An Unfortunate Turn of Events – But a Chance at a New Beginning
What a difference a day makes! At 8:30 P.M. on May 14 I left our vineyard after a day of mowing and spraying, I noted that our Marquette and Prairie Star shoots looked great, later that evening we sat around a bonfire until around 11 P.M. knowing that it was going to be a cold spring night when the temp was at 37 F. However, we had expectations that it might go down to 34 F. At 5:00 A.M, unfortunately the temperature had reached 27 F, and as such 100% of our buds were destroyed. This has the effect of ruining our harvest on both our red Marquette grapes and our White Prairie Star grapes.
The good news is that our 550 Prairie Star vines are recovering nicely with secondary buds, these will do well in the future, however the 1100 Marquette vines sustained further damage. Unfortunately this comes in in the setting of two prior freezes and severe winter damage in 2011 with major trunk damage. We have to essentially start over with the Marquette, and will not have a productive harvest for 2-3 years. This is very discouraging to us and we think it is fair to say that Marquette will not do well long-term in our vineyard.
It should be noted that almost all our surrounding vineyards in the Southern Minnesota and Western Wisconsin area suffered the same damage. This suggests that our climate may be getting more erratic, and may portray a more volatile weather pattern in the future that is not conducive to a healthy vineyard.
It has been decided that although grapes do not do well in our climate we still want to keep going the concept of charitable giving through our farm and have thus decided to embark on a plan to install a charitable orchid! In the next few weeks we will be planting a replacement fruit of around 50 tree of Honey-crisp apples as a start and a new beginning.
Needless to say, we have given with the vineyard and will continue to give through the orchid as this will be our new future. What we can say unequivocally, however, is that the wonderful volunteers (YOU! ) who we have had the joy of meeting and sharing times with. This is simply irreplaceable. Myself and our board of directors would do it all again for that reason only.
Additionally we have a fun idea as a way to give back to our volunteers and help our charities at the same time. This fall we plan to host a A Fund-Raising Harvest Party!
We intend to have fun at our farm while hopefully raising more money for our 3 charities in one day than we have any year in the past.
We are planning to have this party on Saturday, October 1. We will get it started at 1:00, all of our past volunteers and anyone else who has followed our progress on our website or would like to be involved with this concept and would like to join us on that day is invited. Our purpose on this day will be to just have fun, play games and enjoy some great food. We will be set up for volleyball and all sorts of lawn games. Additionally we suspect that we may have at least one band coming to play music for us on this occasion.
The one thing we ask from you is to bring something to share, we will be serving hot pulled pork sandwiches as we have in the past, and you can bring anything as a compliment to that. We will have all the silverware, napkins, and plates necessary.
The most important thing that we want to mention is, we will have a “contribution container” available, and hope that everyone is able to make a contribution, of any amount of your choice, made out to one of our three charities.
The receipt of your donation will be sent from the charity directly to you. Also, for anyone that plans to donate we will pitch in a bottle of our famous “Altered States Apple” wine to each and every contributor. Additionally we plan to match every contribution from everyone who attends and donates to one of our 3 charities. In this way, we plan to provide a way to have our Vineyard continue to generate contributions to our three outstanding charities, that are doing so much to improve the people in their various communities.
This Fall Harvest Party idea will work if you and your friends want it to work as such we strongly encourage you to thinking about, and if you decide to attend, bring a friend! We strongly feel that this concept could generate more money for our 3 charities than our traditional fall harvests have done in the past, plus we get to have all of the fun – without any of the work in the vineyard!
We will keep you informed of our progress this summer with installing a new charitable orchid with a follow-up “news” item in August, and as usual, everyone is invited to stop out and visit us any time. As usual, feel free to call me with any questions or concerns in this regard.
Peace and charity,
Jim, Linda, and the board of Lost Creek Hippies Vineyard
Cell: 763-354-0880