Monday

Things I should be doing: preparing for a work meeting, doing work stuff

Things I am doing:

Looking up degree days base 10C in British Columbia (interestingly the climate atlas doesn't have a fixed map, it has time sliders because: global warming): https://climateatlas.ca/map/canada/dd10_2060_85# (ok, this is actually relevant to work)

Looking up hardy grape cultivars -> looking up available hardy grape cultivars in Canada -> looking up grape cultivars from the Baltics -> considering how to smuggle grapes here from the rest of Canada and therefore potentially introduce grape diseases to this area but honestly grapes don't grow here -> looking up extreme northern Canadian winery blogs -> creating comparative lists of hardy northern grape cultivars wrt availability, hardiness, earliness of production, and earliness of budbreak

Lamenting not having milk for tea

Slope, Aspect, Grapes, and Frost

Alright. Let's get into it.

My property is for the most part a gentle south slope. There is a long winding swale/depression that gives a little bit of north slope, and the house and a clump of trees both provide some shade that functions similarly to a north slope. In the far back it curves more into a west slope but that's outside current fences almost as far back as the pond.

Temperature-wise we're getting higher minimums and more heat overall during the summers but not at quite the pace of the rest of the province.

There's a lot of spring/early summer drainage across the middle of the back pig field, it's basically the snowmelt and then groundwater coming down through the a slightly low spot: the pigs dug wallows in it this summer or I wouldn't have known it was there.

General gardening wisdom is that a south slope is good for fruit because it gives more heat and provides a longer season. Depressions or spaces with something immediately downhill can "trap" cold air/frost as it sinks across the landscape, increasing the chance of freezes in weird weather.

Further nuance is that a south slope is more affected by sun on warm days but isn't particularly more protective against frost, so a plant growing on a south slope is more likely to come out of dormancy and start flowering before the last frost. Then its fruit or flowers might be harmed by the frost as a result of it being early.

I've planted haskaps on my steepest south slope because even though they are really early to flower and so maybe should be put somewhere that will protect them from early growth, their flowers are unharmed down to -7C (where apple blossoms, for instance, are harmed around -2 or -3C). Even if they are encouraged to grow earlier because of the slope my hope is that they withstand resulting frost on their blossoms. Plus that slope gets pretty dry in August and the haskap are done fruiting long before then so they don't need fruiting levels of irrigation, just enough water to keep them from dying and ease them into dormancy.

Haskaps are wonderful fruit for this area.

Grapes are much, much, much less well-suited to this area. There are a couple places in Canada that make what is considered to be "cold climate" and "hardy" wines. Those are much warmer than where I am, both in how much heat they get in summer and how cold they get in winter. The northernmost functioning grape wineries are roughly 600km south of here; they are roughly 15C warmer than us in the winter and we're only about half the degree days that the coldest ones have (grapes use base 10C). That means basically all grapes won't survive the winter here, and they also will not ripen.

Further further nuance is that a good blanket of snow keeps things under it from getting as cold. We have good snow cover here compared to those areas, we're lucky that way (it replenishes water in the soil too, though managing it is hard) and so I can maybe push those hardiness boundaries a little.

As with so many things there is some super useful breeding work being done in Russia/the Baltic states. They have grapes that will definitely survive here and maybe even ripen here (!!) in good summers. University of Minnesota has been doing a bunch of breeding for grapes that are able to survive winters here but probably need more heat than we currently have to ripen. There's also a bit of work being done in Quebec and there was a guy working on it in U Sask but he may no longer be doing that.

Not just the country border, but borders with the rest of Canada are also problematic for me to cross. Lots of places in Canada can't ship to BC due to quarantine restrictions etc; BC is a pretty intense wine-growing area and so they're trying to keep diseases out. Having said that, I can't even find a lot of the baltics material for sale even in the US (because why would it be? No one's growing in this sort of climate there as much). And I really don't want to be the person who imports some sort of weird disease with my clandestine cuttings.

But anyhow, to bring it back a little: grapes like it dry and warm but stable-warm, so I'm mapping my property to see where I can put grapes. It's a sketchy proposition to put in the plants I can get my hands on easily, and it's sketchy to try and get the plants I can't get my hands on but they'd grow better here. I will likely get some test plants and play around.

If I were to move as far south as Quesnel, which Tucker and I had discussed at some point, I could safely grow grapes that fruited at least most summers, and every year would be more likely to fruit as we came in over the brink of hardiness with climate change. That would be easy fun. Harder fun is sourcing weird material, siting a bunch of plants carefully, and observing results. I'm looking to see how much of a shoestring budget I can put into that harder fun.

This whole thing came about because my grain trials are full of aspen roots and so I'm thinking about shifting that whole area to woody perennial culture and there's a fence that can take grapes there. One thing happens and the whole kaleidoscope of Threshold shifts and shifts again.