Grapes at Bunch Closure

Some of our grapes are at the bunch closure stage:

While it is very heartening to see our grapes looking this healthy, some of our other bunches suffered the lack of rain that we experienced during the months of June and July before our irrigation system came on line. In the photo below, you can see that some of the grapes in the bunch have raisinated.

What we have been doing is to take tweezers and gently remove these raisinated grapes.

We can do this because after we did our Cluster Counting, we have determined that we have approximately 800 grape clusters. After counting clusters, we were able to decide just how much netting we should purchase, but when we called our supplier, he was all out of the netting that we used last year to protect our grapes. A short period of panic set in, but stay tuned for how we solved our problem of the lack of netting.