We are pruning our Sabrevois and St. Croix at Tassel Ridge Vineyard early in the week and as soon as we’re done, we move to the vines at Newport Lane. As soon as (or if) the vineyards dry out a bit, we’ll continue spraying herbicide and fungicide
Read more →We finally finished pruning Edelweiss vines and moved to Sabrevois and St. Croix at both Tassel Ridge and Newport Lane. We also have several maintenance tasks to complete this week. The weather this season has made pruning VERY challenging almost everywhere in Iowa. But, with the chance
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With more than 38,000 vines over 75 acres, pruning is a BIG job for us. We are still working on the Edelweiss at Tassel Ridge. We finished machine pruning at Tassel Ridge on Saturday and will move the pruning equipment to Meadowcreek so we can machine prune
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We expect to apply the annual lime-sulfur spray to the vine trunks and cordons. The objective is to kill any fungus that overwintered in cracks in the trunks and cordons. This spray is commonly also applied to fruit trees. We also expect to start spraying herbicide to
Read more →The next variety that we will machine prune will be the Sabrevois growing at Tassel Ridge and Maple Woods vineyards. Three people do the machine pruning so two to three others will be cleaning out vines that have already been machine pruned. This week, we clean out
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Last week and in spite of very muddy conditions, the vineyard crew finished pruning our nine acre Marquette vineyard and the one acre of vines in our test plot at Meadowcreek East. The first step was to go through the vineyard with our mechanical pruner. We did
Read more →We took advantage of the warm weather over the weekend and started our pruning for 2019 on Monday. The Marquette vineyard is basically a sheet of ice and when the ice melts, it will be a sea of mud! So, as a precaution, we used our mechanical
Read more →We were going to start pruning on March 1, but the cold weather has delayed that until late this week, assuming it warms up to about 30°F. Weather permitting, we’ll be going flat-out pruning for the next two months. For a quick view of what is involved
Read more →The extremely cold weather we’ve experienced over the past three weeks is starting to worry us that we may have incurred damage to trunks and cordons of our vines. The problem is that we aren’t going to know for sure until just before harvest. The reason is
Read more →Adam Nunnikhoven, the Tassel Ridge Vineyard Manager, is working on rebuilding an old sprayer so that it can be used to spray lime-sulfur on the vines during March and April. This fungicide stinks and is very corrosive so we don’t want to use a new sprayer to
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