Planting

April, a month of blue skies and pleasant breezes, has come to an end.

Red maple buds and golden willow catkins against an April sky.

In the vineyard, the vines are doing exactly what we want them to do in this pleasant, amiable month:

Slumbering.

Those who grow grapes for a living track the phenology, or growth stages, of the vines each season with something known as the Eichorn-Lorenz scale. Right now, we are at what's known as the doeskin stage of bed swell: the buds are swollen, but not open, with brownish wool clearly visible.

A "doeskin" bud on the verge of burst.

A few more warm sunny afternoons, and the first tender green leaves will emerge.

In Canton, Ohio, we are subject to potential spring freezes well into May, so it's reassuring to have reached the end of April and find our emerging grape leaves still tightly folded, insulated with doe skin.

The only green grape leaves we see so far are on a few baby plants we propagated in the greenhouse over the winter, ready to move from protected shelter to the great outdoors.

A young Vignoles vine propagated over the winter from a dormant cutting.

So in the lull while we await the unfurling of  leaves out in the real world, we find ourselves looking ahead to a few harvests down the road:

We are planting bare root grape plants, which won't bear fruit for another two to three seasons.

The soil is finally warm enough, and we dig a big enough hole in the crumbly loam to accommodate the ample roots of bare root plants we received in the mail.

A bundle of bare root Vignoles vines awaits transplant.

The wine grapes we have chosen to establish in our vineyard have proven remarkably hardy, but every year there are just a few that don't make it, and need replaced. With several acres and thousands of vines, even just a fraction of a percent of loss can mean several pleasant April days of digging, and planting.

In the vineyard, the leaves emerge before the subtle yellow grape flowers, which we likely won't see until June.

But in the orchard, flowers precede the leaves, so we close April enjoying apple and pear blossoms decorating each tree.

Pear blossoms in the orchard.

With the turn of the calendar page, tomorrow ushers in a month of even more rapid growth and change.

In May, doeskin will give way to delicate pink and light green grape leaves, which if they survive a late frost, will grow into the enormous tough leaves and rampant shoots we will struggle all season to contain.

In the vineyard, it's always just a little bit hard to let pleasant April go, even as we plant for future bountiful harvests.

Wild apple blossoms decorate a fence row.

St. Giuseppe

This year, like last, on the first day of spring a mushy late season snow fell in the pre-dawn hours.

Remnants of winter ice clung to the coldest corners of an otherwise warming lake.

In the vineyard our growing piles of winter vine prunings were blanketed once more in snow.

Marquette prunings in the North Vineyard

Despite the snow, however, the first indications of spring arrived in the vineyard just as they should:

For months buried in a thick snow pack, the turf in the vineyard rows is no longer ice crusted. It is now soft (and muddy) as the soil begins to thaw.

As as the soil thaws, capillary action in the vines pulls excess moisture from our old farm soil, a currently water-logged silty loam.

As the temperatures begin to rise, each of our thousands of vineyard pruning cuts begins to bleed: a good and welcome sign that the vines are alive and waking up after one of the coldest recorded winters in our region.

As the soil awakens, the plants will follow.

Down in the marsh, the (aptly named) skunk cabbages melt their own microclimate, sheaths of red mottled leaves arising steamily through the mire. They will bear early (and malodorous) flower, weeks before those plants on drier ground have even begun to show green.

And of course the vineyard animals are newly astir.

The killdeer have returned to chirp noisily through the vineyard rows, where they will build pebble nests under the vines.

Bluebirds cheerfully negotiate for the choicest knotholes in the trellis poles.

And of course, seasonal drama unfolds amongst the waterfowl.

Giuseppe, our large male swan, hurumphed his way through the vineyard yesterday, in hot pursuit of an errant Canada goose.

Silly goose.

Anyone who's seen Giuseppe glide regally across our lake knows that this is undeniably Giuseppe's terrain.

You don't just show up with your bags packed, as the goose pair did, expecting to build a down feather nest under a pine tree.

If Giuseppe looked especially proud and puffed up yesterday, it might be because he knew it was St. Giuseppe Day.

Giuseppe and Gina

Falling on the eve of the Vernal Equinox, the Feast of San Giuseppe is traditionally a time to set an elaborate table in honor of St. Joseph, patron saint of children and of families.

And so, in the vineyard, it seems fitting on this day to pause for a few minutes, and watch resolute old Giuseppe defend his family home.

The first day of spring, under gray skies and just a little bit of snow.

The Vernal Equinox: a time to pause, and appreciate subtle spring awakenings.

Today, the daylight hours will be exactly as long as the night.

Tonight, the March New Moon will create an especially dark sky, perfect for stargazing.

