Shoots!

Seeing as this is a "Vineyard Blog," how about some blogging about the vineyard? As usual, spring comes roaring in with lots to do, including mowing, spraying, training vines, and scouting for insect and fungal pests. There's plenty to do out there this time of year. Once the temperatures start getting up in the 80s you really need to stay on top of any disease pressure because warm wet springs set the tone for the rest of the growing season. Diseases that take hold on the leaves and blooms are impossible to eradicate later in the summer once they've affected the fruit.

So, what am I up to out there today? Well, I'm working on the Sabrevois vines, which are well ahead of the Traminette and Cynthiana vines in terms of growth stage. They are really taking off. We grow this particular grape on a trellis style called Vertical Shoot Position. This trellis is typically used with upright growing cultivars and there is a main wire that holds the horizontal cordons, the lateral arms from which the rest of the shoots grow vertically. The main wire is roughly 40" above the ground and then at eight-inch intervals above that there are additional pairs of catch wires. These catch wires are attached on either side of the wooden vineyard posts with little plastic clips that hold them in place during the growing season. These movable catch wires provide a sort of cage that holds the shoots straight up, allowing for good air circulation and good sun exposure for the fruit, which is essential to ripening it. What I'm doing this week is walking along each row of vines and tucking the shoots, some of which are a couple of feet long, inside these catch wires. I'm spreading the shoots out and untangling the ones that have wrapped around each other, and I'm also stripping any new shoots that are coming out of the lower portion of the trunk. I usually let the sheep do this part but I have them out of the vineyard right now because we are spraying a fungicide that they cannot ingest. There is a window of time between the last spray of this particular fungicide and when the sheep can get back in there to graze, so the vineyard is off limits for the time being. Not to worry though, I have run hot wire around the house and I have them currently mowing part of the yard and an area with a lot of brush and weeds that have been a pain in the butt for a couple of years. They're making quick work of it and it will soon look as nice as the rest of the yard.

The Sabrevois grapes are starting to bloom this week. The grape blossoms smells incredible. There's really nothing that smells like a blooming vineyard, but it only lasts for a few days and then it's gone. We've had several days of warm, dry weather which bodes well for good fruit set. This grape is the first to bloom, out of the three cultivars we are growing. It typically ripens in Iowa in mid to late August. We have five rows of roughly 60 vines each of this grape and it is absolutely full of tiny clusters of flowers which will become clusters of tiny grapes in a few days.

Now Get To Work!

With about a row and a half of Traminette vines left to prune, and with things starting to rapidly green up on the vineyard floor, today seemed like a good day to get out and do some pruning and take my mowing crew with me. There's not much to eat in their winter pasture now, and they were more than happy to head up to the vineyard and start mowing the grass and eating weeds. We're expecting snow this afternoon but at the moment, they are on the clock.

Here are a couple of photos of them hanging out with me in the vineyard.

Um, hello???

It's alive!!! I'm performing CPR on my vineyard blog and hope you will check in to see how things are going. Quite a hiatus, huh???

Well, it's February 17th and 68 degrees. I don't really know what to say about that and I know it's a tease. We're a long way from spring but I can feel it in the air!!! We have ice in our forecast for next week but today it feels like June. It was absolutely gorgeous today. I took the opportunity to get started on some pruning while I didn't have to dress in six layers and wear gloves, which are a PITA when pruning. I had a sweat shirt over my t-shirt when I got out there but had to take it off before I even started pruning because it really was that warm.

Our vines are dormant right now but all of them need to be pruned so that the new shoots and growth have someplace to grow, and the grape clusters, which form on one-year-old wood, will be located in the part of the trellis where they're supposed to grow. Otherwise, the whole trellis would be one big tangled rats nest of old, unproductive wood, dead winter-killed shoots, and who knows what else. We've had a pretty decent winter compared to the last few years.

We've still got a couple of months to go before we're out of the below-freezing overnight temps but we seem to be coming out of the extremely cold weather. We did not have the bone-crushing cold temps this year that we've had for the last three years, and based on what I saw in the vineyard today, things look really good. We also did not get as much snow (to date) as we have the last several years, so hopefully we won't have to face as much mud up there this year. Fingers Crossed!!!

