On Sunny Lane - Grape Vine

I pruned the grape vine last week. I have no idea how old it is. In fact, it may have been a wild one, or it may have been lovingly planted by a previous owner of the property and neglected until it went wild. Sweetheart and I were only vaguely aware of its existence, because tree branches and dead vines were hiding it until recently. I had to look underneath all of the overgrowth.

Actually, I don’t know why I want to save the vine anyway. I don’t like Concord grapes. I like Concord grape juice and Concord grape jelly and grape meringue pie, but I don’t like to eat the grapes. The inside, gushy part is rather sour, but the juice inside the skin is sweet. The skin is sour and yucky. I always spit it out when I eat them. So, I don’t eat them.

However, since Sweetheart and I had started to clean out the bushes and trees along the edge of the property last year, we started to see hundreds of grapes forming on the vines this spring. Maybe they were there other years and they were so covered with overgrowth that we couldn’t see them. It seemed a shame to just let them go untended. We could surely find a use for the grapes when they are ripe.

So, I got the pruners out and started to work. I’m not trained in lawn care and pruning techniques. I just wanted to get rid of the dead branches so the live ones would not be burdened with maintaining the useless ones.

So, every time I saw a vine that looked like it was dry and useless, or making the mother vine look bad, I cropped it. They would just be a drag to the good branches. Trouble is, every once in a while, I clipped a dry, brittle vine that had just enough life in it to produce a few leaves. It might have produced much fruit. I usually discovered this after I had already relieved it of its duties. First appearances can be deceiving.

In fact, I even cut off some branches that were beginning to bear fruit. And, this may not even be the proper time to be making cuts. I hope I’m not doing more damage than good. An expert would know, but it may turn out all right in the end, in spite of my ignorance.

What I’m really wondering is, if you substitute the word police for the words grape vine and grape branches, could you come up with an analogy.