This week, we finished replacing broken posts in our Marquette blocks and continued pulling Mulberry trees at Meadowcreek Vineyards. Most of our Marquette and all of our La Crescent is on a Vertical Shoot Positioning (VSP) trellis. We won’t do that again! We took the advice of the grapevine cutting supplier on trellising but later learned that a high wire cordon is a better trellis for all of our grape varieties. Converting over is a major, labor-intensive job so it will take us years to get the job done, if in fact, we ever do succeed in finishing it. Anyhow, we expect to be able to prune these vines sometime in November so we will be making sure that the trellis wires are all at optimum tightness now.
We have been irrigating our landscaping in order to lower the level of our waste water treatment lagoons before we start getting hard freezes. We will pull the aerators within the next two weeks. This week, we started pulling out the La Crescent at Maple Woods Vineyard because we will replace it with LaCrosse this spring. We need additional LaCrosse and don’t need as much La Crescent. Finally, once we get some soaking rain, we will spray herbicide under the vines.