The warm temps should be hanging on through Saturday and it is supposed to be sunny so although all of the snow has melted and its a muddy mess outside right now, it should be a really nice weekend to get a big jump on the pruning. It's very time consuming but one of the most important things to do, and do right if you want to grow good winegrapes. It's extremely windy today so that should help things dry out a little.

The sheep are still in the front pasture where the barn is located, and we'll be moving them back out to the vineyard sometime in mid to late March so they can get a jump on the weeds. In the meantime, they hang around in the barn eating hay and roaming around their front pasture. Their wool coats are long and I'll be scheduling them to be sheared sometime in early April. I have 12 of them now, 6 black and 6 white. I'll be sending the best of the fleeces out to a processor to process into yarn. I took a knitting class this winter and learned just enough to play around with it.

I'm also taking a beekeeping class on Thursday nights and I'm going to start with two hives in April and see where it leads. It's absolutely fascinating and we have plenty of clover, wildflowers, fruit trees and, dare I say it, WEEDS, to keep them happy all summer.

I'll post some pictures of the winter vineyard this weekend, and maybe get Greg to help me do a little movie on pruning the vines.

What's up in the vineyard?

I've been terribly negligent on keeping this blog up to date, so it's time for an update. So, uhhh, what's happening out there? Well, most of the vineyard chores at this point involve controlling grass and weeds, tying/training the vines to the trellis, and making sure things stay wet enough. There are no grapes to harvest this year because the vines are still too young. We will probably let the two-year-old vines produce a half crop next year assuming they come out of dormancy in better shape than they did this year. We will be taking off the grow tubes in the next several days so the vines can start hardening off for winter. These are plastic tubes that are about 30" tall, and surround the newly planted vines. They create a protective greenhouse for the vine while it begins to grow. They also help direct it up the bamboo stake toward the wire, and protect the base of the vine from rabbits and so forth. They go on right after planting, and come off in mid August. As we take them off, they get nested into bundles of 20 and stored until next year when we plant the next batch of vines.

Since early July, we have gone through several weeks with minimal rain. We've gotten some but not enough. Watering is a hassle but with new vines, one thing you can't do is let the roots dry out. Older vines, with much deeper roots handle heat and drought stress better than new vines. We have pretty heavy soil here, clay loam, which holds water well so what percolates down tends to stick around.

Anyway, we hand water when necessary and this entails putting a big polyethylene tank in the back of the truck, and driving up and down each row, putting a couple of gallons on each vine. We have a small pond right next to the vineyard and when we get decent snow in the winter and normal rain in the spring, the pond is full to the brim through late June. This year was no exception. We had a pretty wet spring and were able to store plenty of water in the pond. We have a trash pump that we keep by the pond and it sucks water up through a hose and into the tank. The tank holds about 125 gallons of water and we have 12 rows of new vines so it takes several trips back and forth. We put about 1500 gallons of water on the vines each week that we don't get at least an inch of rain. Very time consuming. Also, it takes two people, one driving, one holding the hose. Last week I rigged up a little dealie with a piece of metal pipe that extends out almost over the vine, and a couple of clamps attached to the tailgate so I could just open the valve and then run and jump in the front seat, and drive along the vine row, and water by myself. Before I had a chance to try it out though, we started getting rain every couple of days again so I haven't tested it out yet. Anyway, that will free up one person to do something else.

The long term solution, however, is to run drip irrigation. It's expensive but the value of time saved (and gas driving up and down the the vineyard rows with a half ton of water in the back) is worth something so we are probably going to do it either this fall, or next spring before planting gets underway.

