It’s a good thing we had established, in advance, some priorities to help us narrow down the choices of wineries to visit.  There are so many, just in the three AVAs around Healdsburg, that choosing is daunting; even the locals agreed.  We wanted to see some vineyards and wineries that we might want to emulate.  Thus we were looking for small wineries (1,000 cases per year or less) with vineyards applying biodynamic &/or organic practices and to taste their wines.  Pinot Gris would be a bonus since that’s what we have most of in this, our first year as a commercial winery.  We also felt that our limit would be four wineries a day for the three full days we had.  The annotated itinerary is at the bottom of this piece.

We never managed four tastings on any day.  Every stop was a treat bin its own way so we lingered at each winery.  And even now choosing what to talk about presents challenges.  So, back to our stated goals:  Those which best answered our criteria were the first (Porter Creek) and last (Garden Creek) vineyards of our trip.  Actually, our first winery was Siduri but they don’t grow their own grapes, so Porter Creek was, indeed the first vineyard.  We visited it in Santa Rosa on our way North from the airport.  Siduri makes only premium Pinot Noir in small lots, from single block vineyards — so it makes a good example for us.  Currently they have 17 such Pinots.  Their tasting was arranged on the upturned ends of used wine barrels lined-up in an alcove off the work-floor of the winery which is in a light industrial park just off Hwy 101; defying expectations and making a virtue of unpretentious and informal.

On our first full day of touring-and-tasting we headed down-valley along the Russian River marveling at the seemingly continuous vineyards that spill down the sides and across the bottom of the valley, interrupted only by stands of aged oaks and ornate gateways into fancy tasting rooms.  Gangs of workers were pruning vines and we tried to decipher the various pruning and training methods.

The turning into the driveway at Porter Creek Winery was marked by a simple sign.  The designated parking area showed that they don’t expect more than several visitors at a time; all very encouraging.  The tasting room, a converted tractor shed, was similarly simple and friendly, as was the host — who made a point of telling us the many years he had been with Porter Creek and how much he admires their wines and viticulture.  We conversed amiably about biodynamics, the vineyard and winery, and the wines.  It was early in the day and the trip; perhaps with more seasoning we might have probed more deeply.  I was just in awe of everything and transposing, in my head, many of the features to Mesa Winds Farm & Winery.

When I mentioned to Steve, the innkeeper at Honor Mansion, that we wanted to visit Garden Creek his first question was “How did you hear about them?”  They don’t advertise.  They’re not even on the map of Anderson Valley wineries.  Tastings are by appointment.  You won’t find their wines on any retail shelves.  Steve was happy to set up the appointment and so, on our last full day in “Sonapanoma”, we found the discrete sign to the winery, and took the driveway between vineyards and the creek lined by old, moss-festooned oaks.

Karin welcomed us and described the operation:  she and her husband, Justin, were born and raised in the wine business of Sonoma and are farming the place his father pioneered in the early ’60s.  They use only their own grapes and do all the work themselves to produce the two varieties of wine they sell: a red blend and a chardonnay.  We tasted in the winery, crowded with stacks of cases of wine aging in the bottles, standing and talking around an upturned wine barrel on which a candle, a plate of tangy cheese and sausage, glasses, and the wines were arranged.  Soon Justin swung through the door and Karin left to take over child care.

As fellow grape growers and winemakers Justin was very generous and open discussing their techniques, showing their equipment, and sharing stories.  They make a point of extreme gentle care in handling their grapes and juice.  First, critically selecting the very best grapes from the farm’s sixty acres of vineyard (and selling the rest at the astounding price of $7,000/ton), utilizing cold-soak and whole-cluster primary fermentation, never a crusher, and employing gravity instead of a pump to move the juice.  In addition to the excellence of their wines, the premium price is supported by the exclusivity of limited production (around 800 cases a year) obtainable only from the winery at retail (they offer no discounts) and wines held to maturity before release.

