lonrombough

The Grape Grower - Video

Sat, 19 Apr 2008 03:48:57 GMT

A few months back, the folks from Cookingupastory.com came to my place and did a video/interview with me. The finished video is now available for viewing at http://cookingupastory.com/ Look for The Grape Grower.

Fish Fertilizer

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 23:51:57 GMT

A new source of fish fertilizer found me recently. Got an ad for it, then followed the letter to the source and discovered it's quite different. How so?

First, most fish fertilizer is made from wild caught sea fish. That makes the content of it variable according to what species are used, and means the fertilizer may contain heavy metals the fish ingested. Granted, that's not likely to be a major problem, but why add something you don't want, even in small amounts?

This new fertilizer is processed from farmed, freshwater catfish, prepared at much lower temperatures than other fish fertilizers to keep more of the nutrients and amino acids intact. Because the diet of the fish is controlled, the fertilizer has fewer heavy metals and unwanted contaminants. And the supply isn't as dependent on the availability of fish because the production of the catfish is pretty much a known quantity.

The company recommends using the fish as a foliar feed, though it will work perfectly well to fertilize the soil the regular way. I have some to test as soon as the vines get growing, and will keep you posted.

The name of the fertilizer? That will be on my website shortly. ;-)

New Grape on the List

Sun, 09 Mar 2008 03:46:49 GMT

I am offering a new grape, the Dr. Good grape http://bunchgrapes.com/dr_good_grapes.html named for the creator, the late Dr. Norman Good. It might not have been his best creation, as I never got to see all his grapes before or after he died, but he felt it was worthy of sharing with me, which touched me deeply. It's certainly deserving of more trial than it has gotten, at least.

America

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 18:05:05 GMT

If you are interested in the grape "America" this is the time to get it. I have an extra supply this year and probably won't have this kind of quantity again. What is "America"?
http://www.bunchgrapes.com/america_grapes.html

In addition to the above entry, I'll add that reports have been coming in that America can make a very decent dry red wine, after the fashion of Norton, in some locales. It hasn't been tried enough to find out all of where it works, but with the disease resistance and hardiness of the variety, it's worth testing in a lot of areas where the summers are decently warm, such as Missouri.

This is the year for America!

Order SOON

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 22:26:43 GMT

If you are planning to order and you think the variety might be one in low demand, order soon. I'm greatly slowed on collecting cuttings of all varieties this year, so ones that may not be ordered are going to be left unpruned for now. If the weather holds the vines dormant, such varieties MAY be collected eventually, but if not, I'll just prune and drop the wood at the end of the season.

At the same time, packing orders is a piecemeal process due to the same slowdown, so PLEASE be patient. The orders WILL be filled.

With luck, this situation will change before next year and this kind of slowdown won't happen again.

Spam Filters

Sun, 10 Feb 2008 17:03:19 GMT

If you use one of the spam filters that requires that a recipient has to enter the system before the filter will accept a reply, don't be surprised if you don't get a reply. While I'm glad to help, some of these "systems" take time to register and more time to get verification. Combine that with not knowing if the particular spam system isn't itself either sending me some kind of invader, or putting me on it's own spam list, and I prefer not to participate.
So please clear my address in advance if you must use that kind of system.

"New" Grapes

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 05:36:50 GMT

I've had notes from more than one person telling me of a nursery here in Oregon that is offering a couple of "new" grapes. While I appreciate their thoughtfulness in wanting to keep me posted, I do know about the grapes and I feel I should say something about the varieties, called "Heavenly Blue" and "Sweet Seduction".

Heavenly Blue and Sweet Seduction were unofficially "released" by the late William Schulz of Philomath, Oregon, a man I knew for over 25 years. Heavenly Blue is a selection from Cornell's Geneva, NY station. Bill saw it on a visit there and "lifted" a cutting. The selection was actually discarded by the station because, as Bill found out, it has very small berries and is irregular in bearing. In fact, Bill himself didn't really care for it after growing it for a few years. He just happened to have seen it under special conditions when he visited the station.

