It's hard to tellfrom this photo, but this wonderful thompson grape vine is growing like crazy. The vine on the ground is over 6ft long!!!

About a week ago or so our Arizona weather dropped into the high 90'sfor a few days and this thompson grape shoot out everywhere. Today it's back to 106 degrees which I think is a little on the hot side for grapes. They seem to grow best when it's around 85-90 degrees.

Out of all our grapes, (thompson, perlette, flame and cabernet sauvignon grapes), our thompson grapes do best in the super high heat and sun of Arizona. However, that's not to say that our other grapes are not doing well, it's just that the thompsons seem to be the most vigorous.

Soon this grape vine will be over a wooden window arbor type thing...it's  just to hot to work on building it right now :)

The rain saved our flame grape vine

This here is a grape vine that was on it's last leg due to the heat. This grape is the varity called "Flame" and taste really good picked ight off the vine. This little grape vine though was almost dead not long ago, but as you can see it has grown many new leaves and is now thriving once again.

It was purchased in July at a reptuable nursery and it was in full sun when I bought it. Eventhough it was in full sun where I bought it, it did not like our Western expoursure at all. It only took one really hot day above 115 degrees and this grape vine was fried and dropped all it's leaves. I quickly moved it into afternoon shade on our East side where it started to grow some small and pittiful leaves. I truley thought it was going to die.

The first big storm to hit our area happened while we were out of town not that long ago. We when got back home and looked at the yard and garden to survey the damage, (monsoons can wreck havoc on your yard and gardens here if not protected), we noticed how great this flame grape vine looks.