Second Year Vineyard

Well here we are again with another year half finished...    

Many of us experienced an unusually harsh and long winter for 2017-2018; which seems to be a growing trend in our little part of the world.  I worried as March turned into April and the snows continued with no signs of life in the vines.   By this time the previous year, the vines, still in buckets, were greening up with new growth.   However, when the last of the snow finally melted, all but three of our vines burst into green.  Three vines lost to winter kill were less than 5% of the total.  Not bad by most standards.   

April moved into May, which remained colder than normal and with a lot of rain.   The vines continued to produce leaves and flowers…and so did the weeds.    Our soils retain water well and the rootstock is growing strong (as evidenced by the difficulty we had removing the dead vines!) so we made the decision to allow cover crops to remain between and around the vines to keep them from putting on too much growth.   We are now rethinking that decision and may place a stone mulch along the rows this autumn.  In spite of the scorching heat, endless rains, and weed competition, the vines didn’t show any signs of stress.  

As the growth continued and we moved into the beginning of June, we prepared for the onslaught of Japanese beetles.   Sprays worked until the rain washed them away.  The beetles returned and we sprayed again.   And again…and again.   It was getting ridiculous.   Then we noticed that the beetles choose the newest leaves at the tops of the developing canopy.   Maybe we can use this to our advantage when the vines are fully mature and flush with growth in the next year or two and avoid spraying so much.  While we don’t like using pesticides that can harm our bees and other beneficials, we also don’t want to have a population explosion of beetles every year to munch our vines and retarding their growth.  They also take a toll on our orchard and crepe myrtles.  The solution we’ve settled on will be to plant roses, most likely a climbing variety such as ‘New Dawn’ that will also shade the peafowl aviary near the vineyard.    

Roses have been used for centuries in many wine growing regions of the world as a bellwether for the vines.   Their cultural requirements are similar to grapes and they share pests and diseases.   The appearance of something like downy mildew on the roses is an early warning to take the necessary precautions with the vines.   Not to mention the additional benefits of beauty, fragrance, and their attraction to pollinators and other beneficial bugs.   We are also installing purple martin housing to lure these voracious bug eaters to our farm.

This year, the second year for our vines, we also set up our trellis system.   Most of the varieties we planted do well with the vertical shoot positioning, or VSP, system so that is the method we are using.  With row lengths at or below 100 feet we chose to use steel end posts with earth anchors and aluminum line posts.   We selected 12.5 gauge hard wire with Gripples® for tensioning.   I can’t say enough good things about gripple tensioners and the gripple tool.  They are so easy to use.  

We set the first wire at 40 inches so that our Livestock Guardian Dog can pass beneath without disturbing vines or grapes.   The typical height for the first wire, or cordon height, ranges from 36 inches to 48 inches.  Once the wires were in place and the vines actively growing again, it was time to select and train the cordons.  The Cabernet and Syrah vines took to this quickly and easily, starting into the second, and in some cases, third wires by mid-July.   Approximately half of the Albariño and Norton vines also started into the second wire.  The Semillion and Traminette vines are lagging behind and a few have yet to grow tall enough to reach the first wire.   I suspect they aren’t well suited to our microclimate but we will give them another year or two before we replace them with more suitable vines.   This is the reason we started with a small test plot before investing in larger blocks of vines.

In January and February we will begin our first spur pruning in preparation for our first grape crop in 2019!  

And lest I forget, tickets are already on sale for Powhatan’s Sweet 16^th Festival of the Grape on Saturday, October 6^th!

The First Months - April through June 2017

When we first began exploring the possibility of growing grapes for winemaking, I was disappointed to find there weren’t many blogs or videos out there.  So I decided to start one to document our experiences.  Once we decided to go forward with our little venture, there really wasn’t much to report.  We selected the site on our property, did soil tests and attended as many vineyard related functions as we could find in our corner of the world.    Descriptions of those events are documented in earlier postings.

Then the BIG day finally arrived – the UPS man delivered our tender little bundles of joy – and we discovered exactly WHY there aren’t many blogs out there.   No one who is actually growing grapes has the time!   I now understand that this vineyard will require more time and effort of us than raising two children.

Our vines arrived on a rainy day at the beginning of April.  They were bundled by variety, covered in mud and wrapped in plastic with wet cloth to keep them from drying out.    I gleefully dragged the huge box out to the designated location only to realize the soils were much too wet to plant.    So back into the barn and out of reach of the livestock dog the vines went, while I went to the garden center for bags of unfertilized soil.   

