We have a small amount of pruning to finish. Rainy weather last week made it impossible to hold to our original pruning schedule. Our new vines will arrive late next week. This year, we are only replanting about 650 vines, the smallest amount of planting in three
Read more →All of our 38,500 vines have been long pruned (most of them mechanically) and now we have the Edelweiss that needs to be short pruned. The grass in the rows between the vines is loving the rain and is growing FAST. We’ll be mowing every day we
Read more →All of our 38,500 vines have been long pruned (most of them mechanically) and now we have the Marquette, Brianna, and Edelweiss that need to be short pruned. As of last Friday, about 50% of the vines had started to leaf out although the cool, wet weather
Read more →The cold snap late last week illustrates the judgment required to know when and how much to prune grapes in Iowa. It is essential to prune grapes annually in the spring because without pruning, they would attempt to produce far more grapes than possible without damaging and
Read more →We will finish spraying sulfur in our 17 acres of Edelweiss. Meanwhile, we will be tying and pruning St. Pepin and Brianna at Maple Woods. These are young vines and this pruning will be done very carefully by hand. We will machine prune the Sabrevois, St. Croix,
Read more →Although the weather cooled off last week slowing the rate that vines come out of dormancy, we remain very cautious because we’ve experienced warm weather much earlier in the season than usual. We are very concerned about a cold snap in April or early May that could
Read more →Although we remain wary of unseasonably warm weather, we are forging ahead with pruning varieties that usually bud late. We’ve started with Edelweiss and will finish Edelweiss by mid-week. We long pruned our Edelweiss with our V-Mech mechanical pruning system (click here for brief video) and will
Read more →We are walking on pins and needles in the vineyards right now. Recent warm weather combined with a relatively warm winter are causing buds on some early budding varieties to swell. If we achieve bud break in late March, we will lose leaves and buds if we
Read more →Friday, February 19 4:30 p.m.—VIP Ticket Holder Admission 5:30 p.m.—The Grand Tasting Location: Des Moines Marriott Downtown Tickets: VIP—$100; Grand Tasting—$50 Tassel Ridge Winery will be pouring samples of several Tassel Ridge wines at this event. Other Iowa wineries and microbreweries along with wine and beer distributors
Read more →The colder weather has sent the vines into dormancy so we can now spray herbicide under the vines at Newport Lane. It also means we can spray herbicide to control broadleaved weeds in-between the vines at Newport Lane and Maple Woods. We will also be spraying pre-emergent herbicides at
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