Sweet Seduction is a white seedless muscat from the U. of Arkansas. Dr. James Moore let Bill have it, but it is very straggly and bears very light crops. It does have muscat flavor, but the blue variety "Jupiter" also from the University of Arkansas is a much better bearing seedless muscat.

Unfortunately, the nursery continues to offer the grapes simply because the varieties sell, not because they are particularly worthwhile.

From Out Of The Past

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 14:54:10 GMT

There is a grape in my collection that I enjoy for more than just the grape itself. Delaware is an American grape that has been around for close to 200 years. It's a bit of living American history in my vineyard.
http://www.bunchgrapes.com/delaware_grapes.html

How many hands did the variety pass through on it's way to me? It had to cross the continent in the process, and it produced many thousands of gallons of wine, as well as tons of fruit that were used by countless people before me. It may continue on, though probably in a diminishing role as other grapes take center stage. It didn't leave any offspring of real note - many breeders used it in crosses, but none of the offspring ever achieved the same quality.

In some locales Delaware is gaining a bit of new interest because it has good resistance to the disease, black rot, which means it has some value for people who want to use less spray.

It's still a lovely little vine for those who grow it, and I hope that this past giant of American grapes will continue for a while. I'll do my best to help it on it's journey.

Please Don't Buy These

Sun, 27 Jan 2008 05:25:27 GMT

Back in college, I belonged to a horticulture club that had an annual field trip, which was financed by sales of house plants we propagated in the school greenhouse. When we loaded them to take to the student union for the big sale, there were always some that were runts or otherwise poor plants. When the sale was over and the leftovers were being loaded, those low-grade plants were always gone. There was always someone who either "took pity" on the runty plants, or took it as a personal challenge to try to nurse them to health.
What does that have to do with grapes?
Just that there are two varieties in my material that I would rather NOT sell as those two grapes have serious issues. One is a total weakling on all but a few very fertile soils, while the other is so prone to splitting and spoilage of the fruit it has to be grown in a nearly ideal, dry climate and treated very carefully for disease to get anything.
I added them to my collection early, before I knew anything about their performance, and the only reason I list them is because so many people heard of them and wanted to try them, I realized that NOT listing them was a losing battle. Putting them on the list just spared me lots of phone calls and e-mails from people who just HAD to try them.
More than once I've heard from previous customers who agreed that the varieties really weren't worth growing, though once in a while a really persistent grower reports a degree of success.

And no, I'm NOT going to name them here because I don't want even more requests for them. I want to sell grapes because I know you'll ENJOY them, not just because a masochistic grower wants a challenge.

Oopsie!

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 04:58:56 GMT

Had an accident in the nursery and mixed cuttings of Canadice, a red seedless, with Campbell Early, a seeded black American table grape. Rather than risk trying to sort them out, I am offering them as mixed cuttings at 30 cents off on the price. You may get all of one or the other, or some of each. No way to know until they grow. So for five cuttings, the price would be 5 x $1.00 instead of the usual 5 x $1.30. Shipping stays the same. Order "Mixup" on the order form. Both are excellent grapes, you just won't know what you have until they grow and bear.

Remember, "Mixup" on the order form.

A Nice Local Publication

Sat, 12 Jan 2008 23:51:27 GMT

http://www.mtangelpub.com/ This is the website for a local publisher, Mt. Angel Publishing, that has been buying some gardening articles from me. It's a nice small-town place that deserves more recognition.

