vines

That's what this is all about, right? Well, after spending the weekend in the vineyard training new trunks on most of the Cynthiana vines, I'm finally coming to grips with how cold it got this past winter. We had temperatures in January down close to -20F. Greg has a couple of temperature probes up in the vineyard, one on the top of the hill and one down by the creek, where you would expect cold air to accumulate. He built a spreadsheet to keep track of the temperatures over the winter, and those probes plug right into a USB port on his laptop, which allows him to dump the data into Excel. There were definitely times when the top of the vineyard was several degrees warmer than the lower elevation part of the vineyard.

We originally assumed that much of the winter injury we were seeing was likely a result of the really cold spell we had in January. Things got started pretty late this spring in terms of new growth and we were holding our breath until we started seeing a lot of new growth from the base of most of the plants. We have planted two grapes that are in the upper edge of their hardiness range where we are, and both went through the wringer this past year. There's a pretty wide range of foliage in the Cynthiana, from puny, weak looking plants, to huge, very lush vines arching way up over the high wires above our heads. We've been doing some research and Greg suggests that it wasn't necessarily the January ultra-frigid temperatures that caused a lot of the canes and trunks to die back to the ground, but rather, it was the extreme November drop in temperatures that took the vines by surprise. We had a fairly warm spell in late October and early November and then one night the temperature plummeted to 18F after a fairly warm day. Vines are generally completely dormant by January but that kind of cold, that early in the fall may have caught a lot of the vine tissue still full of sap, and not hardened off enough to survive it. I think he may be right. Green grape vine canes break pretty easily (think fresh asparagus) but when they start hardening off, the soft green tissue is replaced by brown woody tough tissue that, while remaining pretty flexible, it is much more difficult to break. We had so much rain in Spring of 2008 that we got tremendous first-year growth out of the vines. It may have just been too much vegetation to harden off completely before things got really cold. Vine tissue containing a lot of water would have had a lot of ice forming in the cells and that may have sealed their fate.

I was pleased to see how much growth we got from the base of the vines this year, which enabled us to replace the damaged trunks and train new ones back up to the wire. We still lost some vines completely and will be replacing them with rooted cuttings that I will nurture over the winter under grow lights so they'll be ready to go in the ground next May. We've had a lot of rain again this year, but not the deluge we got last year. We now seem to be entering a dry spell which should help slow down the vegetative growth, and assuming we don't have a very wet August, things should start hardening off for winter better than they did last year. We're also going to try some viticultural practices that we've been reading up on that deal with protecting the crown of the vine, which should help prevent crown gall, which we've seen on several plants, and it is directly related to trunk injury from cold. This will involve painting the base of the trunk white, to reflect sunlight so the night/day temperature in the trunk is less extreme, and also finding some kind of tool that we can attach to the back of the tractor that will go along next to the vine row and mound up the soil over the bottom 6 to 8 inches of the trunk. The crown gall problem is something that we are going to need to find a solution for if these two varieties are going to be growing at Bluff Creek Vineyards. Whatever protection methods we can come up with for the Cynthiana and Traminette vines that we planted in 2008, we will also apply to the new 2009 vines, and hopefully we won't be dealing with this same issue again next spring.

Hot wire (no not that one)

When I was a kid, I loved to spend weeks in the summer with my Aunt Bibby and Uncle Joe. They had a farm with cows, horses, chickens, a huge garden, and what seemed at the time like a million acres of land. They lived in a big farm house and the entire second floor was used as an attic and man was there ever some cool stuff up there. I could spend hours up there poking around in boxes of Life Magazine and newspapers from the 1930s and 40s. Incredible stuff! I never went home from there without some treasure I'd dug up in the attic.

When I wasn't sleuthing around in the cubby holes in the backs of closets I was roaming all over the farm. Yes, part of the point of being there was to earn some summer cash helping out collecting eggs in the chicken house (imagine the scene from Napoleon Dynamite without the pitcher of raw eggs) but the majority of my time was spent crawling around the barn loft, messing around with the cows, trying to get them to chase me, and basically pretending to be Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Anyway, hot wire. The whole point of getting my miniature sheep was so they could work in the vineyard, eating weeds and mowing grass instead of me having to spray herbicide for weeds and run the mower for several hours per week. In order for the sheep to stay where I want them, I need to have some form of partition so they only work in the rows where I want them to mow/weed and not go running off all over the property. Originally I had thought about using several wires attached to the vineyard posts, about 8 inches apart, forming a multi-wire fence and blocking off the ends with cattle panels or snow fence or something else that would be easy to move, but we're talking literally about several miles of galvanized wire to do the whole vineyard that way. After visiting the vineyard where I bought my the sheep, I noted that they were using a single strand of electric fence to keep the sheep where they want them. When they wanted to move the electric fence, they just rolled it up on a spool and moved it to the new rows. (by the way, that also opens up the potential of never having to mow the yard again).

Back to Aunt Bibby and Uncle Joe's farm. Back in the day, when I was around 9 or 10, I had my first encounter there with electric fence. I happened to reach out and touch it after being told by my cousins, who shall remain nameless, that it was not plugged in. After being knocked off my feet by the jolt, and vowing revenge, (and also crying), I learned a valuable lesson about electricity.