An ideal time to pause, perhaps to enjoy a zeppole pastry topped with black cherries. (It's okay to take a brief respite from Lenten austerity, St. Joseph is also patron saint of pastry chefs).

A time to perhaps open a special bottle of wine, and savor the brief lull before the full flush of spring. (Which the blooming of the skunk cabbages tells us, is just around the corner.)

Senescence

The last few winters have provided some gorgeous vineyard scenery.

But there are enough pretty snow scenes on the vineyard blog: Janus, Vortex, Romance, Shadows.

Today's post takes us back to the golden glow of autumn.

October 29, 2014

2014 turned out to be an exquisite season of cane ripening, the benefits of which we are now seeing, after this, the coldest February on record.

Scrolling through four years of vineyard records and photographs, and two years of blog posts, it occurs to me that fully inhabiting each season, as it unfolds, is one of the great pleasures of tending the earth.

Each season, as you live it, seems so epic and permanent.

But, of course, scrolling through the photos tells a different story.

Aromella vines in the South Vineyard, October 21, 2014

Each season, of course, passes as it should, seemingly endless summer folding into languid fall.

But as you catalog one, two, three, four (and counting) rotations around the sun, on the same little patch of terrain, you also come to see that each winter, each spring, each summer, and yes, each mellow autumn, also differs markedly from those that came before.

It is easy to remember scorching dry summers and cool wet ones, mild green winters and frigid snowy ones.

Autumn, however, sometimes blurs into sameness.

But just because autumn may be a mellow season, don't assume it is dull: it is a time of dramatic and rapidly shifting light, of sudden gusts, of startlingly vibrant colors that increase just as the life force of a season slowly subsides.

And each autumn can differ markedly from those that came before.

Looking back, the autumn of 2014 was among the most lovely in the vineyard.

Sure, there have been seasons when the fence rows, bedecked with scarlet Virginia Creeper, buttery orange sassafras, and clear lemony cottonwood, have stolen the show.

Sassafras leaves, September 2012

But this fall, the vines themselves mellowed to their distinct varietal hue, with a vividness we haven't previously achieved.

In the South Vineyard, our four varieties, climbing a gentle slope from the mill creek, created a distinctive pattern of ascending horizontal stripes, as each variety, in its own time, shed its chlorophyll, to display inherent hues previously cloaked by green.

October 15, 2014

In the vineyard we always think a season or two ahead, and watching those colors stripe the hillside, we knew that this was a sign of nearly perfect post-harvest ripening conditions.

In the vineyard, each year we ripen not just that summer's grape crop, but more importantly, after the fruit is plucked, we ripen the canes themselves.

Future seasons' crops are latent in buds within those canes, as they mature through autumn from green to a fully ripened tawny brown.

Those vivid foliage colors we witness, and the more subtle progression of the cane's coloration, are senescence: the highly ordered and genetically regulated process through which an organism, or one of its parts, progresses after maturity.

In the leaves of the grapevine, we witness senescence in the mutable color of leaves, from green to lemon yellow (or russet or purple or crimson) as the variety's genetics dictate.

In the shoots that arose so rampantly over the course of an endless summer, we witness senescence in a progression from apple green shoots in the spring, to olive in autumn, to a tawny or rosy winter brown. We watch supple vegetative shoots ripen to become woody canes, a process called "hardening off," in preparation for impending winter chill.

Vivid fall leaf color told us that the leaves had supped an optimal amount of light, and created optimal fuel, for the permanent vine they feed.

This winter, those rosy brown canes we sliced open in the warmth of the vineyard office, to reveal the startlingly green and living bud within, told us the canes had luxuriated in an optimal autumn, preparing themselves to survive what turned out to be temperatures below what some of our varieties should be expected to survive.

Slicing open one dormant bud after another in the warmth of the vineyard office, we are pleased but not surprised by the vivid green within.

Those vivid autumn colors told us exactly what to expect, in the nadir of our coldest winter.

October 21, 2014

Still

A view from the footbridge, across the frozen lake.

Yes, it's happened:

This winter is colder than last.

In fact, it's the coldest February on record.

Last year, our coldest temperatures recorded were -14 degrees F.

This year, on more than one occasion, our vineyards have registered -17 to -20 degrees. (Depending on elevation. You never realize how much temperature varies until you start recording it on multiple sensors across several acres!)

And so, the vineyard remains still, quieted and muffled under a thick blanket of snow, as winter pruning carries on, and summer planning continues.

Each day the temperature plunges, the snow sparkles all the more, beneath a prism of dazzling ice crystals.

Although cold, this winter has been exceptionally bright: a banana tree I grow at home as a foliage plant, perched in a sunny window, produced a cream-colored flower cluster for the first time ever, bursting open mid-February and blanketing the house with the scent of hyacinth, on the coldest day of the year.

