The weather, while not perfect for pruning this week, did allow for a couple of days in the vineyard and we made good progress. The Sabrevois is located at Tassel Ridge and Maple Woods Vineyards. Because we didn’t need this variety last year, we didn’t prune it.
Read more →On nice weather days, we are already out in the vineyard getting started with hand pruning. Some varieties start to bud out as soon as they are pruned so we avoid those varieties for now and start on varieties like Marquette and La Crescent that can be
Read more →We are doing a bit of hand pruning when weather and other priorities permit. Adam’s goal is to get two rows of Marquette pruned each day. These vines have already been machine-pruned so these are the finishing touches. Our harvester has sprung a small oil leak. We
Read more →We are doing oil changes on a tractor and a Gator housed at Maple Woods Vineyard. We have also started researching additional vineyard mechanization. Our V-Mech pre-pruner does a good job but it requires three people to operate: one in the tractor and two on the V-Mech.
Read more →We dismantled and rebuilt our mechanical pruner and tried it out on Monday. On Tuesday, we deep-cleaned the bottling line, power washed the floors, and got everything ready for bottling in January. Our electrically-powered hand pruners needed to be overhauled, cleaned, and have their blades sharpened this
Read more →We will continue with rough pruning using our mechanical pruner at Tassel Ridge, weather permitting. We will start cleaning out trellis wires in the Marquette. The mechanical pruner cuts the canes but many are so long that they have to be pulled out manually. And, we will
Read more →Each day, we do what we can in the vineyard considering temperature, precipitation, and wind speed. We worked to finish pulling Mulberry trees at Tassel Ridge vineyard. This vineyard looks MUCH better now than it did just a month ago. We will switch to mulching up the
Read more →We started mechanically pruning our Marquette with our V-Mech pruning system this week. We can prune two rows simultaneously while the tractor and cart are moving at about 2 miles per hour. Although the vines are already dormant, we normally wouldn’t prune at this time of year
Read more →We will continue pulling trees at Maple Woods and Newport Lane Vineyards and will be taking advantage of the ground that got softened by the recent rain storm. This is important because we have to pull the Mulberry trees out by the roots. If the ground is
Read more →This week, we finished replacing broken posts in our Marquette blocks and continued pulling Mulberry trees at Meadowcreek Vineyards. Most of our Marquette and all of our La Crescent is on a Vertical Shoot Positioning (VSP) trellis. We won’t do that again! We took the advice of
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