Perhaps I’ll manage another explication of other highlights, but for now, here’s the bare bones:

Monday, 2/6: Depart Mesa Winds Farm to Denver, evening with Aniela.
Tuesday, 2/7:  DIA to OAK
Lunch at Wild Goat Bistro, Petaluma.  http://www.wildgoatbistro.com
Drive to Santa Rosa, visit Siduri Winery.  In an industrial park setting.  www.siduri.com
Makes exclusively “ultra premium, single vineyard Pinot Noir wines”.
Purchased:    ‘09 Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir, “Sonatera Vineyard”  (1,028 cases)
Check-in at Honor Mansion Inn, Healdsburg.  www.honormansion.com
Wednesday, 2/8:  Russian River Valley
Porter Creek Vineyard and Winery; biodynamic, small, unpretentious.  www.portercreekvineyards.com
Purchased:      ’09  Zinfandel “Old Vine”
‘09  Pinot Noir “Fiona Hill Vineyard”
Carol Shelton Winery, Santa Rosa; Small, unpretentious, winery in industrial park.  www.carolshelton.com
5,000 cases/year.  Met Carol herself — twice named US winemaker of the year.
Purchased:     ’11 Rendezvous Rose,
‘08 Petit Sirah “Rockpile Reserve”
Lunch at Chloe Cafe, Santa Rosa.  Delicious!
Will H. arrives, Honor Mansion
Dinner at Zin Restaurant, Healdsburg.  http://zinrestaurant.com/
Thursday, 2/9:  Dry Creek Valley
Michel Schlumberger Vineyard and Winery, formerly biodynamic.  http://www.michelschlumberger.com/
Vineyard tour with Jim  and tasting, 2 hrs.
Purchased:    ’10 Pinot Blanc “La Bise”
‘09 Syrah “La Source”
‘10 Chardonnay “La Nue”
Picnic lunch from Dry Creek Store;  http://drycreekgeneralstore1881.com/
enjoyed at Dutcher Crossing Vineyard.  Did not stick around for tasting.
Truett Hurst Vineyards and Winery; biodynamic, sheep, steelhead in the creek.  http://www.truetthurst.com/
Purchased:    ’09 “Balance by Heath Dolan” Red Field Blend, made with Biodynamic grapes
Amista Vineyard and Winery;  http://www.amistavineyards.com/
Purchased:     ’10 Rose of Syrah, Morningsong Vineyards (70 cases made)
Dinner at Baci Cafe;  http://bacicafeandwinebar.com/
Friday, 2/10:  Alexander Valley and Calistoga.
Will departs
Armida Vineyard and Winery; Russian River Valley;  http://www.armida.com/
Purchased:    ’10 “PoiZin” Zinfandel — a cute play on words, silkscreened bottle
‘10 “Antidote” Pinot Gris — also cute.  The only Gris we could find….
Garden Creek Vineyard and Winery, Justin & Karin, 2+ hrs.  800 cases total production, 2 varieties.         www.gardencreekvineyards.com/
Purchased:     ’06 Tesserae “Red Wine”
‘09 Chardonnay “Clonal Selection”
Lunch from Jimtown Store;  www.jimtown.com
To Calistoga, Euro Spa Inn — soaked and rested, pizza in the room…  http://www.eurospa.com/
Saturday, 2/11: to OAK, DIA, and home to the farm….

Our friend, filmmaker Dave Gardner, is still sensitive to the limits of the Earth’s carrying capacity and is never reluctant to confront the growth-pushers.  His new film, GrowthBusters (www.growthbusters.org) is just released and will be premiering in Colorado Springs on Wednesday, 11/9.  Max and I will be there.

Colorado Springs is Dave’s home-town and what an appropriate place for his odyssey to begin!  Concern for his children’s future encouraged him to set-aside a successful business as a commercial filmmaker and to focus on sustainability.  His city’s addiction to “growth everlasting” inspired his decade-long effort to engage the city’s leadership in a dialog about the limits to growth.  This film is the result of his frustration in being disregarded and marginalized as an extremist.  Now the town fathers may have to take the issue more seriously.

