Grafting and rock excursion

Tuesday, April 17

Today I met Cliff at the train station where we checked on the grubs living in the plastic bins and chomping on sprouts. Looks like they’re eating the clover roots quite nicely. Soon we’ll be digging them up to see if they’ve been ingesting the milky spore as well. We then took a trip over to the community garden where Cliff taught me two different ways of grafting. For the first, he used this expensive but neat tool to punch out notches into the vines—one on the vine he was grafting to and one on the vine he was grafting with. The two notches fit together perfectly. Then he wrapped electrical tape around the puzzle-piece notch so that it would stay. We were grafting one of his hybrids onto a male native vine on the side of the old feeding barn. Once he had clipped the ends of the native vine to initiate the grafting, however, the vine started to bleed. Since this is detrimental to the whole grafting process (as the bleeding can prevent the notches from lining up well), he sawed at the base of the vine to cause it to bleed down there, and (due to gravity) the ends stopped bleeding. Now he can graft without worrying about it bleeding through the tape. The trick to grafting is to line up the zylem of each so that the plant the nutrients from the plant can reach the new vine. This can be tricky to do and is why whenever you graft you cross your fingers that it will work. For the second method, which he used mostly when the vine where he was grafting on was a bit thick, he cut a notch manually at the end of the vine using a knife and wedged the ends of his hybrid cutting (“weegie” J) to fit into the notch of the native vine. Since his hybrid vine cuttings were pretty small, he wedged two in side-by-side lining them up with the native vine along their edges. Then he wrapped tape around them and sprayed them with this grafting tar that was supposed to seal it up even more (smelly stuff). We got through two vines (well, he did, I got to hold the tar spray) before we headed back to the train station to meet up with Dr Rebecca Ambers and her Earth Materials class to go out along the James river in Lynchburg and look at rocks! Since Cliff was asked to come as a consultant (he got his Ph.D. in rocks) I got to tail along. We drove around and studied the different rocks found in the piedmont region of the Blue-ridge mountains south of the Shenancoah National Park Area. It was actually kind of cool trying to identify the various rock types and checking out the stratification and metamorphic folds, ect. The Blue-ridge really is an old mountain chain. Neato.