I am feeling as though we’ve had two days of spring and now it’s summer. I think the vines are feeling the same. We have had a very long and cool spring that has left our vines about three weeks behind last year. At the beginning of
Read more →We are still working on hand pruning Edelweiss, Brianna, and Petite Pearl at Tassel Ridge. With 17 acres of Edelweiss vines, our Edelweiss blocks at Tassel Ridge are huge and they take a long time to hand prune. As soon as we finish the Edelweiss, we will
Read more →We finished most of our mechanical pruning last week so we are focused on hand pruning at Tassel Ridge this week with an emphasis on our 17-acre Edelweiss block. Once that is done, we will move to the LaCrosse block at Newport Lane. Last week, we made
Read more →Although we have had a lot of rain and other weather that makes vineyard operations impossible, Monday and Tuesday’s weather was perfect for mechanical pruning. We got all of the 36 acres at Tassel Ridge and most of the 10 unpruned acres at Meadowcreek mechanically pruned. Future
Read more →Cold, rainy weather has prevented us from doing much pruning this month. One good outcome of this weather is that our vines are still dormant and have not begun to awaken from their winter’s sleep. That means that a late frost is less likely to damage buds.
Read more →We got the Marquette all pruned at the end of last week and got a nice start on LaCrosse in beautiful weather on Monday of this week. Rain on Tuesday and Wednesday kept us out of the vineyard but we expect to get more done on Thursday
Read more →We are making good progress this week in pruning Marquette. This is a nice acre vineyard so we have a lot of vines to attend to. We did the actual pruning in late November with our tow-behind V-Mech pruner. Although it takes two people in the V-Mech
Read more →We took advantage of warm weather back in early December and took the V-Mech pruning system out into the Marquette vineyard to start our seasonal pruning. While we were able to cut the long canes, some canes are so long that they stay in the vine canopy.
Read more →One of the tasks that takes a lot of our vineyard crew’s time is removal of the large and growing number of Mulberry trees that start to grow each season. They grow fast and have a tap root that must come out because otherwise, it will regrow
Read more →Our vineyard crew will take advantage of the good weather to mechanically prune select varieties in all four vineyards. We early prune grape varieties that are least likely to bud out early when temperatures warm up in April. They include St. Croix, Frontenac, Sabrevois, and Brianna. After
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