But Dave’s journey doesn’t end at city hall.  He speaks to reasonable people around the globe who know that the longer we delay grappling with this issue, the more disruptive the readjustment may be.  People who are not afraid to be educated and who want to participate in crafting solutions; solutions that respect and enhance life and lives around the Globe.

When called-upon to consider the question, most of us are willing to acknowledge that resources are, by definition, limited but then we go about our day-to-day lives as if it were not our concern.  But with the projected addition of yet another billion people in just 12 years or so, and with so many of Earth’s life-support systems already reaching capacity, we must make it our concern.  Too many people lack access to clean water to drink or to water crops.  Famine and malnutrition are widespread.  We have passed the “peak oil” milestone.  Extreme weather events remind us of the warnings explicated in “An Inconvenient Truth”.  But unlike Al Gore’s didactic, Dave is a master story-teller who relates his journey an an engaging and entertaining manner.

With the help of us all, GrowthBusters will be coming soon to a theatre near you — or to a living room and a clutch of friends, at least.  I strongly urge us all to see the film, tell our friends and neighbors about it, and press the debate wherever we see the growth “solution” being propounded.

Our gratitude has been mixed, this Spring, with concern and disappointment.  Last week seemed more like winter with several over-night lows in the mid 20s and the neighborhood a-throb with the roar of wind machines for frost control.  This, at a time when the swelling fruit buds were most vulnerable.  My neighbor avers that we were within a couple degrees of being wiped-out for the season.  The jury’s still out on the damage to our orchard, and there’s still the possibility of more frost, but the preliminary report is that we will have peaches, apples, and grapes, though I can say with certainty there’ll not be many.  Making what remains all the more dear.

We are also grateful for the willingness of our loyal CSA members to share, with us, the risks inherent in growing nutritious, local fruit.  We trust that they feel satisfaction in this.  Their reward will include having priority for the quantity and quality of fruit we will be able to bring to market.  Thank you!

This week in the field, we are completing the commissioning of the micro-sprinkler irrigation and beginning the process of re-charging the water table; completing the removal of pruning from the orchards in preparation for mowing and spraying; and continuing to prune the grapes.  Max is preparing to bottle last fall’s chambourcin rose wine — which promises to be a refreshing summer wine.  And today we bid farewell to Bob and Sharon who brought three border collies to compete in the Hotchkiss Sheep Camp Dog Trials this weekend and stayed in one of our farm-stay apartment.  We enjoyed having them.

We are currently preparing our Northeast field for planting to pasture and hay which, at this point, involves endless rock-picking. When the previous owner removed the 4.5 acres of apples from the field, she had the it ripped — the customary practice — which brought-up zillions of rocks from the size of a Volkswagen to that of a sugar beet. Unfortunately that’s as far as she went with it, so it has been fallow ever since, a sea of holes, impossible to irrigate or mow. Now the task of clearing all those rocks falls to us. Neighbor Don generously brought over his backhoe and extracted the really big, partially buried rocks while I scooped as many as I could haul in the bucket of the John Deere. The big ones John Deere and I pushed into Don’s much larger bucket. It seemed an endless task at first, but the end of this phase is in sight.

Next, a custom farmer will chisel-plow the field which will, no doubt, bring up more rocks, which we’ll pick, then he’ll disc it, and finally land-plane it smooth enough to irrigate by furrows. Weeds will be our first crop and we’ll endeavor to graze and disc the weeds before they go to seed — all in an effort to deplete the weed seed bank. The weeds slow down in late summer, so we’ll disc it again and seed it to a pasture mix in August — in time for the seedlings to get well established before winter dormancy. The theory is that come next spring the grass will have sufficient head start to out-compete the weeds. Stay tuned…

No sooner did the Vernal Equinox herald spring on Sunday than winter decided to reassert herself. The 60-degree days had been enjoying have given way to a colder, stormy, windy pattern. I imagine that today’s winds are part of the storm system that uprooted mature almond groves in California a couple of days ago. And there’s more on the way — tornadoes in the Central Valley yesterday. Snow and rain are in our forecast through the weekend. Two days ago the mountains were obscured by airborne dust (read “topsoil”) from the farmers’ fields down-valley. I’m glad we haven’t yet plowed the Northeast field or our topsoil would be airborne too.

