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Sunday, July 9, 2023

Chardonnay Recovery from May Frost Damage

In preparation for this blogpost, I was looking back at the blogpost on June 2, Vintage 2023: June Doings, in that posting were photos of the Chardonnay rows that we were working on showing all of the dead young shoots that we were removing, the after effects of the mid-May frost.
Fast forward three weeks and the Chardonnay amazingly look like this:
On July 4th, we were busy shoot tucking, shoot removal and cleaning the graft union where all kinds of tiny shoots have decided to bud out! We are encouraged with the Chardonnay's desire to grow because that means that next year, we will have some nice fruiting canes. We are also seeing berryset in the Chardonnay which is another encouraging sign.
However, with every day that passes, the shoots grow taller, making the shoot tucking a bit more difficult and the lowering of the netting to the lowest slot on our linepost even more imperative. So far, we (our friends) have lowered the netting on 4 of the 8 rows of Chardonnay, with four more rows to go.
Meanwhile, my husband is busy with weeding our 36 rows of vines. Unlike in the past where he was using his hand held weeder to weed our vineyard, the purchase of the Fischer Twister has facilitated this job. So, unlike the month he took to hand weed whack the vineyard, with the Fischer twister, the weeding goes so quickly that within 2 days, he only has 7 more rows to weed.
These incremental advances in how we do vineyard work is helping us but this is the time of the year that Mother Nature blesses us with hot and humid work days! This is farming!

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