Time Passes

Sat, 29 Dec 2007 20:05:45 GMT

There's a new cord of wood stacked to cure and a couple yards of chips for mulch. All from an oak I planted in 1979.
In that year, a friend had a volunteer pin oak seedling in her flowerbed. She's a plant lover and hated to kill it, so she offered it to me. It was planted where it had room to grow on good soil, but otherwise not given special care other than some removal of low limbs that were poorly placed. It eventually reached a height of 60 feet and had a trunk two feet thick at the base. But while many trees of that type have good fall color, it had a bit of yellow for a couple of days, then the leaves went brown and would hang on all winter.
This year I had a chance to get another oak that has red fall color, and has it for at least a couple of weeks or more. More interesting to me, it has large acorns where the old tree had tiny ones. So the old oak came down and there will be a new one planted next to the old stump. The stump itself will be innoculated with mushroom spawn, both to give us something to eat and to break down the old stump.
Now, if it just didn't make me feel old to know that a tiny sapling got THAT big in my lifetime, and is now gone. Maybe the new tree will make it to that size while I'm still around.

"The best time to plant trees is 20 years ago. The second best time is now."

It's Later Than You Think

Sat, 29 Dec 2007 19:56:22 GMT

It has been eight days since bunchgrapes.com opened for the season and already two varieties are sold out, with more already on the endangered list. "Bell" and "Green Veltliner" are gone for the season, "America" is moving quickly, and some of the muscat varieties are being ordered earlier than usual.

Just so you know.

Opening Day

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 05:49:17 GMT

For those who have been waiting, bunchgrapes.com will be open for orders on Friday, December 21, 2007. There are some new varieties, some changes, and some things that were going to change but didn't.

I set up a Paypal account to use, but I probably won't be using it. For one thing, I already had to raise shipping costs because of postal increases, and if I went to Paypal, I'd have to raise prices to cover the business fees they charge. That would put the prices higher than I want them.

Then something happened that almost seemed like a sign. The week I would have put up the Paypal link, there were three separate attempts to try to buy from the site using credit cards, from overseas buyers. Since it states "No International Orders" on the site, it didn't take much to find that these were all scam attempts. That just made it seem like I'd be tempting fate if I started taking credit cards in any way, so I'll stay with the old method, namely cash, checks, or money orders.

Thank you all for your support.

Books For Christmas

Tue, 11 Dec 2007 17:54:03 GMT

If you want to order an autographed copy of The Grape Grower for a special Christmas gift, there is still time. Head for http://www.bunchgrapes.com and follow the directions. Or if you want to order from Amazon.com, go to my site, click on the image of the book on the home page. That takes you to a second image. Click on THAT image and you'll be at the sales site for the book on Amazon.

"You'll Understand When You're Older"

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 05:17:44 GMT

If ever there was a phrase intended to frustrate children, that has to be one of the top ten. But even as annoying as it is at the time you first get it, I'd wager that everyone has at least one instance when they really DID have a sudden flash of understanding years later. Right in the middle of a conversation or activity you've witnessed from adults years earlier, it hits you - "THAT'S what they meant."

What interests me is that the older I get, the more often I get revelations of that type, in a slightly different sort of way.

When I was home on vacation from college I sometimes went around pruning grapes for home growers. Pruning is one of those activities that seems to scare people when it comes to grapes, so I'd do it for them. Usually they just showed me the vines and went away. But one time a boy about 7 or 8 came out and not only stood there watching, he kept asking what I was doing. It wasn't that easy to explain that the vine had to have the extra growth removed so it would grow better, but while I'd have preferred to be doing the work alone, I had no cause to actually run the kid off. And it wouldn't have gone over that well with the people, anyway.

After I was done, I was more or less asking myself "what was THAT all about?" An hour or so spent pruning vines with a somewhat annoying kid around. Not really expecting an answer. Yet, very recently, in preparing a presentation, I realized that kid was the first time I'd put my pruning knowledge, such as it was at the time, before an audience. THAT was the point of it. It was my baptism in instructing someone how to prune grapes. I seriously doubt the kid went out and started to grow grapes later on, but the experience was meant as an icebreaker for me.

And after I realized THAT, I began to see other experiences that pointed me along the way to that first "presentation."

