It’s simply a crazy season, enormous disease pressure, regular heavy downpours and a high level of frustration.
Downy mildew’s goal is to defoliate the vine’s foliage and disintegrate the bunches in the process, and this year it’s giving the process a red hot go.
Regular rain events and warm weather are ideal for the disease.
Our task is to regularly apply fungicides to the rapidly growing foliage to inhibit the disease’s ability to spread, and if a curative chemical is available when it’s applied it can slow down the disease.
The regular rains reduce the fungicide’s effectiveness and there is a desperate shortage of the curative chemicals.
I think I have identified why it’s so wet, with so many snails around this year, the sheer weight of all of them may have shifted the earth’s axis giving us someone else’s weather.
The grapevines are at last at the flowering stage, with the cool weather delaying the process.
The berries become more resistant to downy mildew as they start to size up, so we will see what survives in the next few weeks.
Normally snails fail to get across roads when trying to cross and end up flat, but now some snails have little shovels strapped to their shells and have been digging safety trenches in the roads, when the roads are quiet.
The snails hop in these (potholes) trenches when vehicles approach.
We are high and sort of dry here but we all feel for the guys closer to the rivers and what they are currently enduring, keep talking to your mates.
