Bud Burst!

A bit of sunshine over the last two or three days and the slightly warmer temperatures have worked wonders for the grapevines; the sap is rising and buds are bursting out all over the place now. When I get a moment I'll celebrate with a bottle of home-made wine.

I still don't expect to get much of a crop of grapes this year but next year, year three, with a bit of luck and with nine three year old vines on the plot and a spare vine at home, I should be able to start wine-making on an industrial scale. I can't wait.

Life in the freezer

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.