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Sunday, February 21, 2016

Midwinter Check on our Bud Hardiness

On January 9, we went to our vineyard to cut some canes to send to our nursery. They will be using our budwood to make the tall grafted vines for our Chenin Blanc so they needed to ensure that our vines were "clean", that means free of viruses. Our nursery checked our canes for viruses and pronounced them to be clean so the next step is to send them enough budwood to produce approximately 1000 grafted vines for planting in 2017.
This winter has been on the unusually mild side, but we did have a weekend when temperatures went below zero. It seems that Mother Nature had something special in store for the Valentine's Day weekend. This winter, it was temperatures that were in the negative numbers with windchills bringing the temperature to -30 degrees Fahrenheit.
With all this vacillation in temperatures, we wanted to check our buds to see if they had made it through the coldest temperatures so that when we ship them, they will be healthy. We used an Exacto knife and a camera with a macro lens and we were able to get some photos that showed that our buds were healthy:
Next step, cutting enough canes to provide our nursery with budwood for our grafts! Luckily, we have some warmer weather coming up.

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