Drip, drop, dribble.

I spent the entire day up close and personal with every single vine in Vinoland.  Tomorrow the vineyard is being sulphured so I needed to get all the shoots stuffed up under the trellis.  I also spent some time removing some laterals in the fruit zone.  Wow, there seems to be plenty of extra vigour this season.  All that surplus greenery just gets in the way of where the sulphur needs to go, so it was, "Off with their heads!"  It's okay, they don't feel a thing.
The vines also got their first watering of the year.  That meant checking every emitter, two for each vine, to make sure that they weren't clogged up with gunk.  All in all not bad, only a handful needed to be replaced which is much better than some past years.  The recycled water we are now using is much easier on the emitters than Vinoland's well water.
Drink up kids!

I'm rusty.

Yes, I am blog-rusty, but not as rusty as this chunk of tuff situated underneath a drip irrigation emitter.  Stained a curious shade of orange, from the iron present in Vinoland's well water, this fractured hunk of ash-fall tuff distracted me from the job at hand.  (For more on tuff, see here.)  I've been keeping busy stuffing shoots, thinning heads and suckering trunks.  And watching this California Harvester Ant (Pogonomyrmex californicus) bopping around under a Syrah vine, fascinating.  I'm easily distracted.  Situation, normal.