Update

Well here is a little update without any pictures. MJ and I are back in the same town. For the past two weeks we have been in Austin, and then this past week I have stayed in Amarillo for a leadership training. Here is a run down of things happening in our lives:

• Marriage is great, our four day trip to Austin two weeks ago was so fun
• House is great, showers will be finished on Tuesday, plumbing done Monday, we move in at some point Tuesday or Wed.
• Vineyard is growing, despite the damage noted below, they are growing and some are growing fast!!
• Work is uncertain. Toby Tucker our Assist. Sup is leaving us and that may mean a change for the administration of CISD. I have no idea if this will trickle down to me or not, but one thing is for sure, change is often not welcome, but is often good. We shall see.
• Parents, My, Joe's, parents are coming on Thursday, and I cannot wait. It should be fun to hang out with my parents in Childress, TX considering they spend most of their time in the small town of Chicago. Should be interesting.

That's all for now, I will post some pictures of our vines growing soon.

How are your summers going?

Pictures of Damage

Here are photos of the damage in the vineyard after one week of recovery. Looks as if some will be fine. In the photos there are some new leaves that look healthy. But as you can see there are many plants in the vineyard that are very damaged. At the bottom I included some of the star vines that are actually putting out little fruit clusters.

Stress

This is something I have never experienced before, crop damage caused by a crop duster. In our vineyard on Sunday I was casually walking through doing weed control and began to notice plants with leaf damage. Some plants were entirely torched while others were just a leaf or two. It is the opinion of the experts that the vineyard was hit by a vapor cloud of 24d, a nasty chemical, that was not concentrated very high so the damage is not as bad as it could have been. Either way I have a hard time with some farmer spraying their field and it damaging mine. If you cannot keep your stuff in your field, wait for a better time to spray and leave my stuff alone. Some people will say, "That's just farming," but this is not cotton, these plants are planted once and will grow for 30 years, so this stuff effects growth for years. Frustrating.

My hope is that these very tough plants pull through and continue to grow. It will take about two weeks to really see if any need to be dug up and replaced, so we shall wait and keep our fingers crossed.

Here is the damage.......

This picture shows damage on the leaves to the left and healthy leaves on the right.


This one shows the damage on the top of the plant where the newest buds have come out.


And this picture shows a plant that is almost completely damaged