Full flowering was pretty much the last week of June, around the 20-27th. So flowering was pretty much on time if not a few days early.
The Marquette, Leon Millot in the south lot were the first to start and really started the 2nd last week of June achieving decent fruit set. However there was lots of rain in June and at the exact same time (June 20-27) it was cool and rainy with a stretch of days in the 15c-18c range and you can see that impacted the l'Acadie with poorer fruit set. Castel, Leon Millot, Marechal Foch and Evangeline were not really impacted by rain or cool weather, but L'Acadie is more suseptable to poor weather at flowering.
Generally its the Castel and Marquette that are flowering first, then Leon Millot, the L'Acadie and Foch are next and lastly the Evangeline. All are doing well and we are seeing good development.
At this time and once we can see fruit set has occured we do some crop thinning to adjust to proper crop load. This is to ensure proper developent and to ensure the grapes will ripen (If the weather holds to that of a normal year). This means thinning shoots ...often referred to as green pruning.
Thinning the shoots/green pruning is a function of pruning to proper shoot count that aligns with the desired crop load. For Marechal Foch we target about 5 shoots per linear foot of trellis so as we go through the rows we cut away any extra shoots beyond 5 shoots per foot.
Any shoots beyond the target amount have to go but the first shoots selected to be pruned are the shoots that have no flower clusters or those with under developed clusters. Example below from July 10 of a cane that showing grape cluster (left) that is less developed than a normal one (right). The less developed one has been pruned away.
