North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[road's end farm <organic101@linkny.com>]

On Apr 8, 2007, at 11:12 AM, Jenny Ruth Yasi wrote:

> Snow fell off my roof and totally broke my Niagara white seedless (yummy) 
> grape, right at the old part of the vine. The old part was getting too long 
> anyway, but sigh, hate to lose the whole vine. Anyway to save it?

It will almost certainly produce new growth from under the break; very likely lots of it. Select the canes you want from the new growth to replace the old trunk, and remove the extras. 

If you think it was grafted, select your canes from above the graft; but Niagara may be own-rooted (though I don't know about seedless Niagara), in which case you might do best to select from new canes starting as close to the ground as possible, and remove (saw off) any remaining old trunk. 

I don't think Niagara will bear on a sucker (again, I don't know about the seedless version); so if you've lost the whole top of the vine, you might not get any fruit this year. But you should eventually have a happy new vine aboveground, with the benefit of all the old root system for it to draw on.

--Rivka
Finger Lakes NY; zone 5 mostly