Pots llegir aquest post en català triant CA a munt o clicant aquí.

You know how it happens: you wake up in the middle of the night, you can't sleep and you start wandering around YouTube. And all of a sudden you're wide awake because there's a guy there explaining how you can multiply your grapevines by propagating the branches that you prune in the fall. I won't lie. I didn't get up to try it right then. But it did stick in the back of my mind, and in the fall, two years ago, I tried it.

I started with a grapevine that I bought for my then-husband (don't you think 'ex' is a terrible way to refer to those people?), because I'm not really that into grapes, and it turns out those grapes are amazing. They're really delicious. And I couldn't even eat them all, and some of them dried on the vine and made raisins, and they were amazing too. And during the summer they make these big beautiful leaves, and I think it's the American northeasterner in me that idolizes grapes and thinks of them as these hedonous Greek luxuries. With seeds, ok, but still.

So, that winter, I pruned my grapevines and stuck the pruned bits in some dirt. And then ignored them. I didn't use any root hormone, I didn't do much to them at all. And in the spring, all of a sudden, leaves started popping out. It was kind of miraculous. They grew throughout the summer and got to be a few feet tall. They're in pots, mind you, on my roof, but they don't seem to mind. And they like all the sun.

Last year I had a bunch of those pretty little voracious grape leaf beetles, but I've gotten used to looking for them and their progeny (little yellow eggs on the undersides of leaves, later turning into ravenous black caterpillars) and smushing them with my fingers.

Those grapevines, now in their second year, are covered with grapes, little weency ones yet, it's still spring, but I find it remarkable considering they're only two years old, not even. Check out the photos. Last fall, I pruned the mother grapevine again, and once again, stuck the pruned branches into a pot. I think I dipped them in root hormone this time, but I can't see a lot of difference in the results. I left it alone and lo and behold, now I have another pot full of grapevine plants. I'm going to give them away to my subscribers on this list, but there may be some leftovers. Want some?