New vine grafts in the vineyard

If you regularly read this blog, you may recall that we did some "bud over" in our vineyard in spring - where we grafted a white grape variety over a few of our Merlot vines.  That was at the end of the May - so I thought I'd share with you some photos of the vines now to see the progress.

There is quite a lot of variation in different vines in as much as how they have taken and grown.  You can see from this one, that maybe it  is just taking, as there is a little bit of growth on the new bud on the right:

 Next there are some with a few inches of growth from one or both of the new buds:

Then there are some vines that have grown as tall as trees!:

On these bigger ones, there are even some bunches of grapes.  This first photo shows them still as flowers - you can just see the tiny bits of flowers...and the second photo shows them as new tiny grapes:

 The majority of grafts have taken and each week we count to see how many are 4 inches or more in height.  At the moment it's 240 out of 325 - with lots more that may well be 4 inches by the time we get home.

It's been interesting to see them all start and I'd never have thought we would get so much variation.  All this growth also means we have to do lots of suckering - which is taking off any new buds and shoots that appear BELOW the graft - as they would then come up as Merlot.  So it's been quite a bit of work. 

We'll see how they fair through the fall and hopefully the numbers of grafts taken will continue to rise.