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.

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.

Burst!

May 6, 2014: First apple blossoms in the orchard, three days before vineyard bud burst.

I try to keep this blog close to target, talking about grapes and viticulture (with occasional diversions into swan husbandry and the way snow looks in different permutations of winter sky.)

So bear with me a bit today if it seems like I'm rambling...but it all circles back to what is going on in the vineyard right now, the season of the vineyard with the appropriately explosive name: Bud Burst!

One of the wisest women I ever knew, was Mrs. Jane Reynolds.

She was my third grade teacher at Gordon M. DeWitt Elementary School in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio.

DeWitt School faculty, 1974. Mrs. Reynolds, second from right, front row.

She passed away several weeks ago at the age of 97, after a long and purposeful life.

Although my calculations may be way off (since I was barely four feet tall at the time) I am pretty sure she wasn't much taller than 5'1", and what a dynamo of energy she was.

(Tongues still wag over an mid-1970's last-week-of-school Field Day, where she jumped into the Tug-Of-War, handing decisive victory to her underdog 3-1 grade class, over Mrs. Villemein's much favored 3-2.)

What I remember about her was not just that she was a fantastic teacher, and that she did all the things the other good teachers did, but that she somehow managed to squeeze into each day, and each class, even more than everyone else did.

Above all, I remember her boundless energy.

In addition to her full-time teaching job, she and her husband, Mr. R. O. Reynolds, the retired band director at the high school, had recently moved to and were restoring her ancestral family farm.

(I learned from her obituary that her great-great grandfather had walked from New Hampshire to Ohio to stake a claim on the Western Reserve, and that was the farm she and her husband were restoring.)

Whatever was going on on the farm in a particular season, she would bound into the classroom with examples to show off: The first puffy pussy willow buds of the season. The first drips from the maple buckets during sugaring days. Branches of crabapple in full bloom. The season's first chirpy fluff chicks.

So, for several weeks now, I have been hauling my vase of grape canes around, showing off to anyone who will listen the magic of the buds unfurling, the abundant life inside each inauspicious hard scaly brown bud, which needs just warmth, sunshine and water to unleash abundant green life stored within.

And now that season we had been forcing indoors under hothouse conditions is happening spontaneously in the vineyard acres around us.

May 9, 2014: Ladies and gentlemen, we have achieved BUD BURST.

May 9, 2014: First leaf on the Marquette vines, North Vineyard

After months of work amongst dormant grape canes, and then weeks surrounded by fragile swelling buds, we now see the first green grape leaves of the season.

And what a welcome sight.

It's a day we have been anticipating: each day since the soil started warming (ever so slowly this year), we have been scouting our fifty five acres as we pass through them each day, and making note of what is in bloom, as well as which of our resident vineyard birds are hatching.

The goal is establishing a  phenology log, to help us better understand the specific characteristics of the six grape varieties we grow, and to understand the nuance of how they perform in our micro climate.

Among other things, we want to be able to accurately predict the date of bud burst for each variety in our specific vineyard terrain.

And so, here it is: some highlights from the chronicle of what bloomed, and when, here on our historic farm, in this most unusual spring:

March 20: (first day of spring!): First sap flow in the vines.

April 1: Skunk cabbage in the marsh sends up spears

April 1:  First crocuses bloom at the Vineyard Office

April 13: Norway maple seeds sprouting

April 14: Forsythia in bloom     

April 14: Daffodils bloom at the Farmhouse

April 14: Cornelian dogwwood blossoms at the Marketplace

April 14: Periwinkle at the Villas

April 15: Vineyard ducks lay their first eggs

Female mallard tends her eggs in a vineyard flower pot.

April 17: Privet and multiflora rose leaf out in the hedge rows

April 18: Red maple bud burst

April 21: Weeping willow catkins

April 27: Bartlett pear blossoms in orchard 

April 29: First dogwood bracts

April 21: Vineyard killdeer lay eggs in North Vineyard

Speckled Killdeer eggs beneath the Frontenac Gris

May 1: Full dandelion bloom

May 2: Tulips at Carriage House

May 6: Red maple leaf out

May 5: Fiddleheads on Farmhouse ferns 

May 6: First apple blossoms

May 6: Dogtooth violets bloom

May 6: Vineyard Killdeer hatch

Very well camouflaged Killdeer hatchlings beneath the Frontenac Gris

May 7: Farmhouse lilacs bloom

May 8: Farmhouse crabapples bloom

May 8: Orchard in full bloom and first leaf out

May 9: Vineyard in full bud burst, with earliest varieties in leaf out

And so, we arrive at the culmination, which seems all the more epic after observing and noting each phenological marker as it occurred.

The vineyard bursts into leaf. 

Fifty one days after the vine sap first flowed. 

Thirty nine days after the skunk cabbages unfurled steamily from the swamp. 

Twenty six days after the forsythia blooms. 

Three days after the killdeer hatched.

Which brings us back to Mrs. Reynolds, that wise country schoolteacher, who burst into the classroom each morning with boundless enthusiasm, both for the work before us that day, and what was happening back home at the farm.

It only took me several decades, and almost four years on this farm, to begin to realize the depth of the wisdom she so effortlessly taught us:

Notice the things around you.

Make note of what is blooming each day.

Take care of other living things.

Anticipate what is about to happen.

Appreciate what is occurring right now.

I can't help but think that her infectious energy was absorbed in part from plunging herself so fully into the abundant life of the farm she so loved.

Vineyard phenology wasn't part of the curriculum Mrs. Reynolds was teaching in her Third Grade classroom so long ago. But lo and behold, it was a small part of the life wisdom she so graciously imparted.