Greg spent part of last weekend attaching the hot wire to four rows of the new vines, which have yet to be sprayed for weeds. He closed the circuit and ran everything up to a battery charged by a solar panel. Neither one of us has had the nerve to touch it to make sure it is working; me, because I know very well what that feels like, and Greg, because he doesn't! We'll know soon enough when we put the sheep out there this weekend. We will both be working out there training the new vines to the trellis and we'll see for certain whether this little sheep experiment is going to work. Based on my observations in the pasture thus far, the sheep seem to select weeds over grass when they have the choice of both. In fact, I've watched them eat some incredibly unpalatable looking stuff, including the noxious, skin-shredding, multiflora rose that is endemic here, as well as the wild gooseberries, also covered in thorns, which we have all over the place. Oh, and they love poison ivy. More about that later...

We still have the grow tubes on the new vines so they are safe from nibbling, and once the vines are mature, any leaves that grow on the trunk and any water sprouts that come up from the base, down low, are fair game for the sheep because they need to be pruned off anyway. We've set the cordon wire (the lowest horizontal wire where the vine's lateral arms grow, and where the fruit develops) at about 42 inches which should be high enough to be out of reach of the sheep. They do stretch their necks and reach up when eating sometimes but I don't think they can reach the cordons. If they can, I'll just move them higher. Once the vines are weighted down with big, ripe clusters of grapes, the sheep will have to be taken out of the vineyard, as the grapes will prove to be too irresistible to pass up, even if it means climbing up on each other to get them. Based on what I've read, until the grapes are actually almost ripe, and full of sugar, there isn't much interest in them from the sheep, or the deer for that matter. Once the ripening process starts, all bets are off.

From the moment I brought the sheep home, I've been using a little bit of sheep feed in a bucket to condition them to follow me. It worked. They practically bowl me over now when I walk into their pen shaking the green bucket. They make an incredible amount of racket over a couple of handfuls of grain. I guess the pellets are sort of like crack cocaine. It's hilarious to watch them inhale their food. The lambs in particular sound like little piglets when they're eating. My plan is to lead them out to the vineyard with the bucket of feed, (they are powerless to resist it) into the hot-wire enclosed rows, dump the bucket, and close the circuit. Based on what I've seen thus far, this should work. I've managed to cause a stampede all the way across their pasture just by shaking the bucket a couple of times. Even Jilly Bean comes thundering as fast as her stubby legs can carry her so she doesn't miss out on the treats. She is rotund and looks more like a hippopotamus than a sheep when she is running. I don't understand it because she runs everywhere she goes. She never walks. She shouldn't be fat at all.

See? That's her on the right!

On the Road Again...

Well, right now, Deb is in Missouri picking up her sheep. She left this afternoon for the 6 hour drive south and surely by now is learning a little bit more about what she's gotten herself into. She is staying at the farm where she is purchasing the sheep and this evening she will get a lesson on trimming the sheep's hooves. Interestingly, the farm she is purchasing the sheep from also is in the process of putting in a vineyard and has future plans similar to ours. At some point, once we have permission, we'll put a link to their website. Next year, I'll try to go down there with her, but this time, I still have work to do...

I finished nailing up the fencing up to the gate this evening, I'll finish securing properly tomorrow. Tomorrow morning, I'll be waking up early to finish one last h-brace and will be installing the gate. I then need to complete their shed, the framing is done, just needs a roof and the siding completed.

Never fear, Deb took the camera with her and I'm sure we'll have plenty of photos to share tomorrow evening or Sunday.

Until next time...

Mutton Mowers

Okay, maybe that's too graphic. How about Wooly Weeders or Weed Warriors? Anyway, I'm not sure there is anyplace in the U.S., with the possible exception of Hawaii, where coyotes have not carved out a niche for themselves. With the exception of RATS, I can't think of a more adaptable animal off the top of my head. Rural Iowa is definitely Coyote Country. I seldom see them but I hear them howling at night quite often, particularly in the spring. With our close proximity to the Lake Miami Wildlife Management Area, Coyotes are an inevitable part of living here. They play a role in controlling the population of rodents of all types, and are a part of the ecosystem here. They are welcome to all the rabbits, squirrels, mice, moles, voles, and chipmunks they can catch and carry away. What they are not welcome to is my little sheep. Livestock animals, particulary small livestock, are the low-hanging fruit of the food chain. In order to avoid having my sheep become the main course for a pack of coyotes, I need to protect them. Which brings me to...

Sophia! She's a female Great Pyrenees livestock guardian dog. I got the call today that she is ready to go to her new home and guard her sheep. She's currently in Rescue in Council Bluffs, Iowa, guarding goats. She will be making her way to Bluff Creek Vineyards sometime the week following the arrival of the sheep. She's a beautiful young female and should fit in well here. She's been in rescue for several months, after being found running along I-80 west of Des Moines. She has been evaluated in terms of her willingness and ability to guard livestock and has passed the test with flying colors. I'm really looking forward to getting her here and adjusted to her flock and new family. I'll be a lot less nervous knowing she's out there keeping an eye on things.

I still have a bit of work to do to get things ready for Sophia and the sheep, and that will be accomplished by the end of this weekend. I need my fence to be pretty bomb proof, as I will need to keep Sophia in, and all manner of unwanted guests OUT! I'll post more pictures when I get them.