For most of the summer, we did a solid job of keeping birds away from the grapes by draping the vines with row cover. However, the storms of the last few weeks caused damage that we did not repair quickly and thoroughly enough, and birds consumed about 20 percent of the crop.
Of course, we are talking about roughly 22 pounds munched down to 18. And the 18 pounds were 4 more than last year's harvest.
We have been using the Shroud of St. Vincent for three years now. This year, tattered areas gave birds openings. This photo I think shows the remnants (right foreground) of a cluster of grapes that went down several cardinals' abysmal gullets:
This cluster (below) was damaged by heat and drought stress, which took hold in July but didn't cause all that much damage.
The bigger issue about this "urban vineyard" experiment is that it has not yielded as much as I expected when we started in 2006. We have eight plants, but just two yield in large enough amounts that they have to be thinned, and two others manage to produce scattered sparse clusters. The rest are non-performers. It's odd to realize that all this effort is devoted to what amounts to half a case of wine — good wine, actually. So the experiment is not exactly disappointing, but it is definitely strange.
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