Sunday, July 21, 2013

Moved from 'October Grape': River Vineyard mysteries

The river-vineyard has 5 of 6 rows planted. To check my record keeping, I tried to 'balance' the 'new vineyard' spreadsheet, which was started when I cleaned the seeds and has been updated periodically ever since, against what I counted in the river-vineyard and 14 remaining pots.

Here is what I discovered.  The river-vineyard has 3 sets of mystery plants, plants with suspect lineage.  First, there are offspring of Rich's 'mystery vine'.  Rich's mystery vine is one of his favorites.  Seedlings from this vine are among the most vigorous river-vineyard vines. Pedigree?  Oh, well...

Second, there is the pot whose label said 'Missing spoon'. The pot was planted out and covers 14 dripper locations, the largest group we planted.   I use plastic spoons covered with metalic tape to record the cross in each pot.  This pot seems to have lost its spoon, so at some unrecorded moment this spring, I put a 'missing spoon' spoon in that pot.

After carefully checking my spreadsheet, all the river vineyard vines and remaining pots, there were only two spreadsheet entries that were not accounted for:

CA 06-38-1 x Carnelian (on 5/4/13, my records said there were 20 seedlings)

Doaniana Montague x Carnelian (on 5/4/13 there were 5 seedlings)

Since we planted 14+ seedlings, the 'missing spoon' pot was probably 'CA 06-38-1 x Carnelian'.  The Doaniana x Carnelian pot was probably the one attacked by snails, and got removed at some point.  (I only had one pot suffer from snails)

I'll leave the '?' on the label until the seedlings grow out and we can confirm the guess.

Finally, there was one pot with a label that wasn't in my spreadsheet: Z89-9-3 x Cabernet Sauvignon.  The label is pretty clear about what it says, so I'm very sure  it wasn't in my spreadsheet.  What can I say, it is another mystery.  I'm just going to add it to the spreadsheet now, and plant the pot.  Additionally, there was an extra unplanted 'Doaniana Montague x Cab' pot.  Having two Cabernet crosses omitted from the spreadsheet is troubling, but the labels are both explicit (and in my hand writing).

Mea culpa.  My record keeping has flaws.  All I can do is record the issues as I find them.

If you have gotten this far, here is a screen shot of my spreadsheet.  The top 14 entries are "row 6" of the new river-vineyard. The 'planting or greenhouse' numbers are for 'dripper sites'.  Generally, there are two seedlings at each dripper location.

Below that is an inventory of the seedlings still in pots.  For these entries, the 'planting or greenhouse' number is a direct count.

The first 5 river-vineyard rows are shown in my 7/11/13 entry.

Click to enlarge...
























Here is an update on this year's seedlings as of 7/8/13.  Of note, the z89-9-3 x Jupiter has been the weakest cross as a group.  I'm having to work to keep 3 seedlings alive, hiding them from the sun.  Rich's Montague x French Mystery vine seems to be the healthiest.

I'm still planting seedlings as they get large enough to handle the sun.  A new row will probably get planted this weekend. 

Click on the list to enlarge it.

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