We took advantage of warm weather back in early December and took the V-Mech pruning system out into the Marquette vineyard to start our seasonal pruning. While we were able to cut the long canes, some canes are so long that they stay in the vine canopy. This week, we went back on foot to remove long canes that didn’t fall out during machine pruning and to do some clean up in the vines. If we wait until April when the buds are getting larger, this process will result in unintentional removal of good buds that we want to keep.
Late this week, we will change the knives on the V-Mech to allow us to machine mulch the pieces of vine we remove during pruning. We are hoping that will make it easier to get long lengths of bull canes out of the canopy. This is all an experiment but anything we can do to speed up pruning will be a step forward.
