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Tending Vines

Today I returned for my volunteer shift at the greenhouse of the Conservatory Botanical Collection at the University of Minnesota (St. Paul Campus). My assignment was to tend potted vining plants. In pots of various size, ranging from 6 to 24 inches, the vines have been trained to grow up onto either cables or trellises for support. During my shift, which today lasted three and a half hours, I was able to clean and prune approximately a dozen of the vines.

Since the vines are growing on supports which cannot be moved or taken down, one of the challenges is to reach the top of the vine for cleaning and pruning. Many of the vines reach heights of about 10 feet off the floor. Necessarily, a tall ladder had to be used to access the growing business end of the plants. I was able to arrange a couple of side-by-side ladders so that I could balance a bucket of soapy water on the top of one ladder, and myself on the other ladder.

Some of the vines were quite soiled by sooty black mold and scale insects. The sooty plants took the majority of my time, carefully using a soft nail-brush to scrub the mold and insects off from each individual leaf. It was putsy work, but satisfying at the end of the process to see a now-clean plant. 

The majority of the vines didn't require scrubbing, only a snip and a prune hear and there to reduce the amount of plant material and improve air circulation.

The common grape vine is Vitis vinifera. There are 80 species in this family (Vitaceae), but there are thousands of hybrid varieties used in wine making.


Grape vine on the left, false-jasmine in the middle ground, and real jasmine (Jasminum officinale) on the trellis at the right of the photo.



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