We have 3 newborn lambs on the farm! The first was born 2 weeks ago as a single and we call her “Newby”; twins followed 10 days ago. Two more ewes appear ready to birth in the next few days. Newby, unfortunately, is rejected by her mom, so we have to restrain the mom so Newby can nurse. This we have to do every 4 hours, so Max and I take turns with the midnight feeding. We are very grateful for the sheep barn that Steph and Ben completed in January!

Snowy, our 5-month-old Great Pyrenees guard dog is already enormous! She wants to play at all times and doesn’t know her size and strength, so we are no longer keeping her with the sheep during lambing. Undaunted, she stands guard at a strategic vantage point on the dam and warns intruders with her characteristic deep bark. A few mornings ago I awakened to hear a coyote cry nearby, bolted out of bed and into clothes, and by the time I was out the door, Snowy was on the job barking and patrolling. It is said that the sheer magnitude of these majestic beasts is enough to dissuade any nosey predator and it seems to be working out that way.

Snowy is also very adept at finding goose eggs — which they will lay at any convenient sheltered outdoor spot.  So we have to be quick to beat her to them as she finds them fun to throw and pounce upon and delicious eating once she manages to break the tough shell.

With the organic certification, biodynamic record-keeping, lambing, and rock picking behind us, we will finally turn our attention to CSA recruiting. The apples are recently pruned and the peaches and grapes appear to have fared the cold winter better than expected (so far!). So, dear customers, don’t loose hope: there will be fruit and there will be ample opportunity to reserve your fruit-share. We’re just a little behind, as usual.

This march which will take place in the backdrop of the Forum for Life, Social and Environmental Justice in Cancun, Mexico and has as its main slogan “Peasants cool the planet”. This message summarizes the peoples’ proposal to solve the climate crisis and is also reflected in the resolutions that emerged from the peoples’ summit held in Cochabamba, Bolivia.
With colorful flags, hats, signs, posters, and lots of music the protesters will announce their opposition to the mechanisms being imposed in COP 16 such as the false solutions of carbon markets, REDD, agrofuels and geoengineering being imposed on the peoples of the world.

The march will leave at 9:00 am from the Jacinto Canek Sports Center (Unidad Deportiva Jacinto Canek) where roughly 10,000 people are expected to march across the main streets of downtown Cancun. This action is part of the thousands of activities to be performed worldwide as La Via Campesina’s “thousands of Cancun’s.” Actions will happen in Latin America, Asia, Europe, Africa and in the United States and Canada. The actions include public meetings, forums and sit-in’s in Korea, Ecuador, Peru, Uruguay, Brazil, Nepal, Turkey, and mass actions in India, Argentina, Indonesia, El Salvador, the Philippines and Mexico. It is estimated that these actions and events will bring together more than 1 million people.

The popular power generated through these actions is aimed at bringing sustainable and just solutions to solve the climate crisis. In this context, the negotiations of COP 16 can be seen in their true perspective: sand throwing in our eyes for corporate profit rather than the hard decision making needed for social and environmental justice.

Communication team CLOC/Via Campesina
Contacts
Alfredo Acedo
Cel. 52 1 55 3943 0712
alfredo_acedo@hotmail.com

After nearly two years of heated debate and countless food related illnesses, the Food Safety Modernization Act (S.510) passed in the Senate on Tuesday morning by a wide bipartisan margin of 73 to 25, including 15 Republicans.

It was a remarkable victory for American consumers and the growing local, sustainable food movement.

