Skip to main content

A wet night and more rains to come


It turned out to be a very nice day for planting at Winchester. We almost finished planting of two vineyards (a total of 1/2 Acre with Chardonnay and Merlot) which will be used for chemical trials and other management-related experiments. We had a drizzle in the early morning, but the expected thunderstorm did not arrive until 8pm or so and it was not as severe as I expected.

On 14th, night time relative humidity was high, but temperature was low (low 40's), thus it was not a disease night. But last night, we had a series of short rains and temperature stayed in low-60's with the relative humidity above 90% until now (8am, fog). This >12 hours of wetness accounts for Phomopsis, black rot, powdery mildew, and downy mildew infection events.

We are expecting to see more rains during this weekend, so, please think about potential disease events (in the future or in the past) when you decide for a fungicide application. You can find details of infection events I'm describing here in my notes from past vineyard meetings (you can find them in this blog, or in my AREC webpage).

The growth stage of Chardonnay in our vineyard was 15-20% with 7-8 leaves unfolded (but I did not see significant elongation of the cluster yet, thus between E-L 12 and 15), and that of Cabernet sauvignon was 8-90% with 5-6 leaves unfolded (~7-10-inch, E-L 12).

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

2021 Pest Management Guides for grapes (UPDATED 24 March 2021)

Updated: Links below are for the 2021 edition of Pest Management Guides. The first one is for home gardens, and the second is for commercial productions. I asked them to provide by chapter (= crop) and they made changes. :) 1) Visit the page by clicking one of the links below. (It is rather a slow page. Please be patient.) 2) Scroll down until you see "Links to individual chapters." Grapes are chapter 3 for both Home (Home Fruits) and Commercial Crops (Grapes) 3) Once you get to the site, click "PDF", then "Preview", and it will open a new window.  4) Scroll down a bit, and click "Download Version" to download the file to your computer.  2021 Home Grounds  Pest   Management   Guide 2021 Horticulture and Forest  Pest   Management   Guide

Season's Greetings!

I hope you and your family have a good holiday season and a Happy (and safe) New Year! Thanks again for your support of our programs. Here are some recent media highlights. 😉 The link will open a new window. AHS AREC promotional video  that highlights some of our activities. The link did not work... It asks you to log in to VT. I will request the IT people to change the setting, but in a meantime, here's the same video. We also appeared in  the Library of Congress project “Winery Workers of Virginia”. One more announcement: I will be moving this blog to a new location ( ext.grapepathology.org ) early next year. I had to make a change due to the email subscription service, which has been terminated.  You do not need to change your bookmark or your email subscription. The URL will be forwarded to a new site and your email subscription has been moved to a new site already. 

New non-bearing grape guide and a list of fungicides for the home garden grapes.

  Please find a link below to download a new disease management guide for non-bearing grapes. As with the other VCE guides, you need to click on the “Preview” icon, which will open a new window, then click on the “Download” icon to obtain a pdf copy. https://resources.ext.vt.edu/contentdetail?contentid=3226&quantity=1&productprice=0&contentname=Fungicide%20Spray%20Guidelines%20for%20Non-bearing%20Vineyards Also, I updated a list of fungicides that you can obtain from home garden centers. I saw several new products, but unfortunately, many of them do not list grapes on their label, so, the list is identical to the old version. If you know of other products that can be used for home gardens, please let me know. Home-garden-fungicides-2021 Download