Grape Vine Bonsai

Hmmmm, I may need to let them run again then. Not a ton of thickness gained. I did prune in the fall though to hopefully start getting some better branching.

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@ndavila80 @Bonsai_Bentley Howdy so I visited the property and they left 5 vines in place. I first went for the roots and like I thought, it was about 3 succulent like roots off to the side and then a main tap root downward. Not good.

So I thought, f*ck it :smiley: according to Vojtilla, if you stick the areas where the vine has been cut back and there are buds there you can place them into substrate and they should grow? I believe he said that this was callous tissue and so should be open to either growing branch or roots depending on the environment.
So I pretty much cut up 10 interesting sections of the vine and placed them into containers yesterday. They whole ordeal took 4 hours :smiley: as some of the very abstract pieces were very difficult to tie down into containers.
I have no idea if this will work but I’m really hoping so as they would be very beautiful and twisted trees.

I also made a light root hormone soak for 36 hours as I didn’t have time to pot them up. I chopped them up Saturday, placed them into a tub with water + root hormone with the callous tissue/buds in the same position they would be in their containers. And, yesterday afternoon I potted them up.
They are now in a plastic greenhouse and the temperatures are rising so I hope this all adds to them taking root.

What do you guys think?

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I think I’m mad that you didn’t include pics of this awesome project lol. That sounds awesome man. We really should be using vines more often in bonsai. You really didn’t have much to lose other than time, so that’s dope that you went for it.

I will say that the grape vines I collected had basically no roots on them. Just like one little tiny shoot on one and they survived. I have some crape myrtle stumps that are literally just flat cut sections of a branch. Two of the three survived. When I looked at the one that eventually fizzled out I found that roots grew at the base of what was an old branch. Clues me into the fact that that’s where the meristematic tissue lives and informs my future endeavors.

Sounds like you’re tapping into the same concept. Can’t wait to see your results!

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Sounds like you had a great deal of fun, collecting some interesting trunk lines amongst the grape vines. Grapes are very adept and i believe many of your cuttings will root, make sure to keep the substrate moist but not completely saturated. I have a few smaller shohin size vines that were started via the cutting process from the vine in this post. If the weather improves today I will attempt to take some photos of the smaller that were started as cuttings.

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Thanks for the reminder. Now is the time to take grape cuttings - before they leaf out.
You have a greenhouse - but I wonder if the UK practice of sweating the potted cuttings in a black plastic bag might be useful as well.

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I’m black baggin a collected hawthorn that was collected 14 days ago to see if that helps, maybe it could help with the vines as well. I grabbed another one right next to it this past weekend and it’s much more opened though. hmmm, wonder if because it had more time on it’s former root stock it was able to push more into the buds?

Cool to hear about the positive feedback with your grape vine cuttings :slight_smile: let’s see what happens. Today we hit 20C so I think it could have been about 30 in the plastic green house :smiley: that oughta sweat it pretty good.