From Our Vineyard

Last week, it was either rainy, the vineyards were too soggy for our skid-steer, or it was too windy to spray. We were prevented from getting important work done. We did remove suckers and cleaned out the La Crescent at Meadowcreek. Right now, we are trying to

Last week, we used a skid loader to remove trees and shrubs at Maple Woods and got all vineyards mowed. We also removed vines that grow up our trellis posts at Maple Woods. This is very time-consuming because these vines grow quickly and literally cover the posts.

Last week we sprayed Tassel Ridge, Meadowcreek, Newport Lane, and Maple Woods vineyards. We are all done with spraying for a couple of weeks. We have also gotten all mowing up-to-date but that will be a weekly task for now. We are almost done pulling trees at

While high winds and rain last week did not permit vineyard work on some days, problems with the chiller at our warehouse and with the tractor we use for mowing prevented us from focusing on vineyard tasks. We did get some hand-pruning done and we pulled out

Last week, we finished pruning Meadowcreek Vineyards and since Tassel Ridge is also done, we are finished with our two largest vineyards. We have also finished removing Mulberry trees in one bloc of our Edelweiss vineyard at Tassel Ridge. If they are allowed to get tall, these

Our biggest planting is the Edelweiss at Tassel Ridge Vineyard and we have mechanically pruned more than 50% already. We have also finished some trellis repairs in our Marquette vineyard. We expect to finish the Edelweiss and mechanically prune La Crescent at Meadowcreek this week as well

Although we got off to a slow start, we are now making good progress with several aspects of pruning and vineyard maintenance. We have now mechanically-pruned all of the Brianna vines and are about 1/3 of the way through the Edelweiss vines at Tassel Ridge. We have

Last week, we finished machine pruning our Marquette and shifted to machine pruning Brianna. We also continued with final hand pruning of the Marquette. We plan to plant 450 Foch and 200 L’Acadie Blanc (this will be a new grape for us) vines in June and we

The weather during the first two days of this week permitted us to continue hand-pruning the vines in the H-braces at the ends of each row. There is only one vine in each H-Brace and it can’t be effectively machine-pruned so we have to hand-prune it. We

We didn’t make much progress working in our vineyards last week. Severe weather was the problem. We have been working indoors on equipment to make sure it is ready for prime time. In the process, we discovered that some equipment had not been serviced for 3–4 years.