"You'll understand when you're older" seems to be very good advice for people of all ages. Be patient and eventually those odd, puzzling, or unpleasant moments become understandable when you get a chance to put all the pieces of the picture together. Maybe it was a small lesson in patience, maybe it was a nudge along a new path. File your experiences and "wait 'til you're older" and you might discover something outstanding unfolding from them.

Grapes and Trees

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 00:28:08 GMT

Before I started in grapes, I explored many other fruits. In a class in college in my junior year I did a literature search (the OLD way, pre-internet) and did a presentation on "Wide Hybrids in Tree Fruits". That is, crosses between fruits that don't usually cross. Crossing apples with pears, plums with apricots, cherries with plums, and more. This was all done the old fashioned way, without any sort of genetic manipulation, just by putting pollen of one on the flower of another. You might do several hundred flowers to get ONE seed, it was that hard to make some of these crosses.

One of the side effects of that was to stimulate an interest in collecting and studying varieties of fruits of all sorts. At the same time, I was quite taken with the work of Luther Burbank, who made many such unusual crosses himself. He was the first breeder to make confirmed crosses of apricots and plums, so-called "plumcots". Anyway, I started hunting for varieties of his fruits and collected things like stoneless plums, a white-fleshed Japanese plum, and more.

But many of those have been more or less sitting quietly without having anything done with them as my work with grapes increased. Just so much one person can do. Now I've had a renewed interest in some of them and hope to start trying to work with at least a few of them again. Will anything come of it? I don't know, but I hope to at least spread the plants around and perhaps infect a few other people with the bug to work with them so that they won't be lost.

Stay tuned. I'll still be doing grapes, but I hope to revive at least some of my old work again.

Really Accomplishing Something For The Environment and Yourself!

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 22:24:37 GMT

One resource that is becoming more and more critical in too many areas is water.
Most people do things like watering less, or planting landscapes that need less water, but most of us still continue to use one thing that wastes more water than anything else in our lives - flush toilets.

We have been using a waterless compost toilet for nearly 30 years, with the result that we have never had to use water to flush. http://www.compostingtoilet.com/ By this time, that is a lake's worth of water. Ours was a "beta test" model and is slightly undersized for us, so we have to remove compost about every six months, but newer types can literally go years without having to remove anything. Compost removed in the fall goes on the garden for the winter, while the spring cleaning goes on the trees. And while we do the work by hand, the newer models can be totally automated to augur the compost out of the tank into a cart, or wherever you want it to go.

The company has designed the newer types so well that the ventilation system can be entirely solar powered.

We have a well, so the water we save also means less electricity spent to pump water. In the city, it would have more effects than that.

A city dweller with the compost toilet would not only have much lower water bills, they would be putting a lot less water and sewage into the sewer system. Multiply that enough times and suddenly the sewage treatment plants would be handling much less household sewage and more industrial waste material. With the wastes being diluted so much less, it might be easier to remove toxic substances from the waste.

More important, one of the most serious types of pollution now is from biological substances flushed down the sewers. Hormones from birth control. Caffeine. Drugs. Antibiotics. And many more. If all these were caught by compost toilets, they would be broken down more thoroughly and wouldn't be dumped into the water systems to cause problems in rivers and streams. Since the compost in the toilet takes two to four years to go from the top of the pile to the clean-out port, it has a much better chance to be broken down completely than something that spends only a few days in a sewage plant before being flushed into a river.

The compost toilet isn't work free, but the new types take very little work, and most functions can be motorized and simplified. But don't take my word for it. Learn how to really save water and save money, and prevent some serious pollution in the process. Go to http://www.compostingtoilet.com/

Made A Liar of Me

Wed, 26 Sep 2007 04:22:12 GMT

On my website I've noted the grape "Orange Muscat" as being mainly a wine grape, and said that while it has intense muscat flavor, it is too soft to be considered a suitable table grape. This year, it decided to contradict me. This year, the berries were firm, meaty, and very much like a table grape. True, it has seeds, but if it was always like this, I wouldn't hesitate to call it a table grape.

