrients are. The skin of some varieties are astringent and add a lot of tartness, so some sugar may need to be added. When I make jams I grind up the skins in a blinder and add it to the jam. It makes the jam. There are several muscadine pie recipes out there that mainly use the skins. When extracting juice out of the pulp or skin, think "pasteurizing" you heat them quickly and lightly and then extract the juice. Some will accomplish this using steam rather than through boiling. A little heat does a lot. Some of the newer muscadine varieties are bread to have firm flesh and brittle crunchy skin. The varieties with this characteristic that I know about are Supreme, Lane, Late Fry, Big Red, Darlene, Black Beauty, and Majesty. (Majesty is a new variety which is not available to the public yet, but this one is one is supposed to be an inch in a half in diameter). These types you can pick while slightly green, cut in half and scoop the seeds out and process like plums. Something I plan to try is to simply can them and make whole sweet pickles with them. However, these varieties when picked slightly green (color turned but not soft), are quite crunchy and sweet tart. so I think they will make a very nice sweet relish. But truth be told, the big female varieties such as Supreme and Black Beauty are so good I end up standing next to the vines and eating most of the berries right there. Supreme is so sweet that the berries are good to eat long before it fully ripens. So even though it might produce 50 lbs of fruit, I doubt that fruit will go to waste. But the females are just that, female. You need a self fertile variety to go with it for pollination. Supreme which is the largest and the sweetest of the muscadines has some special care needs that the others don't have. The best source of informatiI on on care is the Ison Nursery web-page and You Tube channels. They grow more muscadines than anyone else in the world and give lots of helpful hints. The commercial muscadines all bloom at the same time. You can extend your harvest by a lot by planting a mixture of early, mid season and late season varieties. Also Late Fry and a few others are long season varieties. It starts ripening berries late (September) and will ripen berries until the end of October. Last year, mine has just a smattering of berries to ripen just before Thanksgiving. God bless.

liliwoman, I haven't had scuppernongs in years ... We always ate them before grandma could even attempt to make jelly. I went to my source for Southern cooking: Mrs Dull's Southern Cooking and she does not give a recipe for jelly ... just juice, nectar and wine. However she does give a recipe for spiced muscadine (another grape from my long-ago youth) jam. Would you like that???? kay