Racial profiling was not likely the reason I was asked to prune a big overgrown grapevine at work. I just happen to be more proficient with dormant pruning of dago wisteria than my colleagues are. My proficiency is more cultural than racial. I am from the Santa Clara Valley, and sadly, they are not.

1. Before pruning, the grapevine was a tangled mess on a split rain fence, which is not even visible in this picture. Incidentally, the forsythia that was featured in ‘Six on Saturday’ two seeks ago is located just beyond the upper left margin of the picture.

2. After pruning, the top rail of the fence is visible, extending away from where the picture was taken. Some of the debris is still piled to the left in the background. Green wires to the right are there for new vines to climb on. The few remaining unpruned vines are layers (stems that lay on the ground long enough to develop roots of their own) that will be dug and removed. I wanted to prune to just spurs, but there were no new canes on the main trunk. Instead, I left stubs of canes from the previous season, with a few extra buds.

3. This lineup of what seems to be the usual suspects is really seven well rooted layers (the stems that lay on the ground long enough to develop roots of their own that I mentioned earlier) The smallest one on the left is easy to miss.

4. Most of the layers are very well rooted. We really do not know what to do with the original grapevine. We certainly do not need seven more! Friends and neighbors will likely find good homes for them.

5. The weather was so nice for this project, that the ceanothus nearby started to bloom. There are so many other dormant plants to prune before winter ends!

6. Just prior to such nice spring weather, we got eight inches of rain from a series of a few storms. This would have been two thirds of the average annual rainfall of twelve inches in my former neighborhood in town! This bucket of rainwater is nine inches deep because it is flared toward the top, and narrower at the bottom.

This is the link for Six on Saturday, for anyone else who would like to participate:

https://thepropagatorblog.wordpress.com/2017/09/18/six-on-saturday-a-participant-guide/