Little Fires Everywhere
No, this is not a journal about Celeste Ng's novel - it is a description of the vines and orchards surrounding the Jardin Paysan on several nights over the past week.
Tuesday morning's bale of hay still smouldering - plus another in place in case the temperature drops again
Rural France has been hit with a perfect storm in terms of weather events. We had a wet winter, promoting growth, very warm weather in March, promoting precocious flowering and then, suddenly, over the last week, several nights where the temperature fell to below freezing. The result was described yesterday, by the French Minister of Agriculture (Didier Guillaume), as the biggest catastrophe to hit agriculture this century.
The night before last I was woken at 5am by the sound of vine workers travelling to the vineyards where they set fire to bales of hay. These had been distributed among the vines in frost pockets ready to be lit just before dawn, which is the coldest time of the night. Cold air is heavier than warm and it rolls down a slope to collect in a pocket. This frost pocket can be at the bottom of a valley or it could be that something as simple as a hedge, bank or patch of woodland acts as a dam creating a lethal pool of freezing air. The smouldering bales were an attempt to warm the air and avert catastrophe. Wealthier vineyards, such as those in St Emilion and the Medoc, may employ special fans or burners or even helicopters to circulate the air, but such options are not possible for the ordinary vineyard.
Bales of hay being moved into place in readiness for Tuesday morning's frost
Farmers, vignerons and gardeners know exactly where frost pockets are on their land and after a sudden frost you can often see a "frost line" below which a crop has perished because of the cold. This was most obvious to us a few years ago when there was a savage frost late in April. Travelling along the road below St Emilion we could see a virtual line on the hillside with brown vine leaves below it and healthy green ones above. It was so evident what had happened that in some places vines which were pruned to flower close to the ground were damaged whereas taller vines, pruned to flower higher above the ground, survived.
The buds of grape flowers from a vine on higher ground - they look to have survived
The upshot of this year's late frosts is that some grapes will have been lost plus the harvest of some soft fruit, especially apricots and cherries we are told, will be seriously diminished. This will be reflected in tough times for the agriculteurs concerned and higher prices in the shops for the rest of us. Some local growers of prunes d'Agen (see an earlier blog) have said that they are also facing a crisis.
In our garden we appear to have survived the worst. We are on a hillside and our frost pocket is in the wild garden, where shrubs and trees catch the air in one corner as it rolls downhill. The orchard and potager usually survive unscathed. We covered our potatoes with fleece and made sure that seedlings such as tomatoes and chillis were protected. I suspect that our cherry crop will be poor, but as for the rest - we will have to wait and see.
The pear tree had already set fruit which appear to have survived
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