Yuck!
OK, I hope this doesn’t come off as too winey but come on already Mother Nature! While the rest of the country is roasting we are stuck in a permanent grey spring day here. Temperatures barely getting out of the 50′s and 60s. Plenty of drizzel and an occasionaly small wind storm!!!
It has been the coldest spring/early summer in recorded history in the Seattle area. We are so far below the average growing degree averages for western Washington that I don’t know that we’ll ripen anything this year and that combined with the extra rain and my vines are growing like weeds and the weeds are growing like weeds. It’s a jungle out there! It’s a bit better in Eastern WA, but it’s still one of the coolest years in recent history. Oregon is facing the same dillema as Western Washington, 3+ weeks behind normal temperatures.
There has been a lot of gnashing of teeth that this may be the new normal for us. I think history is against this. We have 100 years of weather data for Seattle and this is an anomoly when averaged out we are still getting warmer as the years progress. I am still very upbeat about our long term prospects here in the PNW for grape growing, but sometimes you have to take the good with the bad…
Yes, pain in the butt. And, the weeds are doing a lot better than my vines. I have a couple that are going gang busters, and a few that are struggling, and several in the middle.