The plants are in the ground.
Now I need to keep them alive, watered, protected, and weeded.
Ten days ago the vineyard had a sterile, but orderly look. It was unplanted, but ready.The angled end-posts were lined up in a row, all sunk to the same depth. Then, exactly every 18 feet, the trellis posts lined up, with straight rows north-south, east-west, and then in oblique rows at additional angles as one looked in different directions. This gave a scientific and disciplined look to the farm.
There is practical value to the ship-shape aesthetic. The precise placement allows me to run my tractor between the nine-foot rows, confident that the margins were consistent on each side of the equipment.
Now things are different. Plants in the ground are similar, but not uniform. Some have budded out. Some have not. The dormant plants were alive and ready to bud out.
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| Nine days ago |
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| Yesterday |
Most of the plants show buds. The metal rod in the above photo is four feet long and as big around as a pencil. My nephew and I stuck them about a foot in the ground, by hand. There is one for each plant. It's purpose is to hold up the grow tube I am placing around each plant. The white tubes give the field a military cemetery look, but without the precision one sees there. The tubes lean.
Not every vineyard bothers with grow tubes. I need them because this land has a special attribute that is both extraordinarily good and extraordinarily troublesome. The pumice soil is ground up pumice rock. It has the consistency of beach sand or fluffy powder snow. The grape roots will be able to extract nutrients and flavors easily. It also means that even the smallest weed seeds find places to start growing, making this soil notoriously weedy. Here is a closeup of a wet spot made by the drip system, filled with tiny weeds after less than a week.
I need the grow tubes surrounding each plant so that I can cultivate and spray right next to the grape plant. The grow tube will protect the plant from being hit by a herbicide and will better mark the plant when I am weeding with a hoe. Those weeds would be three inches high in a week, and eight inches high in two weeks -- if I didn't get right on them.
The little grape start is down at the bottom of the grow tube. It doesn't photograph well, but this is what it looks like when one looks down the tube. You see the grape plant, the rod, and the stiff loop of paper in the tube. The tube is the consistency of a milk carton.
A week ago I posted about hiring a crew of workers to help me plant. I did not want to be the White landowner sitting in the shade. I worked alongside the young men and kept up. The crew commented on what a good worker I was, for an old man. I took it as a compliment. I should have taken it as a warning. In my hubris I re-injured an old hernia problem. But grow tube installation is light work so I will be at the vineyard before 6:00 a.m. today, working alongside two employees.
I appreciate the help of Guest Post authors during this vineyard rush period. The work will quiet down and I will go on the road again soon to see the presidential campaign up close. Three Republican candidates are in New Hampshire and four are in Iowa.
15 comments:
The compulsive gambler is now operating a casino. The sex addict is now operating a strip club. The drug addict is now a drug dealer. Very interesting
All the work you put in to produce your crops is like a metaphor describing the work required to keep our democracy viable. White nationalists, neo-Nazis, religious extremists, militia groups and the like are the weeds and pests seeking to destroy it, and they’ve become the Republican base.
Yesterday their Supreme Leader used the Fourth of July to whine about Special Counsel Jack Smith and the Bidens. He even posted a F**K BIDEN meme. I’m sure all the weeds and pests gobbled up his manure. Meanwhile, Biden celebrated with the dignity and respect expected from a statesman and party leader. I wonder which of them Americans will find more appealing in 2024.
PS: What the hell is 'Anonymous' talking about?
Note to comment-readers: Let me explain the context for the comment by Anonymous about the compulsive gambler, etc.
Someone, possibly not the locally-famous obscenity-writing Republican, the perennially-losing candidate, makes frequent efforts to place comments here in this blog that make oblique allusion to the idea that I used to drink alcohol, but now do not. He or she suggests I am a "dry drunk" and says I should "go to meetings" and in other ways attempts to tease, troll, or insult me. He or she does it anonymously here and in other proposed comments. It is sometimes in the context of defense of Joe Biden, which makes me think it is probably someone other than the local GOP Trump-lover with the anger management problem.
I don't use this blog to write about alcohol dependence, but I would be happy to address that subject if I got substantial evidence of reader interest in the subject. I will summarize my thoughts: alcohol is more dangerous than marijuana, but both are risky. My observation is that alcohol makes people uninhibited and marijuana makes people stupid. Some people seem to handle it well; others do not. I don't use either one. I like a clear head. I like coffee. But I don't preach about drugs. Everyone is different.
I don't mind if someone thinks they can troll me with allusions to my present or former use of mind-altering drugs, but I don't intend to publish their comments in the future, either. A far better way to try to troll me is to comment on my fluctuating weight in my adulthood. That is a struggle for me. Marijuana and alcohol are not. Insults regarding weight would come best from someone who is public about their name and is willing to publish a photograph of his or her face and torso. If that person is a healthy weight, good for you!!! Be proud. Tease fat people. Rub it in.