I'm totally intrigued by the idea of putting some alternative energy to use in the vineyard. I'm already doing this a little bit with the "mutton mowers" as an alternative to mowing and weeding. Anyway, moving water from place to place is an ideal task for a solar or wind project. I subscribe to Home Power magazine which is a really good source for ideas and products geared toward do-it-yourself alternative energy projects. The drip irrigation will require a huge poly tank of at least a thousand gallons, which we will put at the highest point of the property (which happens to be just north of the vineyard). My idea is to use either a small wind turbine or solar panels to a battery bank (or possibly a hybrid of the two) to pump water from the pond to the poly tank, where it will be filtered and stored. The vineyard will then be divided into zones and the flow controlled by a manifold that allows only a few rows at a time to be watered on any given day. That way I can really deeply water 3 or 4 rows at a time on a given day, and then move on to the next batch the next day. Hopefully there will be enough elevation of the tank that gravity can handle most of the pressure needed to push all of that water out to the emitters, but if I need an electric pump to boost the pressure, I'll break down and buy one and run it off a battery bank charged by the panels too. Hopefully it won't be needed. I can drip irrigate overnight and refill the tank during the day when the wind blows and the sun shines. I figure if there's no sun, it's probably raining and I won't need to fill the tank anyway. There's no electricity running out to the vineyard and this seems like an ideal application for solar/wind/hydro. I've even considered buying a big thousand gallon tank that I can put on a trailer, and attach the turbine and solar panels to one side of the trailer. It would look like the Beverly Hillbillies meets Mad Max and would be a self-contained little electricity generator of a sorts, and I can move it to various vineyard blocks, which by the time we finish planting will be spread out on the 40 acres in various locations, park it with the panels facing the sun, and hook up to the manifold for each vineyard block, and let er rip...

As a bonus, that thing could be parked next to a future hoop house/greenhouse and used to provide lighting and irrigation to a winter vegetable garden when not needed in the vineyard. I've been looking at hoop houses online and have the perfect place for one just to the south of the house. I can't grow tomatoes and peppers year round here, but I could probably keep some lettuces, kale/collard/mustard greens, spinach, and cold weather veggies like broccoli and squash going well into December, and then get started in early March with lots of early spring veggies. It will also give me a lot of space to root cuttings of grape vines to either replenish dead ones or expand the vineyard to more of the acreage., and play around a little bit with crossing grapes and developing new cultivars. The possibilities are endless...

Now that I have these sheep, I have an unlimited supply of "fertilizer" in handy "pelletized" form. I've even seen people use horse manure composted in a trench inside a hoop house to raise the temperature several degrees as it breaks down. We're surrounded by people with horses, and plenty of poop to spare.

The thing about a hoop house is it's cheap, movable and when it gets hot you just roll up the sides to the open air. Once it's cold, if you garden in raised beds, and insulate the sides with rigid foam, you can even run PEX tubing under the growing beds and circulate it through a big holding tank attached to a solar collector on the outside of the greenhouse, and provide toasty warm growing beds. With a big enough tank inside the greenhouse, you can probably store enough heat to moderate the temperature of the greenhouse overnight as long as you have good sunny days during the day to heat the water up. You definitely could if you paint the tank black and put it where it can absorb heat from the greenhouse during the day.

So many ideas, so little time.

Day Labor

Well, sort of. Today was the beginning of the beta test phase for the vineyard sheep. We're starting them in a small patch of the vineyard (four rows of the new 2009 vines) to see how they do and how best to use them. Use Them? That sounds terrible! I know, but really it's a win-win. They love weeds. I hate weeds. Grapes hate weeds. The sheep could care less where they are as long as they have something to eat. They might as well be in my vineyard.

These sheep are so funny to watch. You really only have limited options in how to direct them or get them to cooperate with you. Mainly, that involves, again, the food and the bucket. They will pretty much go in the same general direction as you, as long as you have the bucket and are shaking the feed in it. They startle easily though, and will go scattering off in all directions. They hate to be apart from each other so as soon as the perceived danger passes, they clump back into a big woolly blob again.

Greg went out to the vineyard this morning and made some final adjustments to the hot wire and came back to the house. I figured he could follow us and sort of push us along if things didn't go exactly according to plan when I let them out of the gate.

