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In the past few weeks some of my local grocery stores have been receiving an influx of table grapes. I have found a few varieties that have some exceptionally great flavor. Black Corinth, red grapes, and some green grapes. Is there any possibility that a grape bunch (of course after you picked all the grapes off of it) could root? I currently have a semi-sterilized bare grape bunch in a small container of distilled water and honey solution. The grape bunch stem was dipped in Garden Safe Rooting Hormone before being placed in the water and honey solution. There was a decent piece of the peduncle and cane (shoot) still attached to the grape bunch. I have experience with cloning tomato plants, peppers, and even pumpkins, but grapes seem to be a new challenge for me. I also thought about using some gibberellic acid as a rooting hormone. But at about $25-$50 per gram, well that could get quite expensive. Why am I doing this you may ask, well the grape vines are not available for purchase.

Please let me know if this is possible. Or if there is another way I should attempt this experiment.

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  • All the vines I have bought were on grafted root stocks. Jan 18, 2021 at 1:32

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OK I'll bite, and to cut to the chase I would figure this will likely fail. My reasons are these: when we normally take cuttings for vine propagation we take a section of a vegetative stem with a dormant bud and section of cane below the bud, we wound the cane section and provide bottom heat. Roots grow from the wounded cambium and this triggers the bud out of dormancy. One thing your account does not say is if you have a bud and what condition that bud is in, which are critical factors. The pedicel is irrelevant and can be removed since it will not assist in propagation except perhaps for carbohydrates.

If I examine my grapevines at the node where a fruiting branch extends I see a section of cane with the pedicel on one side and a busy vegetative shoot on the opposite side of the stem where a sub-branch expanded. So it is quite possible that you do have such a bud, the question now is what condition that bud is in and its surrounding tissues. Absent the bud there is nothing to expand into a shoot even if you do get roots. And if the cane was not allowed to progress to maturity it is possible that even if the bud exists it will be immature and incapable of expansion.

If I recall correctly we try to avoid such buds when selecting material for propagation, preferring those nodes where there was no fruiting activity. There may or may not be a good reason for this, and it is possible this is variety dependent. So my experience tells me there are more reasons why this would fail rather than succeed. Nevertheless, good luck, and prove me wrong.

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    yeah I think it isn't very likely to work... there is a chance that maybe some tissue culture could find a very small meristem in there somewhere and with some hormonal coaxing you could get a plant... but since these are all probably protected varieties, that wouldn't probably be technically legal... and you would just be way better off buying the same sort of vines from whoever has the legal permission to cultivate them. Aug 8, 2019 at 17:24
  • Thank you for the responses. I am fully aware that the odds are against me in this experiment. Nonetheless, my curious mind wants to see what could happen, even if I already feel the inevitable coming on. I'll be sure to look through the packages of grapes next time I am at the grocery store to see if I can find a bunch with a node mistakenly left attached to it.
    – user26653
    Aug 9, 2019 at 2:06
  • @giuseppe not likely. As table grapes these will be cut at the pedicel by hand pruners, not mechanically harvested. Cutting out an entire node means discarding all the vine above it. A very high end retailer may have some with a 6" stem attached so that the end can be submerged in water, which keeps the cut bunch more turgid. Likely available at the farm if at all, but very costly in terms of use of the resulting vine. Aug 9, 2019 at 12:26

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