Despite partisan gridlock, intense industry opposition, and a Tea Party campaign of misinformation, the Senate appeared to have done the right thing for both consumer protection and family size farms in passing a bill that included a few modest exemptions for small-scale farmers engaged in direct sales of local foods won in a series of last minute amendments.

As per usual when legislation is made in Congress, industrial agriculture sets the rules and these minor protections are the only thing standing between the smallest family farmers and expensive new regulations that could drive them out of business.

But now a minor parliamentary mistake threatens this important victory for consumers and family farmers. The Senate’s violation of an overlooked constitutional provision requiring that taxes originate in the House of Representatives has stalled the legislation in the House.

Industrial agriculture lobbyists and front groups funded by agribusiness are now using this procedural error to try to kill the new food safety bill or, even worse, to strip the hard-won farmer protection provisions from the bill entirely.

Almost as soon as an anonymous Republican Senate staffers tipped off Roll Call late Tuesday evening about the gaffe, Big Ag flacks and their supporters in Congress have been tripping over themselves to once more make their failed and dangerous case for why a common sense amendment sponsored by Senator John Tester (D-MT), the only organic farmer in the U.S. Senate, must be killed.

Even after the Peanut Corporation of America fiasco of last year and the massive egg recall from this past summer, members of Congress and the elite class of agribusiness lobbyists continue to ignore the elephant in the room regarding food safety and agricultural production, which as most informed citizens know is concentration.

It would be laughable if it weren’t so shameful to watch members of the Democratic Party like Dennis Cardoza (D-CA) and Jim Costa (D-CA) gush at the chance to take advantage of this parliamentary mistake to trample the opportunities for true family farmers into the ground.

Yesterday, Rep. Cardoza, who sits on the House Agriculture Committee and represents California’s farm-rich San Joaquin Valley could barely contain his glee over the opportunity to strip the Tester amendment from the bill.

Cardoza went as far as calling the Tester amendment an “abomination” (very strong word folks for something that protects family farmers) and continued saying, “A small farm can devastate the industry as easily as a big farm.”

It’s hard to tell if Rep. Cardoza is just stupid or corrupt.

Fortunately, a quick look at political donations at Opensecrets.org offers some insight. During the 2010 election cycle, three of the top five industries donating to Rep Cardoza’s campaign were from the agricultural sector, including more than $103,000 from the “Crop Production & Basic Processing” industry - the number one industry paying for his re-election and the very people who are now demanding that Tester’s modest farmer protection provisions be killed.

This fact should not be lost on anyone, because this is how industrial agriculture has not only taken over food production in the U.S., driving farmers off the land, fattening Americans and contaminating our food, but it is also how corporate agribusiness has corrupted our democracy.

And if there’s one thing that Americans are rapidly becoming aware of, it is the fact that family farmers don’t kill people, but greed, excessive corporate power, dangerous corporate concentration and corruption within federal agencies do.

Failure to pass the food safety bill without the Tester and Manager’s amendments, which are minor stopgap provisions to protect a tiny, but economically vibrant sector of the agricultural economy would be a travesty of both justice and democracy.

If House Democrats and Senate Republicans cannot put aside bitter partisan bickering to put health and safety of American citizens over giant corporate interests with the passage of this bill, then they deserve to reap the consequences at the ballot box.

It’s time for Democrats and Republicans to show America what they stand for – huge corporations or everyday Americans. The Food Safety Modernization Act with the Tester amendment included is a perfect litmus test to see if they will stand up for the hopes and dreams of the little guy in this country or if they will continue down the long road of rewarding concentrated wealth.

Millions of Americans are watching and they will be organized to vote in 2012.

(Dave Murphy is the founder and Executive Director of Food Democracy Now!, a grassroots community of over 150,000 Americans dedicated to building a sustainable food system that protects our natural environment, sustains farmers and nourishes families.)

