Brrrr! It's cold. In fact it's bloody freezing. After spending two days shovelling snow off the road outside my house and excavating my car from the glacier that had formed on my drive I attempted to drive to work on Friday morning. I managed to move just four inches (sideways). The rear brakes on the car had frozen fast and I was going nowhere fast. According to the car's thermometer the outside temperature was minus 12 degrees centigrade. I have never known it ever get so cold previously. The temperature hardly got above freezing point over the weekend but I did eventually manage to get the car moving again. This morning, when I set off to work, at 7.27am, the temperature was, as you may be able to see from the photograph below, minus 17.5 degrees centigrade and it was only 4 degrees warmer when I arrived home tonight.
I am seriously worried that this prolonged exceptionally cold spell will be fatal to my grapevines. I did carefully select the Rondo variety of vine for its proven winter hardiness but I never thought that in their first year these young vines would be exposed to such cold temperatures. In fact, I never thought that I would experience such cold without making a trip to the Arctic.
I can only hope that the deep layer of snow which covers the vines has provided them with some insulation against the harsh cold. Only time will tell and it will be an anxious wait until next April to discover whether or not any of the vines have survived the Winter.
Posts
Best of luck with the vines, that's a real shock for them in their first year.
ReplyDelete