You build a grape vineyard by subtracting.
Most of the work is shaping plants by pruning them.
(This is new to me. Melons are the other way around. You work to get the plants to grow as big and lush as possible. Large and dense melon vines mean healthy melons.)
Last weekend we took off the top story of now-leafless plants. The top canes are visible in the upper two wires four and five feet off the ground. I took this photo three weeks ago to show the ice that encrusted the plants on a cold morning.
The crew last week left the plants looking like this: one index-finger-thick vine coming out of the root knot. At one point, several stems came out of that spot just off the ground, and this one is the survivor, the strongest of them, so it was kept. Notice the branches on the ground from last week's pruning. The tiller on the back of my tractor will chop them into small pieces and return them to the soil.
This weekend the crew is taking the next step: training the vine to the metal rod so the vine will be straight up. Then they are bending this two-year-old plant so that there will be fruit-producing vines along the cane wire. That wire is the one about 31 inches off the ground, the second-lowest one, the one a foot above the wire that supports the black irrigation tube.
Here is what it looks like when they are done:
The vine is flexible enough that it accepts this 90-degree turn, but it requires about four or five ties with slightly-stretchy green tape to keep it in place.
Workers start near the base, then work up. Bottom two are tied:
Then the third and fourth tie.
Then the bend to the cane wire:
The pruner makes a judgment call here to decide if the vine is big enough to support fruit this year. If the cane is little-finger-thickness at the cane-wire turn, then it is kept and tied to the wire. If it is smaller -- pencil-thickness -- it is cut off at the cane wire and left to grow another year. The pruner is holding an example for comparison of a cane too small to be turned to the side for 2025 fruit. Most of the vineyard consists of healthy two-year- old plants, so most of them are thick enough for the turn.
It takes about two minutes per plant to do this pruning. Nine people, working eight hours yesterday, got about 2,200 plants done. I have about 6,000 plants in the vineyard. This pruning prepares the plants for the first small harvest this coming fall. It also sets up the plants for a pruning a year from now. Then the cane now being attached to the wire and everything above it is removed. The entire plant will be brought down to about 25 inches off the ground -- below the cane wire -- leaving just a single stick cut off below the current 90-degree turn. The 2026 harvest will come from buds that grow out from the top of that short cane. That new growth will be attached to the cane wire.
Remove, remove, remove.
6 comments:
Gentleman farmer.
It reminds me when I was thinning pears so the remaining one would grow bigger or when we limited 3 plants to a melon hill when 5 seeds were planted initially. It seems counterintuitive, but that’s the way it works.
I read recently that there's an overabundance of grapes on the market, and that some grapes weren't picked from the vines because they couldn't be sold. Hopefully Peter Sage doesn't lose his shorts on this business venture, but it appears that he entered the market late in the game. Sage could have made more money growing cannabis or hay.
A few years ago I planted 300 tomato plants. I turned them into 50 cases of amazing tomato sauce, one case a day. They lasted 7 years. I wish I could do it again but age takes its toll. But, Peter is lucky. He hires a bunch of farm workers to do what he needs. My question is, how much does he tip the whipper?
With limited resources, the remaining fruit can grow larger. So, removing the smaller of the pears, leaving the larger, or trimming the grape plant to just a few pears results in a more robust fruit and larger cluster of grapes. In both cases, you have marketable fruit that picks well and quickly.
California’s Wine Crisis—Too Many Grapes
A glut of grapes and sagging consumer demand are forcing vintners to make tough decisions....................https://www.winespectator.com/articles/too-many-grapes-in-california
Post a Comment