Pruning in Winter

There's no alternative. When you have over 1200 vines, you have to start in the dead of winter in order to get them all pruned before the buds swell and everything starts to grow. The buds are fragile in the early spring and can easily get knocked off as you wrestle with the canes and determine what to cut off and what to leave in place. We had a ridiculously nice couple of days last week and I started pruning the Sabrevois vines last Thursday. Wow, what a change. It was in the upper 20s today and the wind was blowing pretty hard. Greg had the day off and I wrapped up work around 2:00 and we headed out there. It was gray and gloomy, and just plain cold. We finished a partial row and tackled a second one in the course of about two hours. It went pretty fast with both of us working. We have a total of 23 rows with between 60 and 64 vines per row. At that rate we shouldn't have any trouble getting the pruning done well before the buds start to swell.

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.

D.U.M.B.

I'm beginning to seriously question the intelligence of these sheep.

This afternoon, I was busily working away, trying to get done so I could run some errands in town. I have the windows open because it's 73 degrees today and absolutely beautiful outside. I took my headphones off for a few minutes and heard one of the lambs making a huge racket. I went to the window and saw Cocoa in the sheep pen. He was on the opposite side from the gate pacing back and forth along the fence. The rest of the sheep were on the other side of the fence eating grass, ignoring him. I watched for a few minutes and realized he was stuck in the pen. Well, sort of. The gate is 16 feet wide, and is wide open during the day so they can come in and out whenever they want and also so I don't have to run out there and let them in if it storms. I close them up in there before dark every evening but other than that, they're on their own.

Clearly, he'd gone in there for some reason and then got upset because the other sheep were outside the pen and he couldn't figure out why or how to get out. This went on for several minutes and he finally flopped down on the ground in frustration. I thought about going out there to help him but less than a minute later, he leaped to his feet, dashed through the gate and ran as fast as he could around to the other side of the pen where the rest of the sheep were eating. Frantically baaa'ing the entire time.

Oh, did I tell you? He did the exact same thing last week.

I do not know how these things ever evolved in the wild...

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.

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.

A post wherein I discuss worms and maggots (you have been warned)

Over the past two days, I've been paying particular attention to Cocoa. Partly because he is so interesting to watch and partly because he seems so independent and often is separated from his flock by quite a distance and I'm not sure why. Anyway, on Sunday I noticed that he was lying around and not eating when the other sheep were grazing. I made note of it but didn't think a whole lot about it. I attributed it to him being smaller, younger and not as hungry.

Yesterday morning when I went out to the sheep pen to let them out to their pasture, and to feed Sophie, everyone but Cocoa met me at the gate, happy to see me (or at least any treats I might have) but Coke was lying over in the grass by himself. His head was up and he was watching me but he didn't make a move to get up and come over to me. I went in the pen and walked toward him and he jumped up and ran to catch up with the rest of the sheep. I checked on him a few times during the morning and sometimes he was eating grass, and other times he was curled up in the grass, not sleeping, just hanging around. Not Normal; at least to my inexperienced eye.

I fired off an email to Kristin, the woman who sold me the sheep, and she reminded me that the first thing to check for is worms. You do this by catching the sheep, pulling down the lower eyelid and checking the color on the inside of the eyelid.
It should be dark pink. If it is pale pink to white, worms are likely the cause. The pallor is a sign of anemia. In sheep, intestinal worms attach to the stomach lining and the blood loss causes anemia in a hurry. The sheep were wormed the day before I brought them home, about two and a half weeks ago, so it didn't click that I had a worm problem until I went back out there, caught him and looked at his eyelids. Sure enough, pale pink, almost white. I called the vet and scheduled a visit for this morning at 10:00. I might have been able to handle this myself but I really wanted some professional guidance this first time. I'm glad I called the vet.

Kristin had suggested I give him a little extra feed and also check the site where he'd been neutered. I managed to catch him again but he was struggling so much, I only got a cursory glance "down there" and did not see anything alarming.

When the vet came this morning, she quickly assessed the situation and we decided to worm everyone. While she had Cocoa on the ground, she wormed him and then took a look between his back legs and sure enough, the snip site had opened up. I'll save the clinical data for another time, but to summarize, maggots were involved.

Obviously, I was horrified but she said it was common, not to worry, and got some stuff to spray to help keep it clean and the flies off. She injected an antibiotic to be on the safe side, then let him up off the ground and he tore off to rejoin his friends.

I got a quick lesson on worming, had a conversation about Coccidosis, Flies, and barn/pen sanitation, and she gave me the stuff to spray on Cocoa's open wound (He's gonna love me by the end of this week) some extra wormer for the lambs, and some stuff to put in their drinking water for Coccidosis, a parasite not treated by the oral wormer she used. Kristin had also indicated this might be a possibility if worms were ruled out as the problem. Hopefully I'm on top of the worm situation now and Cocoa will be back to his usual self in short order.

Based on Cocoa's reaction (he's about 25 lbs) the correct sheep behavior, when grabbed by the back legs is to turn into a kangaroo and attempt to spring away. Hard to imagine with a 100 lb Jilly Bean or Tebow. I'm going to need some practice before I can wrestle one of the adult sheep to the ground. Maybe I'll practice on Sophie. She'll probably think it's a game...

Hey, er, I mean Hay!

One thing that grows really well on our farm is grass. We have lots of it. Tons of it actually. Every year since we built our house, we've harvested the hay on about 8 acres. Well, actually we've brought people in to harvest it since we don't have the equipment necessary to do it ourselves. In the last several years, we've had the same guy cut it, rake it, and bale it. It's fascinating to watch these huge (big boy) tractors and implements convert what is essentially dead grass into these huge, perfect, round bales of hay. The smell alone is incredible (unless you have hay fever allergies). We have a mixture of various pasture grasses including orchard grass, fescue, brome and several other grasses I can't identify, as well as some weeds/wildflower species mixed in.


The way it works is we have a verbal agreement with "Tim" who cuts and bales, and takes half of the bales as payment. That leaves us with the other half of the bales. Up until this year, we have had no use for hay because we have had no livestock. Tim bought our half of the bales to use for his cattle or to sell to others. Now that we have started planting vines, we've used up a good bit of our hay field so over the past two years we've gotten less and less hay. I think the first year we got 22 or 23 big round bales. Last year we were down to 19 or 20, and after planting this year's vines, we are down to 12. That's not a lot of hay.


Here's the thing... Now I have five sheep to feed through the Iowa winter. I need to plan for feeding them hay from about the first of November through the beginning of April, so I need to plan on between five and six months' worth of hay. I likely won't need that much because we usually don't get snow until later in November or early December but you never know. I've talked to Tim a bit about it and what I think I will do to make it easy is sell him my half of the round bales, which I think weigh about 600 to 700 lbs and since he has a small square baler he can sell me back enough square bales of good grass/alfalfa mix hay to get me through the winter.

I've calculated that I need a minimum of 75 square bales to cover me for six months, assuming the bales weigh around 40 lbs. I'll end up owing Tim about $150.00 when it is all said and done.


I should still come out ahead though because I rent 9 acres of pasture to my neighbor which will more than cover my cost for the additional hay.

Here's what our hay field looked like after it was cut this year.

Here's a picture of the rake, piling it up into
long rows to be picked up by the baler.



Here's what the hayfield looks like now that it is baled. You can also see the two-acre vineyard on the top of the hill to the right.

Tim will be back to move the big bales out of the field in the next several days and we are expecting a bunch of rain this week, which will green everything up again. In some years we might get a second cutting but that normally only happens when there is plentiful rain through late July so it is definitely not the norm for us.