Frost!
Yes, my biggest fear regarding the unusually warm early spring came about this week. Two nights of frost, and our vines in various stages of budding out.
The first night was just a slight frost - a little whitening on some of the grass, but nothing spectacular. However this was enough to cause some damage on our smallest vines, in growtubes.
The second night, however, was much worse - it was zero when I woke up with a hard layer of frost on the cars, roof etc.
Fearing the worst, I went out to all three of our vineyards to assess the damage. Luckily, our two producing vineyards are a little later than our estate vines at the winery. Neither vineyard appears to have much damage. Our vineyard in Cowichan Bay suffered quite a bit of frost damage to the baby vines, luckily grapes are almost weeds, and they have defense mechanisms - they usually have secondary and tertiary buds, which won’t open unless the main buds are gone (like frosted!). In which case in a few weeks they will start opening up. Bottom line, our vines like that will still grow this year, and probably won’t be too badly affected. Our high hanging vines (the ones that did well last year) don’t seem to have had much damage at all, so we should still have a small crop of our Cab-Foch, and hybrid whites after all.
So, we dodged a bullet - mostly - although I won’t know for a few more weeks whether we lost any plants due to the cold snap . All part of agricultural living…. Weather can be very upredictable, and we knew from the start that the warm winter/spring would either lead to a great year, or a terrible one, depending on whether we got a late spring frost that damaged our tender vines.
Mark