Your grapes will be fine. It's normal to remove 80-90% of a grape plant. From now on, prune in the spring, just as the buds break on the very ends of the branches. In the meantime, take an hour or so and study up on how to prune grapes for fruit bearing. I'd probably put in some posts and some strong wire trellis to support some of the weight of the plant and to keep at least a portion of the weight off the deck. By the end of next summer, that plant will be enormous... even bigger than this year. And next year, you will wait and prune it the next spring.

You didn't hurt it. Here my Buddleia White Ball die all the way back to the ground and they still grow back just fine. Like you mention, they get no bigger than about 2' tall and wide. Here it has also been the longest lived butterfly bush I have. The same plants have been growing now for 8 years. Most others die out from our wet winters/springs, even though they are all growing on a sandy hillside.

Just to pile it on.....only kidding, because a couple of us have already made this mistake and we feel your pain.....we've learned that the California Mediterranean climate produces different growth and therefore calls for different pruning than Jolly Old England. In NorCal, our spring flush is a full month sooner, meaning our blooming season is probably three months longer than southern England's. My part of Marin County is on a latitude of Sicily. It rains there all spring and summer and fall. It doesn't rain here at all most of of the spring, all summer and fall. Our roses need their foliage to shade the canes. We have no idea how intense our sun is, but I can attest to the fact that some of my best performing roses are blooming under shade cloth. And one last thing. If you planted "English Roses," that's another problem. They may have great marketing, but for the California climate, there are far better producers out there, the kind that are never without bloom. They are evergreen and expect to have their leaves year round or close to it.

Great thread. I've made many mistakes over the years. When I needed drapes for 5 very tall and wide windows, I thought I would save money by making them myself. I ended up buying 30+ yards of a synthetic moire on sale at a chain fabric store, along with drapery lining, and after making up one panel, found that even with lining, the light coming through the fabric made the color brighter and kind of gaudy. The bolt is still in an upstairs closet, and I found 96" crushed voile panels online that I like very much for about $20 each. Lesson: keep it simple. A couple of years ago, I hired a local designer mainly to help me choose paint colors and advise on accessories/tweaking. In the master bedroom, I had some custom green silk drapes that I never liked that much, and she talked me into spending the money to have them interlined and a printed fabric border added, along with custom shams with the same fabric. I had already spent $2000 on the drapes, and now I spent another $1000, and I still didn't like them. I took them down, and they and the matching euro shams are in the closet in the guest room. I put up natural linen-look semi sheers from target, and I like them better. Lesson: keep it simple, and don't throw good money after bad. We weren't using our formal dining room much, and the same designer suggested moving the dining furniture into one end of our large living room, and making the old dining room into a den and the old den into a home office, which was really needed. Since I wanted to replace the old LR sofa anyway, I moved the den furniture into the living room and had a custom ($$$)sofa made for the new den. It was not a huge space, and we tried to keep the sofa scaled down. When it arrived, the fabric was gorgeous, the style just what I wanted, but the seat depth was so shallow that it was not very comfortable. I had also slipcovered the old den chairs to go with the new sofa ($$). I ended up moving the new sofa to the living room, where it was more appropriate for perching ladies than lounging TV viewers, and now none of the colors I had chosen (with help paid for by the hour) for the LR and new den would work. Plus, the newly slipcovered den chairs (on swivel rocker bases, I love them) don't work that well with the old sofa color. Fortunately, I hadn't painted yet. Lessons: Don't buy furniture without sitting on it. Choose paint colors after you are certain of your fabrics. Don't let your designer talk you into stuff you don't really need. Keep your major pieces fairly neutral. The worst was the master bath update. I had chosen tile for the walls and floor, and the tile vendor gave me a couple of names for the installation. The guy with the higher quote was very highly recommended but I went with the other guy because he said he could also do some other work I needed done. Even though I had a gut feeling I was making a mistake. He did a horrible job on the tile, broke my toilet, and disappeared. I had to buy more wall tile and pay another contractor to replace it, and I'm still stuck with a bad job on the floor. Between the cost of doing the job, redoing the job, and buying a new toilet, I could have had the better contractor do the job, and replaced the vanity and sink as well, and upgraded to a better tile. Lessons: A jack of all trades might be a master of none. Go with your gut. Ask contractors for their license numbers and CHECK IT online with your state to see if it's in effect. I've made more, but these are the recent highlights, LOL. I feel better having confessed them here.