Come August, There Will Be Grapes

This then, is The Grapevine.

Stretching for about 30 feet along my northside fence, on my side AND my neighbor's, this son of a gun produces so many grapes we can't eat them all.

When I bought a little bare-root pack of grapes ... maybe five or six years ago, it was nothing more than a stick with a bud or two. I asked the nursery expert if it would grow in a pot, and she told me it could, but not to expect a lot from it. She went on to tell me I'd have to spray it with several different chemicals every year, blah, blah, blah. I didn't buy $50 worth of chemicals -- the grape starts were marked down to End-of-the-Season worthless. I took it home and plunked it in a pot, [see red arrow] watered it, and wondered if it would last the summer.

The following spring, to my surprise, it began to sprout again. I moved the pot to a spot by the fence where I had a trellis, stuck a paving block underneath it so it couldn't put down roots in the soil, gave it its own emitter on the irrigation line, and forgot about it. I hoped it would vine up on the fence for greenery, but I never expected grapes.

By the following spring, the pot had become a wintering spot for ants, and a clump of grass three feet tall had started in the pot. I yanked out the grass, threw in a handful of Osmocort slow-release fertilizer pellets, and evicted the ants by turning on the irrigation system. The plant went nuts shooting out tendrils in every direction. We had a few bunches of grapes, yay! They were small, but tasty.

The following spring I noticed two things: The pot was actually lifted on one side by the vine's grip on the fence; and ... water wasn't draining from the pot.

Okay, three things, the third being that the pot was only about half full of soil, thanks to successive wintering damned ants. Well, I thought, that lack of drainage and soil will do Mr. Grape in for sure. Wrong yet again. We gave away grapes to everyone we knew, until people were avoiding us; we were sick of grapes and left them for the birds. Last year Bernie found a fellow at work who liked the grapes, so I kept packing him down with shopping bags of grapes to take in to work.

This year, I vowed to hack away the vine and allow only a few clusters to ripen. Over the weekend, however, Bernie informed me he had a co-worker ask if the grapes were ripe yet, and could he have some.

Fine, we'll do our part for world hunger; I will only trim up the grapes that the dogs might reach. Sebastian has no sense at all when it comes to eating fruit, and grapes are not good for dogs. (I hope that damned parrot enjoys them.)