Saturday, January 12, 2019

Chips and spread.

Yes, here it is, the obligatory, annual, first pile-of-prunings photograph.  I managed to finish pruning Vinoland's table-grapes today.  It took me a whopping 10 minutes to prune the remaining two vines.  I was exhausted afterwards, hee, hee.  The pruning of the table grapes created a small pile of vine-prunings, small enough that I could probably pick the whole thing up quite readily with both arms.
It's a completely different story when I get to the wine-grapes. 
It still amazes me, each and every year, how much vegetative-material the vines produce.  It's a viticultural miracle that nutrients in the soil combined with water and sunshine can create so much vegetation, shoots and leaves galore.  (Well, pruning determines the number of shoots, but Mother Nature dictates shoot-length.)  And clusters of grapes on top of that.
Of course, all that pruned wood needs to be disposed of.  The Napa Valley Grape Growers outline, in their Best Practices, an online educative resource, the four main ways of disposing of prunings; chop and disc; chop and cover crop; chip with a chipper; burn like billy-o.  (I predict, in the not so distant future that burning will be banned outright in the Napa Valley, even though it is the most efficient way of disposing of grapevine material.)  In Vinoland, we chip and spread - a practice that works best for our modest vineyard operation - returning all that vegetative matter back to the ground from whence it came.

2 comments:

Thud said...

We do love a good bommy.

Vinogirl said...

Thud: Yes, we do :)