Groundhog day: 2022 is looking a lot like 2021
Let's take a look at the soil moisture, shall we?
Things certainly were looking up a few months ago, amiright? Harvest ended. Nothing in Sonoma or Napa caught fire. And we even got rain! A lot of it. Here in Windsor, California we finished out 2021 just south of 20 inches (50.8 cm) of rain for the fall season.
But then that was it. I may not have made it through dry January, but the weather did. Now we’re looking at a February that’s just as temperate.
Roll the footage...
We love our soil probes here at AV, so let’s take a look at how this year stacks up against its parched predecessor.
Here’s a Napa site, now keep in mind, we had some rain in February of 2021, but as you can see the moisture reserves that we accumulated in the fall have left us exactly where we were last year, and that’s not a comforting place to be…
Ditto in the Russian River Valley…
So is 2022 going to be just as hard?
Yes and no. One of the major problems last year was running out of water. If you use surface water-fed ponds, the early rains were probably enough to top them up. That’s great! You may need to irrigate just as hard as you did last year, but at least you’ve got something to work with.
As for how a continuing drought is going to affect you, that, as always is going to depend on your soil. Your vineyard may have hung onto all that water or it may already be dry, or partially dry. The only way to know for sure is to measure. So yeah, get yourself a soil moisture probe and enjoy the sunshine, because there’s more where that came from.