The coldest February on record, but, also one of the sunniest (clear open skies contributing to the plunging mercury.)

Frost paints the banks of the old sawmill creek.

Another season for the record books.

Another winter unlike the one before.

Cold, but dazzling.

Each year's weather is registered in the flavors and aromas of the next year's vintage: I anticipate some dazzling, and unprecedented, wine for 2015.

Februa

Calendar illustration for February, from a circa 1500 Dutch manuscript.

With the turn of a calendar page, we find ourselves in our shortest month, one which derives its name from the Roman feast of purification, Februa.

In the vineyard, February remains a time of cleaning, of preparation.

February is the month when most of our vineyard pruning takes place, a brief midwinter lull to prepare the vines for the flush of luscious growth that will drive our labors from bud burst through harvest.

Crunching through snowy vineyard rows, cutting away last year's ripened canes, we take comfort knowing that we are following the rituals of an ancient calendar.

Medieval prayer books and calendars frequently had illustrations depicting appropriate seasonal agricultural tasks for each month.

For Februa's month, more often than not, the calendar scenes depict ruddy-faced laborers gathering wood, warming themselves by a fire, or, out in a vineyard, cutting vines.

The sturdy vinedressers in the Medieval calendar illustration above also provide an answer to perhaps the most common question those of us who work in a vineyard still get asked today: what do you do in the winter?

The rows of vines, the tools employed, the layers of clothing: immediately recognizable to anyone who's worked a vineyard in February, despite the passage of so much time.

If winter vineyard work remains remarkably consistent, February itself is ever changing.

Some winters, our February fields look remarkably similar to the Dutch scene above: grass a dull green, the soil soft and friable. (Although our vineyard rows are tilled with a restored 1953 Farmall tractor, not the sturdy Dutch ox depicted.)

Our North Vineyard, after a first round of pruning. Photo by Tonya Fields.

This winter and last, cold has prevailed in Canton, Ohio.

February's earth remains frozen solid, the tracks of deer and muskrats etched into icy ruts of wintry perambulations.

A mantle of snow has cloaked the vineyard since mid January, doing exactly what we want it to do: regulating the ground temperature, insulating the vines.

A persistent blanket of snow warms the North Vineyard.

One of our vineyard thermometer probes fell from the trellis wire into a snowbank on January 17th: ever since, it has recorded a temperature range of between 32.043 and 32.093 degrees Fahrenheit, with no variation, for each of the days.

Going about the rhythm of our February pruning, at times the only sound is the stainless steel snip of our pruner blades, with occasional chirps and chortles from our (supposedly) mute swans.

Despite the silence, we are a little less anxious than we were last year at this time.

Our sturdy vines survived last winter's unprecedented cold exactly as we had hoped, with the nectar of last summer's bountiful harvest perfecting itself in the safety of our winery's stainless steel tanks.

Last February 2nd, Bucky our vineyard groundhog failed to rouse himself from the warmth of his den beneath a Petite Pearl vine.

This February, the snow above his warren is untrodden again, on the cusp of Valentines Day.

We'll take Bucky's slumber to mean we expect the gelid conditions to linger, although with each passing day, the sun, when it reveals itself, feels just a bit warmer on our cheeks, and the chatter of mute swans grows louder.

Cold temperatures linger, but there is a new warmth to February's sun.

Heat

A small observation on a cold winter's day:

Although the temperatures on the thermometer may register subzero, it is a great time to witness, first hand, the awesome power of solar heat.

Pictured above are bits of vine prunings, resting on top of our insulating blanket of vineyard snow.

We pruned these vines yesterday morning. 

Despite the arctic temperatures, in the course of a January afternoon, each rosy brown twig absorbed enough solar energy to melt a little depression in the snow around it.

(You witness the same thing at the base of the young vine on the right side of the picture.)

Solar energy, absorbed from the sun, stored in the tawny bark of the vine, and radiating back out onto the snow, melting a depression.

The things that cross your mine, trudging through the vineyard on a cold winter's day.

Denizens

It's a little quieter on the grounds this time of year.

The tables on the Piazza are stowed for the season.

No festive pavilion weddings.

So the swans seemed a little curious about this new vineyard denizen.

He must have arrived last night, staying in the farmhouse,

Although statistically, we don't get a lot of snow in November, and to some this seems early, in the vineyard, we welcome it.

Our vines need cold weather early in the season to "put them to bed."

And at this point in the season, before the vines are fully hardened off, the snow is a welcome blanket, insulating the roots just a bit, until they achieve full dormancy.

Cold temperatures in November, and a bit of snow, are exactly what the vines want to see.

The swans, on the other hand, aren't so sure.