Seasonal Balances and Distributions of Growth, Nutrients, and Carbohydrates in Mature Concord Grapevines © 2003

A cooperative project with: Alan Lakso, Terry Bates, Martin Goffinet, and Lailiang Cheng

In downtown Boston there is a huge road and tunnel construction project renamed the "Big Dig" by the residents of the city. Well, at the Fredonia Lab we have our own "Big Dig" with Concord Grapevines. Last November a research group started excavating whole mature Concord vines to look at a variety of growth, nutrition, and anatomical questions. There are ten scheduled excavations spanning from November 2002 to November 2003 and five vines are excavated at each time point. The "Big Dig" is a cooperative project between me, Dr. Martin Goffinet, Dr. Lailiang Cheng, and Dr. Alan Lakso. I am investigating seasonal vine and root growth, Martin is studying grapevine vascular anatomy, Lailiang is looking at nitrogen and carbon use, and Alan is measuring canopy development and photosynthesis.

On 5/28/2003, we completed excavation #4 and the following pictures illustrate just some of the activities involved in the "Big Dig."

When you find yourself in a hole. . . Mike Vercant removes the grapevines in the rows next to the experimental 'count' vines. Matthew begins excavating the root system of the vine behind him with a spading fork and uses the trench to dump the excess soil. In the end, roots are manually excavated from an 8 foot wide by 8 foot long by 4 foot deep area.

. . . stop digging: Although the "Big Dig" block is a deep, well drained, gravely-loam soil, ownrooted Concord roots tend to be shallow and spreading. The darker soil on the right of the picture clearly shows the 12 inch plow layer where the soil is higher in organic matter and contains most of the grape roots. The more orange (deeper) layer contains few grape roots; however, each vine we excavated has at least one sinking root that penetrates the deeper soil layers.

Mapping Nitrogen: Ted Taft and I collect soil samples at three depths and pass the samples onto Lailiang Cheng for analysis. Three weeks prior to this excavation, N15 (a stable isotope of Nitrogen) fertilizer was applied to these vines. Lailiang will use the soil samples and vine tissue to determine the fate and efficiency of the applied nitrogen fertilizer.

Parts is parts: Paula, Kelly, and Madonna separate vines into the major tissues of leaves, stems, clusters, canes, two-year-old wood, cordons, trunks, shanks, thick roots, and thin roots. The vine parts will be measured, dried, weighed, and analyzed for nutrients and carbohydrates.

The dirty dozen: Concord roots spread all over the vineyard floor. All hands are called out from the different research labs to help excavate those pesky roots.

More parts is parts: Finally, Martin and Mary Jean collect the tissue they need for their anatomy studies and the rest of the root systems are separated and processed for biomass, carbohydrate, and nutrient analysis.

Only six more excavations to go and the next one will be at bloom.