Chris Preston wrote: ↑Wed Feb 01, 2023 12:51 am
It is almost like wine makers (because often they ultimately decide what grapegrowers can do) are particularly susceptible to muck, magic and pixie dust.
Wine is a product which is considerably about mystique and impressions, at least at the upper end. There are famous experiments where professional wine tasters are asked to rate wines at a blind or semi-blind tasting. They give consistently different ratings of the same wine according to what they are or aren't told about it - what they are told may include carefully chosen lies for experimental purposes. These indicate the considerable susceptibility of the customer base to suggestion. So a winemaker with an instinct for pixie dust is maybe better able to spread that pixie dust over their product and get more money out of their pixie-dust susceptible customers.
Meanwhile the government here seems to expect amateur vine-growers to use homeopathy and reiki to keep blights off their grapes. I haven't got any grapes off one of my vines the last 3 years, because the entire crop got destroyed by powdery mildew. It is a supposedly a mildew resistant hybrid, and I got away with it for 15 years. But no longer. And reading about it, now it has set in, it will do the same every year unless I get rid of it. I look what I can get to spray it with, and basically you can't buy the stuff that works any more. I tried some "toy" sprays, but they were both ridiculously expensive and ineffective. My attempt to use sulphur didn't work. I can buy flowers of sulphur cheaply, even in a garden centre. But apparently you need to get it in a colloidal solution, for effective fungicidal use, and I couldn't locate a practical method of kitchen chemistry to achieve that.
It seems basically the only way I'm going to solve this is to do what people have always done, and treat the vine with Bordeaux mix in the winter season. Bordeaux mix is a watery slurry of lime and copper sulphate. I can't buy copper sulphate for garden use, but I can buy copper sulphate for veterinary use, so now I have some copper sulphate. I bought some garden lime, and tried to make my Bordeaux mix with it, and sprayed it. But I now realise that is the wrong kind of lime. Wasted £10 there. It needs to be proper caustic. I have discovered I can buy the right kind of lime for culinary usage (!), and in more suitable small quantities, so I will buy that and try again. A bit more carefully, probably.
Another amateur gardening application where I am seemingly expected to use pixie-dust these days is protecting seedlings from damping off fungus. When I first tried to grow veg from seed, most of the seedlings wilted a few days after emerging. That's damping off, and it is instantly fatal to the seedling. Simply controlled by spraying the potting surface with copper sulphate, which you can't buy for garden use any more. I finally used up my last stocks that I bought a long time ago last year. But now I have some copper sulphate for veterinary use, so fixed that.