Last week, we finished pulling trees at Maple Woods Vineyard and will work on pulling trees at Tassel Ridge Vineyard where we have lots more trees to pull. We finished spraying at Tassel Ridge Vineyard and removed suckers from the LaCrosse at Meadowcreek. The grass is growing fast now too so we finished a round of mowing all of the vineyards.
This week, we added two summer workers starting on Monday. We finished removing suckers and tied up vines at Meadowcreek Vineyard. We plan to plant new Foch and L’Acadie Blanc vines at Meadowcreek next week and collect petioles as time permits.
Petiole Samples
So, what is a petiole? It is the short stem that the leaf is on. This is essentially the pipeline for the vine with water and nutrients coming up through the trunk from the roots and sugars being transported down from the leaves to the roots. The sugars are created through the process of photosynthesis using sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide. So, by analyzing the liquid in the petiole, a lab can tell us which nutrients are missing or are low and we use that information to decide which foliar sprays to apply to in order to add just the nutrients that are low.
For each grape variety, we will actually collect 50 petioles selected throughout the bloc at random and we’ll put them in a carefully labelled paper bag and will send them off to a lab for analysis.