However, I don't know what exactly made it come out the way it is this time around. So I STILL can't generally recommend it as a table grape, since I don't know what combination of soil and climate will make it such a nice table grape (assuming you don't mind seeds and can control disease on it).

Pass It On

Sun, 16 Sep 2007 04:29:53 GMT

The late Elmer Swenson so enjoyed the grapes he bred that he would send cuttings and seeds to anyone who wanted them. He purely sparkled when he talked about his grapes, and he had a lot to be proud of. His grapes have gone to many different countries and have changed the course of grape growing in many parts of the U.S., Canada and other countries where cold weather limited grape growing in the past.

I have a good number of his grapes planted in my own collection, and many of them do very well here in Oregon. I'm also able to grow varieties that Elmer would have had trouble with in his cold northern Wisconsin location, so I can make crosses that he might have had difficulty doing. I don't grow the seeds out myself any more, but instead send them to people in other areas who grow the vines out and look for new selections that hopefully will stand up to their conditions, but will be an improvement over older varieties.

Elmer Swenson took grapes that had been bred and selected by people before him and used them to create new and better grapes that improved the lot of thousands of people who could grow good grapes in places where old varieties couldn't grow. Those grapes will continue for decades or even centuries into the future.

I hope that what I'm doing will honor the work of people like Elmer Swenson and will set more grapes on the way into the future to help improve things for future grape growers.

In the end, even if a person is forgotten, if something he created or helped create continues on after him and continues to do good, he will have given of himself in one of the highest ways possible.

I Get Around

Sat, 01 Sep 2007 05:02:09 GMT

Sometimes without even meaning to.

Gurney's and Henry Fields' nurseries are offering some new grapes this year, including an old one named "America".

A fellow I know came to me about three years ago asking advice on grape varieties. One I recommended was "America" an old variety with excellent disease resistance and hardiness. He later bought all the cuttings of America I had to spare that year. Turned out he was doing consulting work for a group that bought up the two aforementioned nurseries, along with several others. They took the cuttings and had them mass propagated and are now offering vines of a variety that hasn't been in wide circulation for nearly a century.

Competing with me? Heavens, no. They've publicized the variety enough that I'm getting more orders for it than I've ever had before. And a worthwhile old grape is getting exposure it deserves.

Very Close Now

Sun, 05 Aug 2007 22:07:11 GMT

The Grapeschool Special Mentoring Teleseminar http://www.grapeschool.com/launch.htm has just three spaces left. If you want to join us, the time is NOW.

Special Mentoring Program

Fri, 27 Jul 2007 20:35:33 GMT

The morning of July 27, 2007 marks the start of the signup period for Grapeschool's special Teleseminar Mentoring Program http://www.grapeschool.com/launch.htm on grape growing . This is an interactive multi-week program with a ton of information and bonuses. It's for grape growers of any level, from amateurs to established commercial growers. Rather than try to describe it all here, I encourage you to visit http://www.grapeschool.com/launch.htm and read the full story. It includes books, personal conferences, even the cuttings needed to start a vineyard. Just be sure to hurry as the spaces are limited.

Teleseminar

Fri, 20 Jul 2007 00:17:53 GMT

My first venture into an audio teleseminar, on grape growing.
http://www.instantteleseminar.com/?preview=3&previewbar=1&eventid=455583

This is the free "warm up" to the full seminar later on.

Time Flies

Thu, 19 Jul 2007 04:48:48 GMT

Below is URL and an excerpt from the site. Why this one? The lady who wrote it was one of my wife's elementary school students at the time we met. Now that girl is a grown woman with children older than she was at the time she was my wife's student. She has always been a very creative person and this is my small way of recognizing that creativity.

http://www.bonnieblythe.com/

Welcome to my website! Reading romance novels has always been a favorite pastime for me and now I'm having even more fun writing them.
My novels are gently woven with an element of faith. To some that might seem odd, but it shouldn't be. After all, God is the true author of romance!