Rock Garden

The rock garden isn't finished yet but it seems to be one of those projects that has to evolve. We're keeping our eyes open for something tall to put at the far end which is underneath the bathroom window at the back of this space.

 It is such a change from the same space filled with plants that were overgrown and struggling to escape either by growing forward, (the lemon tree) or over the high guest bathroom window (the streletzias) . I wasted spent quite a bit of time looking for a picture of those plants in place for comparison purposes, but gave up. I need a better photo management system than Apple photo.

The days are getting shorter and the nights are getting colder. Because of the heat wave in September a lot of the grapes were harvested earlier than usual this year. I have always been impressed by the way the vineyards are managed...the planting, the pruning, the thousands of decisions that have to be made about weed and pest management and the surprise weather changes due to frost, extreme heat or early rains. The vineyard managers have developed techniques for meeting all these challenges, but the one they were totally unprepared for was smoke taint.

The fires that have burned up and down the West Coast have produced prodigious quantities of smoke that darkened the skies, choked the inhabitants and threatened the grapes. The labs that are able to test grapes for smoke taint were overwhelmed and vineyard managers were forced to make decisions based on intuition. Thousands of tons of grapes were dropped because the wineries wouldn't buy them. Other than lab testing, there was no reliable way to tell. Winery managers  worried that gambled on the grapes being good,  and they turned out not to be, the reputation of the winery would be affected. Sometimes the grapes were turned down because of the location of the vineyard in proximity to fires. 

UC Davis now has a 17 acre test vineyard where they are working on a reliable system to predict, test and protect grapes from smoke. The key to reaching some conclusions lies with sensors that are being placed in vineyards in California, Oregon and Washington. It will take awhile to gather data and reach some conclusions, but yet another challenge resulting from climate change is being addressed and studied.