Early spring, heat wave, drought, ground frost – what next?
May 10, 2011
These Regent vines in their second year were tall enough to escape the ground frost on the night of 2-3 May.
Spring has come very early to London, and with it a succession of dramatic weather events. First, there is a heat wave that has lasted till today, bringing forward the growing season by about five weeks. Without rain, however, the heat wave has led to drought. At Hawkwood on the edge of London where the Organiclea food growers co-op I belong to has just planted over 100 fruit trees and 200 grape vines, the soil is parched and cracked to a depth of 10 centimetres in some places. And then to underscore our troubles we had a ground frost on Tuesday 3 May that damaged a lot of potted vegetable plants set outside to harden off as well as around a fifth of our newly planted grape vines.
Our 200 vines are not all the same, so the frost hit them with quite variable effect:
Fifty Regent vines planted in the spring of 2009 are well established, so they had grown high enough by last Tuesday to escape the ground frost. Only a couple of them suffered some damage to a few of their leaves.
Ninety Madeleine Angevine, Pinot Noir and Kubishevsky vines were planted out in March as one year old rooted cuttings from our own nursery. Six of them were fully burned by the frost.
We also planted sixty unrooted cuttings straight into the vineyard. These cuttings were taken from the winter pruning of 20 year old Madeleine Angevine vines growing on my allotment. It was an experiement to see if we could dispense with the effort of propagating cuttings in the nursery for a season before transplanting them into the vineyard. Well, these bare cuttings, pushed into the ground in late March, did take well at first. However, their buds swelled and then opened close to ground, so their still tender embryonic leaves met the full force of the frost rolling down the hill. Of these sixty, a full half of them had their new growth throroughly dessicated.
We’ll now watch to see how and when the damaged vines come back to life – normally it takes about three weeks for recovery to start. However, we face an unusual spring this year. Its a bit of a firefight with the drought. We’re out there watering around the newly planted vines, waiting for the heavens to open. Perhaps the rain will come tomorrow. That’s the forecast, but as you know forecasts are sometimes wrong or they come just too late. As in the evening of 2 May, when the forecast at 6 pm was for an overnight low of 7 degrees Celsius. Everyone went home after a hard day’s work. Then at 7 pm the forecast changed: an east wind was registered blowing out of Scandinavia. It came over Epping Forest in the night and rolled down the hill into Hawkwood. And not just here – all over southern England vineyard workers were scrambling to protect their vines, in many places to no avail.
My friend Sarah at the Forty Hall Vineyard in Enfield said to me stoically this morning: “We have to take it as it comes”. She lost some of the new season’s growth to that frost on her two acres of Bacchus. Today, however, she starts planting another five acres of vines -7,000 of them! Good luck, Sarah. By the time the buds burst on these new plants we should be out of the frost danger zone. All we have to do now is pray for rain.
