Yesterday, May 17th, we were patting ourselves in the back, having finished pruning and laying down the fruiting canes and removing the kicker canes in the entire vineyard. We were moving on to the next step which is to disbud and clean the area around our graft union.
We were working in our Axerrois, taking photos of what we were doing:
We had a hard frost on
February 3 and 4 and when we did a survey of the buds, we were seeing a lot of primary bud death across all of our varieties but especially in our Chenin Blanc.
Now that we were past budbreak, we were encouraged by the growth we were seeing and we were even seeing flower buds that were tucked into the growing tips of the new shoots.
On the evening of May 17th, the weather forecast was calling for frost events in the northwest and northeast corners of our state but when we woke up this morning and listened to the news, it appeared that the frost warnings were also for the southeast corner of the state where our vineyard is located.
We went to the vineyard around 9 and when we got there, this is what we saw:
We were at the south end of our vineyard and knew immediately that our vineyard had been hit by frost. We checked out the north end of the vineyard and oddly enough the vines there were much better.
For now, we are leaving the affected shoots alone. May has been a very dry month and the forecast is calling for rain on Saturday so we'll see what that will do for the vines.
My husband and I have lived here for 39 years and we have never experienced a frost event in mid-May!
No comments:
Post a Comment