Garden tips: Even home gardeners can grow grapes

One can grow grapes in the Colorado home garden.

Plant Select Saint Theresa grape vine is a hardy plant for our alkaline soils, producing nearly seedless clusters of table grapes on one-year-old wood.

As with all grapes, proper pruning and trellising is necessary for good production. The single curtain technique is a method for establishing leader and side branches for new plants over the first seasons of growth. Refer to Growing Grapes in the Colorado Garden: CMG Notes #764 for instructions, which can be found at www.cmg.colostate.edu.

One person’s weed is another person’s salad. Common purslane (Portulaca oleracea) is a fleshy ground-hugging annual with red stems and a single taproot resembling a jade plant. With rain, it will spring up just about anywhere, even in the cracks of your driveway. It usually escapes preemergent herbicides. Best control measures is to pull it out by the taproot and do not let it go to seed. It is edible, with a taste resembling spinach or watercress. Don’t eat purslane that has been treated with chemicals. Because it’s a summer annual, it will die with the first frost.

Take advantage of end-of-summer perennial and shrub sales. Plants benefit from the warm soil of late summer to establish good root systems before going dormant. The exception is evergreens, which do better if planted in the spring. Most perennials are in survival mode come late August — deadhead and water, leaving seedheads of hollyhock, columbine, mallow and foxglove for reseeding.

Anne Wuerslin has received training through Colorado State University Extension's Master Gardener program and is a Master Gardener volunteer for Larimer County.