Dormant Bud

On March 11, we went to the vineyard to check on the status of our vines. The vineyard was no longer snow covered, but there were some patches of snow in the northwest corner of the vineyard where it was obviously much colder than other areas of the field. Surprisingly, it was a warm day but the field was still saturated with the melted snow and made walking the field a mucky business.

We were able to get a few photos of the dormant vines including this little dormant bud. We did not bring our clippers with us on that day but on Saturday, March 22, we took our clippers to see if we could discern the status of our vines. We began with clipping some of the sacrificial canes and we could see that although some of the canes were brown throughout, many of the canes had green interiors! We still have to do a bud count to test for winter injury but we have decided to cut our canes back down to two buds for this year's growth. I'll be taking closeups of the buds and will post them on this blog. Can't wait for early bud swell!