QOTD: How do you grow seedless grapes?

Today's Question Of The Day comes from six year old Lolli.

I've been known to buy seeded grapes because they're cheaper than seedless grapes. Costco on occasion sells these huge red seeded grapes that can pass for small plums on a vine. While it is a pain to slice each one open and pull out each and every seed in the grape (these grapes average about 4-6 seeds apiece), the grapes are sweet and they're usually much cheaper.

After finishing a huge batch of these with my family, I found seedless grapes from one of our local markets for a fairly reasonable price. I splurged and purchases the seedless grapes and enjoyed the luxury of simply washing and eating my grapes.

"Mommy, how come these grapes don't have seeds," Lolli had asked me after noticing her grapes didn't have the 'gaping mouth' as telltale evidence that there was necessary seed extraction.

"Well, some grapes have seeds and some don't," was my brilliant reply. After awhile, I thought that explanation was a bit lame so I added, "just like some mangoes have green skin and others have yellow skin."

She seemed somewhat satisfied with that response or else she was simply enjoying the unadulterated grapes. However, the silence didn't last too long as she asked me a question I simply didn't have the answer to.

"Well, if there is no seed, how do you grow seedless grapes?"

"You know, I don't really know. That's a great question," I told her and as I have said on several occasions in my math classes, "Let me look into that and see if I can find out something for you."

So, thanks to Google, I've skimmed a couple of articles/postings on how seedless grapes are grown (by clippings from existing seedless grape plants). It's a fairly involved process which can be better explained in this ezine article. The long and short of it though, is that I don't think there will be any seedless grapes growing in our backyard.