Notice the daylight.

For real: This post is not about politics.

Here comes the sun, doo-doo-doo-doo
Here comes the sun
And I say, it's all right

     George Harrison, The Beatles, 1969

On the shortest day of the year, December 21, 2023, I posted about the length of daylight. I wrote that we were then in a month-long period at the low ebb of the tilted Earth. The length of daylight barely changed from day-to-day. For 25 days, from December 9 (9:09:42) through January 2 (also 9:09:42), the length of daylight fluctuated within a five minute band. Each day changed only a few seconds from the one before or after it.

It is a bit hard to picture, but because of the tilt of the Earth from the plane of the path around the sun (the ecliptic), light hitting Earth would draw an oval shape, not a round one, becoming more ovoid the closer one gets to the poles. At mid-winter and mid-summer, we are at the thin ends of the oval. There isn't as much difference from day to day at those ends of the oval as there is at the equinox. Here is that graphic I showed back in December.

It is all different now, in late February. Today, February 24 has two minutes and 46 seconds more daylight than yesterday. Each of the 29 days in February is about two and a half minutes longer than the day prior. There is more difference in daylight in a single day now than there was in two weeks back around Christmas.

Here in Medford, just above the 42nd parallel, daffodils have been out for a week now. Some trees are in blossom. Violets are in bloom. 

Grape vines are not yet leafing. The season is on my mind because starting today I will be helping a crew (i.e., observing and staying out of their way, mostly) do the first-year pruning. Grape plants looked leafy green last September:

Now they look like this:

With leaves gone, the plant is just a brown stem and hard to see in this photo. Most plants have one to three stems. What you are seeing is a metal rod the thickness of a pencil that is four feet in length, with three feet sticking out of the ground. To the left of that pencil rod is a main grape stalk with two branches starting at about the level of the plastic drip line, 14 inches off the ground. A foot above it, near the top of the photo, barely visible, is the wire line that will be the lowest wire that will support the plants. 

Here is what the vineyard looks like now.  I took off the grow-tube sleeves on those plants to the right to take the photo above. On all except the largest plants, the pruners can slide the tube up six or eight inches, find two strong buds, and cut off everything above those buds. This first year we were primarily growing roots. The sleeves have been out in the weather for nine months so they are looking ragged, but on most plants the pruners can slide the tube back down onto the now-stubby plant for a second year of use. They are made of milk-carton-like cardboard.

 

These are my Cabernet Sauvignon grapes adjacent to my Malbec and Pinot Noirs. The Oregon Grape Almanac reports that there are 26,257 acres planted to Pinot Noir in Oregon, making it by far the most popular variety in the state. The Willamette Valley is the major wine-growing area in Oregon, with 96,000 acres planted to grapes. My farm is in the Rogue Valley, which has about 17,000 acres planted to grapes. Summer days are much hotter here than up in the Willamette Valley, so theoretically my grapes will get riper and sweeter (higher Brix.) Maybe yes, maybe no. The vineyard is at the base of the two Table Rocks, and during frosty mornings in April and October, cold air drifts down off the sheer bluffs and creeps along the ground on its way to the Rogue River 2,000 feet away. I may have shorter seasons than most area vineyards. 

Every place is different. My soil is 100% pumice rock, ground into a fine powder. The sandy loam will allow the grape roots easy access to whatever particular qualities there are in that soil, and therefore make exceptional wine. At least I hope so.

But that is four years out. For now, the task is to prune the plants so that the strongest canes are chosen to concentrate the future growth of the plant.

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