Last year was a good year for grape propagation, and so I spent the day pruning the grapes, which have gone dormant, and potting up cuttings thus:

I’ve been gang potting cuttings lately, as it saves time and materials, and it’s not so difficult to tease apart the roots and plant the cuttings separately once they strike.

I grow three kinds of table grapes: Flame Seedless, Black Monukka, and Ladyfinger. Of the three, only the flame seedless produces much in the way of fruit, which I most often crush for juice. The Ladyfinger has produced a few clusters, and the Black Monukka none, though I hold out hope, as is necessary when gardening.  Perhaps this year with be the year.  I can’t locate the photo I took a month or two ago, but one of the goji berry plants I put in years and years ago finally threw a flower this year.

There isn’t a whole lot of actual gardening to be done here in the winter, and so attention turns to planning for spring.  For instance, a number of potted pants in the nursery, including pomegranate, pecan, Chinese hackberry, and blue-berried honeysuckle, will be ready for the ground in March or April, and the seed catalogs all need attention.  I also need to take cuttings from some wild plants.  Just yesterday, I noticed a huge fig growing along the side of the road out in a rural part of Sacramento county, a fig so big it can be seen from space.  There are lots of big California wild grape (I think) plants near the college where I work that have just about lost their leaves, so I plan to take cuttings of these as well.  They seem to thrive without summer water, even in the brutal heat that sometimes hangs on for weeks in Folsom, CA, and are also employed as rootstocks for other grapes, so perhaps I’ll use them to practice grafting techniques.

In other news, this discarded bit of onion is growing in the compost, the wrong way up:

It’s sending roots up and over and down into the soil, and I don’t have the heart to move it – it’s trying so hard.  Here’s to hope.