So about a week ago, the fencerow buds emerged. Starting at the end, I could have left this "cordon" 70ft long and it would have filled in quite nicely as it does every year, but I wanted to experiment with growing other grapes so it got bobbed back to about 10ft long.
Here's the buds, you can see two on the cane plus one more down at the base, on the main vine.
A wider shot of the next two canes back:
All of the other rooting attempts have been moved outside, it's now 65-80 degrees out, and will be until end of June, when temps will start living in the 80's and 90's. August will be 85 to somewhat rare 100F, cooling off in September back to 75F and then mid-October we'll start seeing 50's at night again.
This group is the fencerow grape in the small pots, and the original syrah and vidal blanc cuttings in the two big green ones. Some of the vidal blanc cuttings are starting to swell buds, while the syrah are not so much. All of them are still green, though.
This group is the second group of cuttings-Cab sauv and Syrah. These were soaked in water for a few hours, then into a bag of moist peat and zip-locked, then put on the top of my computer monitor for two weeks. The Syrah all budded out and started growing, and one of the Cab Sauv opened up. I didn't get on the ball fast though and the Syrah started to brown up and die back where it was touching the bag.
Now, before you say that's crazy, what are you doing...this is how I do hardwood rose cuttings. Cut them off the plant, into rooting compound, then into dirt. Cut the base of a 2-liter soda bottle off, and it's now a private greenhouse. The soda bottle stays until the plant has enough roots to show near the bottom of the pot. It works. To control humidity, you take the cap off the soda bottle, or leave it on but unscrewed, or screw it right down.
Even though it's only been three or four minutes, you can see humidity collecting on the inside of the still-sealed greenhouses-I let them go like this for two days then unscrew the cap and let it sit on top, unless the temperature gets over 80 on the porch-then the caps come off and I water a bit more frequently.
Cab sauv #1 still has never broken buds, but 32 has a very nice single green leaf and short new cane growing. Syrahs 1-3 all have 1 bud open and about 1.5" of cane, but the leaves turned brown where they hit the bag and shriveled back-I am hoping that secondary buds can make up for the damage. Syrah 3 had two buds open up, although one was and is still buried below the surface of the soil. Maybe that will encourage rooting?
Note I don't intend to have these grow on their own roots-the rooting process is combination of practice and ensuring I will have viable budwood even if there is a mishap at the university yards or a change in faculty, and I loose access. The 3309C that was left ungrafted had 13 buds opening up on it-I took off 4 of them, leaving no more than two in each location it was budding out at. Once the 3309C has viable green canes, I'll cut the number back to only 4 canes left, and I'll root the others via the coke bottle method-this method works very well for green cuttings as well as hardwood cuttings.