Did you know that very few garden centers sell anything other than pre-fertilized soils?   Two more days passed until I located plain garden soil that wasn’t actually fine chopped mulch or chemically enhanced.  The weather had been nice and the soils were ready to plant. 

Here’s a little bit of friendly advice for anyone in central Virginia thinking about growing grapes.  Even if you prepare the soil in advance, prepare it again on the first nice day before you expect to receive your vines.   All the rain we received early this year made our late winter soil preparation virtually useless.  After four hours of digging and heavy lifting, only ten Cabernet vines and ten Syrah vines made it into the ground before it started raining.  Again. 

Out came the buckets and potting soil as temporary housing for those poor patient vines.    Between weather delays and my work schedule, it took three weeks to get them all in the ground.   One hundred vines, 21 days of labor.  And that was just the beginning. 

While I was busy spending all of my weeknights and weekends trying to get the last of the vines in the ground, the well-watered grasses and weeds were busy overtaking my fledgling grapes.  Did I mention how much I hate that creeping ryegrass we inadvertently imported as hay for our sheep and goats?  It is almost impossible to kill and I swear I can see it grow.  It rapidly overtook the bare ground around the vines.   It also had to be hand pulled from the base of every single vine…all one hundred of them.   Another thing you can expect after lots of rain is a lot of mosquitos.   I must have gone through a case of Deet while out there pulling those weeds.   At least the weather was finally cooperating.

Once the vines had been weeded it was time to bring out the garden tractor to beat back the jungle threatening to overtake my little vineyard.   By this time there was so much green mass the tractor stalled every six feet or so.   The solution was to raise the blades as high as they would go for the first pass, make a second pass to gather up the clippings, then make a third pass with the blades set to normal.  I think we’re going to invest in a bush hog or flail mower for next year.

Finally, at the end of May, I could sit back and contemplate my beautiful little vineyard.  I proudly walked the rows, inspecting the thriving vines, glass in hand, listening to the cicadas and drone of the bees.  And then I found something weird on one of the leaves.  These odd little spots cropped up on one leaf, only one.  I snipped it off, took these photographs and sent them off to the Extension office where I think they fell into the spam bin.  I never did hear back, but that’s okay.  I walked those vines every day and never saw another leaf like it.   But I did find aphids.  And the nasty mean ants that come with them.  Back to Stranges for more horticultural soap to blast those suckers off. 

   

Then the heat came and life got in the way so I didn’t get out to inspect those vines for two whole weeks.   And that was a big mistake.   While I wasn’t looking, Japanese Beetles moved in.  Normally our chickens maintain the bug populations, but this Spring we were hit by a fox raising kits.   Now I can accept – even if I’m not happy about – the loss of a chicken or two.  After all it is Nature’s cycle of life, but after losing several birds a day for over the course of three weeks, it was time to shut down the all you can eat buffet and lock them up.   Unfortunately the end result was a beetle population explosion.

Japanese Beetle Damage

I wish I could say the crisis ended there.  Oh no, the some of the Cabernet, Syrah and Albarino vines had produced grape clusters! (How did I miss the flowering???)  Mid-June is already getting behind with pruning the vines back to one stalk so they could harden off for winter and set up for next year’s trellis training.  And here we were with multi stalked vines with roughly half of their leaves skeletonized.  I felt positively evil clipping them back and tying them off to their support stakes.  Worse, I had to take drastic action to save them…it was time for Sevan.  

Tiny grape clusters 

As a beekeeper, I HATE to use Sevan dust.  My preference would have been the liquid form, but I couldn’t find it anywhere.   Fortunately bees aren’t interested in grape leaves and none of the weeds around the vines were in flower.  But it still felt like Nature herself was ready to punish us for such a transgression.   I would take an entomologist to identify every critter that occupied those vines as I toiled under the brutal summer sun.   Most were probably benign to grapevines, even beneficial, but spiders aren’t my favorite insect and those damn horse flies…where did they even come from?  We haven’t had horses in ten years, and none of our neighbors have horses or cows.  Hard to believe, but the mosquitos after dusk were much less annoying, particularly when one is coated with Deep Woods OFF!®   So I committed my crime last night, out in the vineyard, flashlight in hand, delicately dusting the remaining leaves of my precious vines.

What Japanese beetles can do to a vine in no time at all.

Now as I sit here typing away to share with you some of the tribulations the first year can bring, glass of vino in hand, I no longer question the cost of the bottle it came from.   Growing wine grapes won’t be all fun and games, forget those plans of sipping vino in a shady pergola, enjoying the sun setting over your vines – at least not yet.  It is going to be work…lots of hard, physically demanding work.  And sometimes you have to make hard choices.