From Our Vineyard

Last week, everyone was employed planting our new Foch and L’Acadie Blanc grapevines. That included installing pencil rods and grow tubes. Then we went to work removing suckers that come up from the vine roots each year and tying the vines up to the trellis where necessary.

Each year at this time, we normally take petiole samples from each grape variety in each vineyard and we send them to a lab for analysis. What is a petiole? The petiole is the stem of a grape leaf. We will collect 50–100 petioles from each grape

While the big news is our planting of new vines, we are also making progress on a number of fronts. We got Newport Lane and the Sabrevois at Maple Woods sprayed, the LaCrosse at Meadowcreek were suckered and tied up, and trees removed from the A, B,

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

We have pulled most of the volunteer trees and bushes in the Maple Woods Vineyard but have about 11 rows to do. This task was neglected last year and probably the year before and we are paying the price now. We sprayed all vineyards except for some

Last week it was either rainy, or 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

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