What an odd weekend weather we’ve had. As you can see from the chart Friday was cool and cloudy and very poor for June. Saturday morning started off even worse with some very light drizzle through the morning. It took until lunchtime for the rainfall to amount up to 0.2mm (0.01") and tip the measuring device in my rain gauge which measures in 0.2mm increments.
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| Temperature and Rainfall Friday - Sunday 19 - 21 June 2015 |
By mid afternoon the sun was doing its best to break through the clouds and the temperature started to lift reaching a high of 20.0°C (68.0°F) at 18:30. I thought that might be an end to the cool weather but it wasn’t to be as the temperature fell back to 11.5°C (52.7°F) during the night and didn’t get an awful lot higher all day on Sunday.
During the decent spell on Saturday afternoon I did a little bit of pruning to our Himrod grapevine. Left to its own devices it would completely take over the greenhouse. Through summer it becomes a weekly task a bit like mowing the lawn. I have to be careful not to cut off any young bunches of grapes which is very easily done amid all the vine stems vying for the best growing position along the greenhouse ridge.
Once again this year we’ve lots of bunches of grapes. Each year I entertain the idea of cutting a few bunches off, hence increasing the size of the grapes on the remaining bunches but each year that’s as far as I get and all the bunches are left on the vine. I can’t bring myself to deliberately cut off some bunches. Who knows what might happen between now and the end of August when the grapes are usually lovely and sweet and ready to pick.
It’s possible that in one of the many pruning sessions required before then that one or two bunches may accidentally get the chop much to my annoyance. They have to be quickly hidden in the wheelie bin before my mistake is spotted.
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Did you watch Gardener's World on Friday? Monty was thining out the fruit on each bunch to get bigger grapes rather than cutting off whole bunches. I suppose it would be quite time consuming to do that though.
ReplyDeleteStill to catch up on last week's Gardener's World Jo. I did see Monty training his vine a few weeks ago in his enormous greenhouse. Our grapevine isn't so well trained!
DeleteYou can understand why the stately homes had teams of gardeners to do jobs like thinning the bunches of grapes - it must take ages - and I'm not sure Monty would have persuaded many people to have a go any time soon.
ReplyDeleteOurs are seedless so there's never a problem eating a couple of small grapes at a time. The main thing for me is that they finish up sweet and juicy rather than how large they are. Monty wont be persuading us to take on the challenge.
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