Winter arrives!!

The colder weather really hit us this week with temperatures dropping.  This is excellent for the trees and vineyards.  The buds need enough cold units to go through their rest period and be ready to bud for the next season.  To work it out the rule of thumb is usually the average of the days temperature (Min add Max divide by two) to be under 9 degrees Celsius.  This must continue for 5 or more consecutive days.  If it does not happen we will see uneven budding in Spring and this leads usually to uneven ripening of the fruit and thus lesser quality and difficult season. 
The other excellent thing about the cold and more precise the frost.  It helps to keep down the insect numbers.  Some of the insects die and or the eggs not being protected does not hatch.  Leading to a lesser concentration of insects. 
I also want to encourage neighbours to any farmer with a few nice fruit trees in their town garden to try and spray for fruit flies this winter.  The population of fruit flies in the Calitzdorp region was exceptionally high.  The flies usually goes to hide in trees with leaves and other hide outs in the winter because of the lack of protection in the cultivated orchards.  Their is a lot of different products that can be used and the best is to get the advice of the nearest Landmark. 
Well at Withoek we are not going to have an auction.  We are just cleaning up our act a bit.  Oom Apie is buys repairing the tractors one by one  and it seem to go well.  In the process we also spray them so that they also feels a bit better. 
The tasting room also got a new coat of paint to be ready for the Port festival and we are looking ahead to another successful one.  Thanks to Nita and Tony in particular for their hard work and dedication to this local festival.  We are hoping that the success of this one might lead to it being held annually again.  I thing the direction of lifestyle with a lot of emphasis on food type of entertainment.