Biological tinkering.

How did you spend your Sunday? Mine was spent field-budding root stocks over to Cabernet sauvignon, Pinot gris and Syrah.
Unfortunately, there are unexpected casualties each year in a vineyard. Last year it was seemingly the mission of Vinodog 2 to prematurely dispatch a few plants to vine-heaven and it was primarily these that I was grafting today. However, there were also some gopher casualties and a couple of deaths from unknown causes.
The photograph on my post about field-budding last year (Sept. 20th), showed the taped up graft. This year I decided to show the graft, sans grafting tape. You can see that the bud is a pretty close fit on the trunk of the rootstock. This is very important as the cambiums of the donor and host should match perfectly to ensure that the non-specific cells in the vines will ultimately become cambium cells, and that the trunk will accept the chip bud. I won't know if the grafts were successful until next April or so.
My knees ached a little bit from all the getting up and down, but all the aches were forgotten after a cold Sierra Nevada Torpedo Extra IPA. I fared better than poor Ron Combo, who from now on will be buying wine it seems, rather than helping with its production.