Our Thanksgiving guests, Aniela and Joe, having arrived the night before, were unprepared to have their morning rest so rudely interrupted.  But they were game and Joe, who in addition to braving I-70 from Denver on T-giving eve had driven down from Jackson Hole on Tuesday over sketchy roads, so he managed to sleep-in.  After this nerve-wracking start, our turkey day unfolded in a lovely, laid-back sorta way.  Joe had brought with him his state-of-the-art Fiscars splitting axe so he split logs as I bucked them into stove lengths and before lunch we had 1/4 cord stacked beside the office door.

Max and Aniela, meanwhile, roasted peppers on the grill, filling the chill air with delicious autumn fragrances.  Some of the peppers found their way into a delicious squash soup for a light lunch before we turned to preparations for the feast:  The turkey, with quinoa stuffing, had, of course, gone into the oven first thing in the morning.  It was a fresh, never-frozen bird, raised across the valley on The Living Farm, that our friend Karla had “processed” on Monday.  To this we added an acorn squash casserole; mashed purple viking potatoes, grilled root vegetables, green beans with almonds; salad; and cranberry relish.  OK, not everything was local (cranberries and almonds don’t grow here) but most food was from the farm or our Valley and almost entirely organic.

We capped the evening with a game of Trivial Pursuit in which Aniela and Joe were off to an early start and looked sure to whoop Max and Wink.  But a learning curve, fate, and the throw of the die came down for the underdogs and when we finally went to bed it was tied with both of us crisscrossing the winner’s circle.  The game refused to be decided even with the renewed energies of the AM so we finally settled on a draw so we could get on with the day.  Getting on with the day included work on the new sheep barn below the dam.  Under Aniela’s supervision and Joe’s expert tractor skills, much was accomplished and Wink is greatly encouraged.  Since then we have raised two of the three lintel beams and the barn is taking shape.

Sustainable peasant and family farm agriculture can feed the world!
(Rome, October 11, 2010) With the number of hungry people in the world at almost 1 billion, it is clear that the current food system blatantly fails in providing healthy and adequate food for all. The recent increase in land grabbing is an integral part of the dominant corporate agribusiness model with large-scale industrial monocultures. This system has caused climate change and allows speculation on food for the benefit of a small minority.

Today the plenary session of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) of the United Nations started in Rome. La Via Campesina, the international peasant movement, wants to take advantage of this occasion to reiterate that sustainable peasant and family farm agriculture can feed the world, as mentioned in our newest publication.
This also means that the solutions reside in changing our food system to a system within the framework of food sovereignty that has sustaibable family farming at its centre.
Small food producers are already feeding a huge amount of people, using smaller plots of land and working in a sustainable way.
More and more actors, such as stated in the IAASTD report recognise that small-scale sustainable farming is the way to find sustainable solutions to this terrible violation of the human right to food.
The CFS should put the right to food at the heart of the global food and agricultural governance and international institutions and governments should be made accountable regarding their efforts to implement this right. The points of view of civil society organisations directly affected by the food crisis should constitute the basis for the development of solutions. La Via Campesina will be present at the CFS to provide a follow-up to the discussions and propose real solutions.

On the web site, Max has introduced you to our Babydoll Southdown sheep. In addition to cute, and their traditional roles as wool and meat providers, they will also play an important role in maintaining soil fertility and controlling weeds and cover crops in our vineyards. But why won’t they eat the grape leaves, we ask? So, while our young farmers sweated-out the last rows in the Pinot Gris, Max and I have been working with our CSU Extension Agent, Robbie Baird Levalley, to train the sheep what NOT to eat.

The protocol for this training was developed by Dr Fred Provenza of Utah State University and has been applied in vineyards on the West coast. Robbie has successfully applied it to a flock of Babydolls on a vineyard in Palisade, CO. So we are not exactly pioneers in this: We hold the ewes off feed overnight and then present them with fresh grape leaves, which they are happy to eat. We then give them a pill of lithium chloride that gives them a stomachache – which they associate with having eaten the grape leaves. On the second morning of this regime, most of them declined the grape leaves; those who ate were treated again. Later we turned them out into a vineyard. Those who ate grapes were removed for further conditioning; it is important that they not teach the others that its OK to eat leaves.

