From Our Vineyard

We will blow out our irrigation system on Thursday. We need to remove water from the underground tubes so freezing conditions don’t cause that water to freeze and burst the tubes. Although the air temperature will be quite low late this week, the ground temperatures are still

The vineyard team will finish up removing Mulberry trees at Newport Lane Vineyard and then start over with tree removal and post replacement at Meadowcreek Vineyard. We will be spraying herbicide if we get a break in the weather. And, we are putting our waste water treatment

We are working to remove Mulberry Trees at Maple Woods Vineyards and then at Newport Lane Vineyard.  The Mulberry Trees seem to be everywhere but they aren’t as big a problem in the vineyards around Oskaloosa. We will be spraying pre-emergent under the vines. This is a

The 30°F frost on Saturday, October 5 followed by another frost on Sunday, October 13 appear to have convinced our vines to start shutting down for the season. While there are still some green leaves to be seen, the overall impression is that the vineyards are turning

Frequent rain last week made spraying and mowing impossible. The vineyards were really soggy. We did get more Mulberry trees removed but even that task was possible on only a couple of days. Last weekend, somebody asked me why we have so many Mulberry trees and why

We harvested Steuben Monday and processed it on Tuesday. That means that our small 2019 harvest is now done. We’ll do a deep cleaning of the harvester and perform some preventative maintenance on it. Then, we’ll clean up all of the harvest equipment and put it away

While we harvested our first grapes on Monday, August 19, we’ve been twiddling since. So, when the vineyard manager was asked about his plans for this week, it was TO HARVEST SOMETHING! We’ve been testing and tasting all varieties for the past couple of weeks and we

Last Monday, the Brianna was ready and we harvested it. Nothing else is ready so we are taking samples and testing, testing, and more testing. We got all of our grapes tested to double-check our lab numbers and we’ll be out tasting and picking up samples for

Herbie the Hawk (actually, we have five of them stationed in our vineyards) spends his days flying around. All he needs is a wind of 2–3 miles per hour. Our present all-natural hawk can’t quite figure out what to make of Herbie. He has checked Herbie out