Peter Sage
Whoever it is that tries to keep insulting Peter around here is unworthy of having gotten to incarnate in a human body. Next time around, their karma will probably place them in a dung beetle.
But I would like to speak up on behalf of marijuana. While I suspect that some who often disagree with me might disagree 😀, marijuana did not make me stupid. It made me cosmic.
I had thoughts and saw things that I could never have gotten to without marijuana. It showed me the limits of normal consciousness and logic. It opened my mind about religious/mystical experience. It helped me play 🎹 in my amateur rock band in virtuosic ways that I could never have played without it. It taught me how to dance (the secret: hook your ears up directly to your muscles; leave the conscious mind out of it — this is also the secret to playing lead and improvising: it’s just like dancing, but with notes instead of your body).
And it helped me participate in the group mind that sometimes formed at Grateful Dead concerts when we were lucky. We would all became neurons in that mind, giant cosmic thoughts the size of freight trains would come roaring through, and we would all get to experience them. You had to be there.
There’s a reason that Bill Graham once said, “The Grateful Dead aren’t the best at what they do, they’re the only ones who do what they do.” It’s why we all loved Jerry Garcia. It’s why I am proud to be using a version of their logo as my current profile image.
And I got to experience all of that thanks to marijuana.
Yup, drugs can provide such profound insights. Go ask Alice.
William James experimented with drugs and once had an epiphany that he quickly wrote down lest he forget it. The next morning, he promptly located his note, anxious to read his great revelation. It said:
“Hogamous higamous
Man is polygamous,
Higamous hogamous
Woman monogamous."
As Tinkerbell once told me in a smoke-filled teepee after we threw another lid on the fire: “Spread mysticism. Help stamp out reality.”
Yup, drugs can provide such profound insights. Go ask Alice.
Go ask Aldous Huxley. Go ask Richard Alpert/Baba Ram Dass. Go ask Alan Watts. Go ask Stephen Gaskin.
Go read What The Dormouse Said about the influence LSD had on the evolution of computers. I got to meet some of those people when I worked at Xerox in Palo Alto. They were brilliant. They invented the basis for all the stuff we have now.
Or sit on the sidelines and take a potshots at what you have never experienced, like a virgin going on about the insignificance of sex.
Someday if you get lucky, and a light you never expected shines on you, you may look back at what you said today and shake your head in embarrassment.
Actually, I was there when the Grateful Dead played on a flatbed truck in the panhandle of Golden Gate Park and tossed Owsley acid into the crowd. I was kidding about Tinkerbell, but not about the teepee full of pot smoke. I engaged in more than my share of such foolishness, but when I became a man, I put aside childish things, eventually making my journey to the east where I learned a little about expanding our consciousness. Hint: It has nothing to do with drugs or computers. Someday if you get lucky, maybe you will too.
So you were there at the very beginning, had access to Owsley acid at those original Grateful Dead concerts in the panhandle, and you call it childish foolishness? What a waste of good luck. Lots of us got a lot further on a lot less In places like New Jersey.
I’m not the one who was casting scorn on someone else’s path. Some of us learn not to do that when we expand our consciousness.
Just to clarify, I was making fun of my own path. The time came to move on, so I did. The universe is like a university. I didn't feel like staying in the same class all my life.
It was my own path once that I was mocking. Maybe you take yourself too seriously.
You could probably be clearer about what you’re mocking, but I’ll take your word for it. We all end up “majoring” in different subject areas in the university of life.
I take the things I am serious about seriously. I bet you do too.
I was casting scorn on the drug culture I once took part in. Drugs are not a "path." We did have some good music, but it was a wake-up call when the drugs killed some of my favorites at 27. Nor did pot promote peace and love. People started stealing and killing other over it, just like all the others.
Mike and Anon,
The psychedelics and marijuana were really bad for some people and really good for others. I was fortunate to be in the second group, despite a really unpleasant first experience with LSD.
There wasn’t just one “drug culture“; there were many. Deadheads in particular were and still are a very positive and life-affirmingly cosmic drug/music subculture.
The Grateful Dead were like one of those elevated trains they have in Chicago. The drugs were how you got up to the station; and then the train would roll in and take you on a tour through the fundamental nature of consciousness. I was grateful to be alive in a time when I could ride that train.
Drugs are a trips that take you nowhere. They're not a path, but a treadmill. Jerry Garcia was a heroin addict. Beware of darkness.
Mike, with all due respect, you don’t know what you’re talking about.
Jerry Garcia was a prophet. He took the weight for the band and all of us Deadheads, and it cost him dearly. All you can see is the darkness, but you apparently never got to see the light.
Here are some lines from their song, Stella Blue:
All the years combine, they melt into a dream
A broken angel sings from a guitar
Jerry was broken, but he was also an angel. It’s sad that you apparently missed the train. You were right there at the original station.
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