Pre-Baby Grapes are here!

I wish I could say that these cute little pre-baby grapes are on my Marquette vines, but alas I am not expecting to see grape production from them for another year. In fact, I have some wild grapes in the side yard and they are sprouting some little grape clusters. It's interesting...I have lived here for 12 years and had wild grapes in the woods behind the house the whole time. I never noticed. I think the birds got the grapes before they were big enough to notice. And we have so many mosquitos in the summer that the last thing I want to do is go walking in the woods. This past winter the kids and I were walking in the woods, exploring the property in the bug-free splendor of cold weather. We saw some vines that looked a lot like wild grape vines climbing some trees. But with no leaves (or grapes!), we couldn't be sure. Later, I found some more of them pretty close to the house in the side yard. So this spring I cleared the brush from around them, picked them up off the ground, put in a couple of stakes and tied them up to see what would appear. Voila! Wild grapes! Probably V. lubrusca, a wild version of the Concord grape. I'm going to do some kind of a simple trellis for these and see if I can bird-net them well enough to get some ripe grapes just for fun. These clusters are going to flower and then they become grapes.

Jacques