We will be pruning St Croix, St. Pepin, Brianna, and Foch at Newport Lane Vineyard this week. 28,000 of our 38,000 vines have been pruned. We have delayed shipment of new vines from the nursery in Southeastern Vermont to allow our vineyards to dry out. We removed two blocks of St. Croix at Tassel Ridge in November and will be replacing the St. Croix with Crimson Pearl and Verona.
If our vineyards can dry out a bit, we will be mowing this week. Considering that it takes one man, a tractor, and a mower one week to mow all of our vineyards, we aren’t likely to get the mowing finished by the end of the week.
We also need to spray but the vineyards have to be drier than they’ve been for several weeks to get much spraying done. This has been a rough spring to get the necessary work done.
We are frequently asked if all the rain is good for the vines. At this point, the vines are pretty happy with all the rain. But, they are behind their normal development benchmarks largely because of the cool weather so far this spring. For example, they normally flower by the Memorial Day weekend and this year, we don’t have any vines that will flower in the next two weeks. The wet vineyards also make it very hard to move machinery for spraying, mowing, and other maintenance that we’d like to do.
