I don’t usually post two vineyard blogs so close together but things have been happening that I want to get off my chest, so here’s the second one.*
To think that about this time last year we were standing in our vineyard looking at the vines and thinking what jolly fine fellows we were. How clever we were to grow grapes against all the odds. Consider that warm glow officially over. I’m not sure whether I can bear to give a pictorial representation of just how bad things are this year. We will see how it goes. It’s above, In simple terms, red is good, green not dead yet and black, had it.
This is definitely a writing as therapy blog but also, if possible, a problem-solving / planning activity. I clearly need a plan. Funny thing is what I’m about to do is what I spent my professional life doing as a psychologist working in the area of children with behaviour problems.
In simplified form it went like this – write down as much of the problem as you can. Get it all out on paper. Get it out of your head where it goes round and round – and round, doing no earthly good. Then take each bit of the problem and think of as many solutions as possible. Evaluate each one for its practicality. Devise a plan you’re happy with.
A person with troubles, which we surely have, needs a plan, a strategy. At that point you can stop with the round and round in ever-decreasing circles bit. Writing out the problem part of the exercise will be a jumble but that’s OK. This is part of the therapy. The sorting out bit comes later.
This is what our vineyard problem looks like in no particular order. Many of our mature vines are dead. Far more than I thought when I decided to order 25 more for next spring. I will need 50 at least. These have died over a period of time and mostly I think the rabbits are to blame. It’s particularly upsetting when the mature vines die.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I mentioned in the previous blog that on our last visit the vines looked like they had been weed-killed. We pulled off all the dead and dying leaves and left, puzzled to say the least.
We also de-leafed to expose what grapes we had and hoped we hadn’t taken off too many leaves. This is a perennial problem not one peculiar to this year. So far this part of the strategy seems to be working but early days, they could still all die I suppose. Doesn’t do to be too cheerful.
Alongside the dying leaves we have a lot of leaves that seem to be diseased. It’s not easy trying to identify the actual disease or even that is what it is. It’s getting late in the year and in these parts autumn comes early, so they might just be dying of natural causes. They have a variety of spots and blotches and some leaves are losing colour, going yellow or in one case bright red. Possibly a soil nutrient deficiency of some kind.
We haven’t been great at keeping on top of the soil analysis part of owning a vineyard, nor at fertilising the vines. In fact trying to remediate this is where many of our problems seem to begin. See last blog for more details of this part of the adventure.
In addition to all of the above, the bottom half of the vineyard have hardly any grapes. As you might be able to see from the chart. This is a very big difference to last year. We are puzzled. It might be that they are more exposed to the wind which has been more influential (in a bad way) than last year.
Another possible answer to this part of the problem is that we pruned them badly. There’s something about grapes only growing on last year’s new growth. I think. We didn’t leave any new growth when we pruned them over the winter so that may be relevant. Also you might remember from past blogs we didn’t prune all the vines the year before. The top third which we did prune is giving us grapes right now.
Of course it’s another aspect of the bad place we find ourselves in, that there’s no guarantee that the grapes we do have will ripen. They’re miles behind last year’s at this stage. They would be you say, last year we had the hottest August since records began. This summer has been just an average British summer. Also, while we’re on with the weather, my friend Nick, the gamekeeper, who knows about these things, reminds us that June was warm and wet. Perfect conditions for disease to flourish. Is this the explanation for the black spots on some grapes?
I thought the one thing we had in our favour in this part of the world was that the wind kept the vineyard disease-free. Maybe not. Skipping ahead to possible solutions, I might thicken up the willow windbreaks. This could be easily done when it comes to chopping back the willows. Just stick the lopped off branches into the soil and watch them grow. The irony then would be that improving the wind-breaks might make the vines more susceptible to disease.
So after some thought here’s the plan. It’s not what we might have called an elegant solution but there’s possible actions in there somewhere. Needs a bit more work.
Double the windbreaks / buy new vines to replace dead ones / check rabbit guards / send leaves and soil off for analysis and add whatever is needed / monitor for disease next year more closely.
Just to add insult to injury, the latest copy of The Grapepress magazine arrived. This issue featured the awards ceremony for English and Welsh wines. All these people in their tuxs and bow-ties, smiling at the camera, feeling very good about life I imagine. Seems a very long way from our windswept Yorkshire Dales hillside. My apologies to those of you attracted by our advert in The Oldie. I’m sure things will improve, just not sure when.
PS. For those sadists among you and those with excellent eyesight below is a version of the vineyard chart in 2014, a year after the vines were first planted. It’s a little bit sobering. And you see what I mean about record-keeping.
*There will be another one shortly so keep reading to find out how this drama unfolds.
