We are making good progress this week in pruning Marquette. This is a nice acre vineyard so we have a lot of vines to attend to. We did the actual pruning in late November with our tow-behind V-Mech pruner. Although it takes two people in the V-Mech and one in the tractor, we can operate at about 10,000 feet per hour while pruning on both sides of the row. But, we still have to go back and remove long canes and other “brush” that gets cut off but which stays in the canopy. This is pretty slow work, but we are making good progress.
We start pruning officially on March 1, but the work we are doing now will give us a running start.