We fed Sophie and took her out of her pen on her leash, opened the main sheep enclosure gate, and I started shaking the hell out of that bucket. We walked as a group toward the pasture gate. I opened it, walked out and off we went. From the gate to the vineyard is about 400 feet or so, straight down the north fence line. Greg and Sophie brought up the rear and when one or more sheep stopped to eat on the way, he encouraged them forward. We all walked out to the vineyard, through the gap in the hot wire and down one of the vine rows. Once they were all in, Greg closed the gap, completing the circuit of the hot wire. I dumped the feed on the ground and stepped back. They swarmed the little pile of food and I scooted around them and stepped over the hot wire, which is about 12 inches off the ground. He has it pulled taut and it's definitely live.

Once the sheep finished their snack, they got to work eating the weeds (an overwhelming task at this point because we did not spray these four rows to kill the weeds when we sprayed the other 8 rows). They ate, and ate, and ate, and ate and then took a nap. Then they ate, and ate, and ate, and ate, and then took another nap. So it goes. They work when they want, and when they need a break, they just take one. I think these are Union sheep. When one flops down for a nap, they all do. It's hot today and I realized that there really isn't anything out there that provides them with shade so I took an 8 x 6 blue tarp and some bungee cords, and rigged up a nice shady tent for them, using the four posts of two adjacent H-braces on the north end of the vineyard.

Greg and I watched for a while to see which one of them tested out the hot wire first. My bet was on Cocoa. He has been the most inquisitive of the three lambs, and can't seem to keep from poking his nose into anything new that enters his environment. Like the other day with my tool belt. I had set it down on the ground and he immediately came over and checked out each pocket.

Anyway, it didn't take long for him to get pushed into the hot wire by the yearling wether I named Tebow. From the moment these sheep got here, Tebow has been head butting the lambs all over the place. He does it if they're in his way, or if they're trying to eat out of the same food pan, or just for the heck of it. He has a thing about ramming them. They just seem to take it in stride, like it's a normal thing. He does it to Jill too but she just turns around and knocks him right back, and I think she has at least 40 lbs on him at this point. She is a much more docile sheep but she is definitely at the top of the pecking order in this little flock.

Tebow knocked Cocoa into the hot wire and he actually went under it, and it zapped him. After a few moments of panic, he managed to leap over it back into the row, none the worse for the experience. Sheep hate to be singled out so once he was outside the hot wire, all he could think about was getting back in. The adult sheep seem to understand the hot wire already. It looks just like the hot wire at the farm they came from. The lambs apparently will need a few shocks before they figure it out. Later in the day, Tebow knocked Pancho into it and Pancho was touching two or three other sheep at the time so I think they all got a dose of it.

We are keeping Sophie tethered up there so she doesn't blunder into the hot wire. As long as she's there, the sheep should be safe. I don't think I will leave them unattended up there until we see how this is going to go. From what we've seen today, they will need to be out there a lot in order to gain control of the weed situation. Next year, we will start putting them in there a lot sooner and they should be able to keep things from getting out of hand.

There is one weed species that gets a very early start, and in fact it goes dormant but does not die over the winter, and then comes to life, even before all the snow has melted. It is the only green thing in the vineyard in March. Even the grass is still dormant at that point. The sheep should be able to clean those weeds up pretty quick so they don't become the problem they became this year. They started off as cute little dark green plants, and by the end of March had put out lovely white flowers that made the vineyard look like a postcard from Burgundy. Then, almost overnight, out came the seed pods. We did not deal with these particular weeds early enough so of course they got away from us and released their seeds. We'll be seeing them again next year as a result, but next year the sheep will be ready for them.

The other thing I will need to do is run the mower through the rows the sheep are currently working on, cutting the grass between the vine rows pretty short. I'll probably only have to do it this year because the sheep should be able to keep up with the weeds and the grass if I put them out there in late March or early April. I noticed that the lambs were focusing on the grass instead of the weeds, and I think by cutting the grass very short, they will look for more interesting things to eat in the vine rows. This is one great big experiment and some things will work and other things won't. We'll just have to try different things until we figure out how best to work with these sheep. You cannot make them do anything they don't want to do. If there is a sheep user's manual, that statement is on page one.

They seem pretty content to stay in there for now, and as long as there's something they want to eat, I shouldn't have any problem containing them with just the one strand of hot wire.