Wednesday, May 6, 2015

Leaf Out

An early May sunrise slowly burns morning fog from the lake.

Guiseppi, one of our resident mute swans, reaches his long neck up into a newly leafed-out willow tree.


Just yesterday, it was colored with gold catkins. Today brings fresh green leaves.

He strips the tender new foliage from a weeping bough, and dips his spring salad into the water before eating.


Unlike geese, who grub voraciously through the turf for victuals, swans will only accept food submerged in water.

After a winter of sustenance pulled from sediment at the bottom of the lake, Guiseppe seems invigorated by his meal of fresh green leaves.


Those of us who tend the vineyard know just how he feels.

All winter long, we tromped through snow, pruning dormant brown vines. Spring brings mud, and the promise of new life.

And so May has dawned, and brought with it, welcome warm temperatures.

The soil warms, and welcomes the new vines  we nudge into it.

After a brutally cold winter, and a relatively cool and wet spring, the growth we see all around us in May is welcome, and rapid.

As if on cue, our earliest budding grape variety, Marquette, broke bud on May 1st.

Marquette block, North Vineyard, May 1, 2015
Each day, additional buds unfurl, slowly clothing the North Vineyard in fresh green foliage.

These warming afternoons will bring rapidly elongating shoots. We'll likely see several inches of new growth a day later this week, as temperatures climb into the eighties.


Elsewhere on the property, our later budding varieties continue to slumber. Swelling buds will continue to break open over the next several weeks.

In the fence rows and the orchard, blossoms abound.

Honey bees luxuriate in golden pollen, in apple blossoms that change from carmine to pink to white as they open.


Every year, all of this happens.

But the sequence is never precisely the same. 

Although this spring seems cool and damp, our Marquette vines broke bud nine days earlier than they did in 2014.

Bred in frigid Minnesota, it's as if our vines couldn't stand to miss a single May afternoon of pleasant Canton sun. I think Giuseppe, as well us we who tend the vines, feel exactly the same way.


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