Suddenly I am "mom" to a grapevine!
My sweet cousin tried to dig up some fig tree suckers for me over at my late uncle's backyard. I am trying an experiment to see if I can clone some fig trees from what we used to call "slips" back on the farm, but wanted backup in case that didn't work. So there were all these roots near the little fig trees, as the parent plant although laden with fruit had not gotten much care for about ten years. He got some of the gnarly straggly root stuff up out of the ground and I happily took it home and stuck it in the ground, watered it well and waited. Some of the dried out stem stuff was sticking out of the dirt and when a neighbor came by, she ran her hands over it and pronounced it dead. She did not say it was NOT a fig. She just said that no way was it going to grow.
Well, it grew, but it was not a fig:
I haVe very little experience in dirt gardening and never grew any kind of tree before except for a ficus benjamina we had rescued from the dumpster. Everybody thought it was dead, and to tell you the truth we were just intending to recycle the dirt from that plant, as we thought it was a goner, too. This was in autumn, and then we got busy with other things and set it aside where it was forgotten until spring. When I finally picked up the pot to take it back to the dumpster, surprise, by then there were two tiny leaves peaking out from the base of the stem. It grew like wildfire and after a few years, when it got too tall to stay on the porch, we put it out near our carport, The following spring we saw a couple birds building a nest in it and before long it was home to cheeping babies, a scenario which repeated itself every year for a couple decades thereafter.
That tree was like a treasure to us until the new management of our apartment complex got the brilliant idea of disallowing any live plants in the carports. We moved and tried to take the ficus with us, but it did not like its new home and soon expired at the new location. Died of sadness, I think.
I don't know what kind of grape that is in the picture above, nor how to care for a grape, but as it is "family" I will learn and do my best to keep it alive and flourishing in my new plant-friendly community.
