This week: 26th. October

Weather Report Week Ending 26/10/07

Maximum Temperature for the week 36.0C (97F) on Sun. 5 readings above our monthly average of 20.5C.

Minimum Temperature for the week 6.1C (43F) on Fri. 5 readings above our monthly average of 8.0C.

Rainfall for the Week 6.6mm (19 points) 2 days of rain.

Weather data thanks to BOM & Nuriootpa Viticulture Research Centre.

Some rain for us this week, but not really enough to be useful. Two very hot days, with hot Northerly winds for us this week, these will have caused the vines to start using up our available moisture. We will need to start monitoring our soil moisture's very closely from now on, to work out when to start watering our vines.

This week in the vineyard:

We are continuing to do our Summer pruning. As I reported last week we have been drilling for water, to replace an old bore that we used to use for irrigation. We have been successful in finding water - however the quality is (as we expected) fairly marginal for growing grape vines. We will go ahead and equip this bore with a pump and filtration equipment, but it will only be used as an emergency water supply, if we can not get enough out of the Barossa Infrastructure Limited scheme that has been supplying water for us from the Murray River. If we have to use this bore water for more than a couple of years, I would expect to see some problems with Sodic soils starting to re-emerge (our soils have improved considerably in the 5 or 6 years since we have had access to the BIL water). The photo shows our new bore being blown out at about 8000 gal./hour.

We have also started putting on our 2nd fungicide spray for the season as some of our Chardonnay are showing the first signs of flowering.