When I’m stuck in the house on a rainy day with nothing to do, it never fails that I pickup a book to read. Lately, I’ve been re-reading Lon Rombough’s The Grape Grower. I’m amazed by how much I’ve learned since I first bought this book. Reading it now, I’m thinking ‘oh yeah, it makes sense now’. If you don’t own this book or if you are looking for a great reference for growing grapes anywhere, this is it. Click on the image below to find out more about the book.
Surfing the web today, I came across the mention of a new winegrape bred in Minnesota – named Chisago. It is a red wine grape bred by the folks at WineHaven Winery in Chisago City, MN. I found this writeup on it and it sounds like yet another promising vine for cold climate wine grape growers.
A couple years back my 3 Sabrevois vines mysteriously withered and died. I had my suspicions – mainly that ground squirrels had chewed through their roots. Anyway, I cut the vines back and kept them watered, but nothing came back. I had completely given up on them. Just last week, I noticed a few sprouts of a tiny plant that looked very ‘grapeviney’. A week and several inches of rain later, I can confidently say that they are grapevines and based on the leaf, I’m also confident that they are my long-lost Sabrevois vines attempting yet another comeback. This time I am prepared to help them along. Below are a few shots of the plants in question.
Closeup #1 of tiny Sabrevois vine
Closeup #2 of tiny Sabrevois vine
Closeup #3 of tiny Sabrevois vine
Since we hadn’t received rain since last weekend, I ran the irrigation on the Prairie Star and Foch vines today. On top of that we received some unexpected rain this evening – probably about 1/2 inch total.
With the forecasted temps expected in the mid-80’s to low 90s this week, I expect that I’ll start to see huge leaps in vine growth. Already this past week I witnessed a recuperating Prairie Star vine that I had pruned to one shoot put on 4 feet of growth in two days! With the rise in humidity, I need to begin keeping an eye out for disease.
This season I have planted a few new vines and am also working to resurrect a few other vines. It used to be that I didn’t have to worry about too much nibbling of the new growth – what chewing the deer did didn’t amount to much and there were no rabbits to speak of.
Well, we now are in the midst of a rabbit population explosion. So a few of my new vines have been chewed down repeatedly. For obvious reasons the rabbits and for the most part the deer don’t mess with the older, taller vines. So today I was back out in the vineyard completing the installation of grow-tubes on the immature/recuperating vines. A nice side effect of using the grow tubes is the enhanced growth the vines experience.