November surprise

A hard freeze turned the leaves brown overnight, and within hours they'd all dropped. The notoriously vigorous norton vines shed their dinner plate-sized leaves and exposed a few surprise missed clusters. I tried the berries (that weren't dessicated) and they were rich and without the usual norton acidic tang. It was a reminder to leave this varietal hanging longer to drop the TA as much as possible. I'm always overeager to harvest. I could have left them for another two weeks at least. Conversely, I should have harvested the traminette a week or even ten days earlier. It's a slow learning process, and you have to wait an entire year to correct your mistakes, by which time you're apt to have forgotten your lessons. How does the saying go? Insanity is doing things over and over again the same way but expecting different results. In any case, it's a great time of year...the season is over, and the weather pleasant for trellis repairs, which you can undertake at a leisurely pace.