Yesterday we had remarkable success: only the ram, Louie, continued to eat leaves in the corral. He was left behind when we turned the others out to the vineyard. Most of the sheep ate grass and weeds around the grape plants without bothering the leaves; a few tested the grapes but went back to the grasses. Only two ewes and a lamb required further conditioning. Today we’ll do it again.

A “heritage breed”, Babydoll Southdowns are the breed of choice for this work because of their diminutive size which allows them to move about between rows and under the trellis wires. They seem intelligent enough to readily grasp this training and, in addition, they are known for their excellent quality fleece, comparable to Merino, and for delicious meat. We are very excited by this addition to our agro-ecology.

Now I’m back in the cabin, listening to my machines chop the air, sipping tea, and watching the thermometer continue to fall. Some more data: the thermometers at the CSU Ag Experiment Station (accessed by phone, about a mile away and several hundred feet lower) are a couple degrees warmer and showing the same spread. The humidity is 33% which sets the dew point at 4 degrees (see www.dpcalc.org) — I already knew we weren’t close to the dew point as my shoes came back dry from the walk to the wind machines. No future in relying on this heat source.

Last Friday night’s freeze was the coldest it has been since then. But Saturday and Sunday nights were similar nail-biters: Saturday went down to 30 and Sunday to 32. Both nights my neighbors (or some of them) ran their wind machines and both nights I restrained myself from the temptation to follow the crowd. I sat awake by the wood stove in the wee hours, charting the mercuries (actually digitals), studying the skies for portents, and in the end resolved to stick to the data.At times like these I like to remind myself of the time that, on our first spring on Mesa Winds, I let the propane supply in one machine run low. Too late to order a delivery I realized we were in for another cold night and I would be unable to run our frost protection. Max was furious. I lay awake that night listening to every wind machine in Delta County chop the air and feeling the chill from the other side of the bed. I still can’t explain why we were spared the severity of the freeze that hit our neighbors that night. Was it the dew point, the wind chill, or beginner’s blind luck? Anyway, I was redeemed and grateful.

So, the observation that the mercury seemed to rise after I turned off the machines on Friday night doesn’t come as a total surprise. And such events make for more complicated judgements and less sleep. On Saturday and Sunday nights my data was easier to trust: on neither night did we reach the critical temperature, on both nights I couldn’t discern an inversion, one night there was a bit too much wind, and another an ample cloud cover.

Be that as it may, the proof is in the pudding: Jack Frost did a pretty aggressive job of thinning for us. But we DO still have a crop. We’re still not out of the woods, though, and tonight’s low is forecast at 26. The Crest Haven peaches fared better than the Red Globes, likely because they mature later and were, therefore, at an earlier, less vulnerable stage. There are more viable buds up high in the trees than low, reflecting the colder temps near the ground (an inversion).

The Golden Delicious apples fared better than the Galas both because they are a later variety and because they are a taller tree.  On the Galas that we sampled, about 40% of the clusters (a normal cluster has 5 or 6 blossoms, each with the capacity to become an apple) has only one or two viable buds.  Only the buds that hadn’t yet opened were still viable. This is more or less the rate we’d want to thin-to; the difficulty being that Jack Frost doesn’t necessarily distribute his handiwork evenly in the tree. We’ll still be hand-thinning to even-out the crop-load but will not be chemical thinning this year — an eventuality that I find most agreeable.

I will conclude by saying that I hope this is the last you’ll have to endure my spring frost stories this year and I trust, with the help of the wind machines, that we’ll have a crop. We can tell that our customers are beginning to look forward to local fruit season as each mail brings more CSA member sign-ups. Thank you! We look forward to seeing you at the market and in the mean time, keep in touch through the web site and this blog. Thanks for paying attention!