When we moved to west Texas four years ago, one thing we were told was not to fret the weather – give it time, it’ll change. Boy, were they right!
Last week we had freezing weather with drizzle, sleet and snow. Oh, and don’t forget the wind. One day we had 41 mile/hour sustained winds with gusts reaching 50 m/hr – we lasted about an hour before deciding it was a great day for schoolwork! The younger children are the ones who really suffer in the high winds – the dust is being blown around closer to their eye level. Wanting to be prepared, they played around us with their goggles on to protect their eyes!
This week the weather began with temperatures in the high 70′s and very little wind. Monday was such a beautiful day that we had an afternoon snack of apples right in the vineyard! As you can see, most everyone is wearing shorts!
We are now well over 1/2 finished with the pruning. We completed the 7.5 acres of Roussanne last week. Tomorrow we should easily finish the 5 acres of Montepulciano and begin the Aglianico (7.5 acres).
As I mentioned yesterday, Bob walks (or runs) with us to the vineyard each morning – the whole 1/6 mile distance. I have been taking sand toys to occupy our youngest children throughout the morning. Bob, being the intelligent corgi that he is, also decided to take toys to the vineyard. Being obsessed with fetch, his toys revolve around his favorite game.
A chunk of wood makes a great fetch toy, but it is hard to get your mouth around!
Then there is always a tennis ball -they are easy to find in the vineyard!
Even a boring old stick!
Actually, a stick is not so boring – you can also play tug-a-war!
Whatever the toy of the day is, he waits just beyond it, crouching down on his front paws until you pick it up. He seems to beg or maybe dare you to get it and throw it – smiling all the while!
He is always a source of entertainment – tearing off through the rows to fetch whatever you have thrown for him!
And, like the cows, he must stop periodically for a drink of water from the barrel. That is, until someone distracts him with something that might make a great fetch toy!
You can always tell when Bob is getting tired – his tongue hangs out!
Bob’s tongue does not just hang out, it flops out the side of his mouth! Have you ever seen such a long tongue?
Our daily routine is just that, pretty routine. Each morning after breakfast, we all walk to the vineyard to prune. I say “we” loosely, because this “we” also includes our two cows and Bob.
Each morning Buttercup (our black family milk cow) and Emme (short for Emmentaler cheese) wait for us by the hot wire fence to take them to the vineyard. Emme is a jersey heifer purchased with the anticipation of more milk but we have had problems breeding her. Hopefully, we will find out this week if she is pregnant or not. If not, she will probably be sold.  She is such a nice cow but a 700+ lb pet is a bit large to keep when she essentially brings no benefit through milk production.
With winter here there is not much green anything for them to graze. But, in the vineyard, we have rye planted between the rows to stop the dirt from blowing. It is beautiful and green and there are also plenty of weeds for them to eat – they love both! Allowing them to graze at the vineyard has really saved on our feed bill. Since the vines have not yet budded, there is nothing for them to hurt – it is a win-win situation.
The boys lead them over to the vineyard with a lasso around their necks (the cows’ necks, that is). They lead very easily and since each is wearing a cow bell, they ding-a-ling as they go.
As you can see from the picture below, a snack is needed for the journey! 1/6 of a mile is a long way!
Once at the vineyard, both cows go up and down the rows as if trying to find the most delicious mouthfuls. It brings back wonderful memories of our 4 years in Switzerland as they walk with their bells ringing. We used to hear both cows and sheep grazing on the hillsides with their bells ringing. Once the wind stops blowing so much (it might be awhile here in west Texas!), I would like to post a video so you can hear them too!
As always, the grass (or weeds in this case) is always greener on the other side of the vine row.
When their first course is complete, the wander up to the center of the vineyard where we have a barrel of water for them.
So goes the day – first, second, third, fourth and I honestly don’t know how many courses they actually have in their menu, until they are led home at evening!
Moving from lower Alabama to west Texas, we traded hurricanes for sand storms or haboobs. While they are much less life threatening than hurricanes, haboobs do create a dirt mess.
Normally, I am in the vineyard with John and the children every morning until lunchtime. After lunch, I stay home and put the two younger children down for a nap. While they are sleeping, I catch up on housework, cook and have a cup of coffee. Once they wake up, we walk back to the vineyard to put in a couple more hours of pruning before supper.
Yesterday, I had just gotten to the vineyard with our 3 year old riding piggyback, when John said, “Look! Do you want to be in that?” Turning around, I was met with the above picture – a haboob to the north and headed our way fast! You can see the red cloud above the horizon.
A haboob can move deceptively quickly. You think you have plenty of time to get home and before you know it, you are in the middle of dust, dirt and debris being thrown at you – yes, that is a voice of experience speaking 
Needless to say, we all started running and just made it to the door as the first wave of dirt began to pelt us. Whew!
Yesterday I explained what the prepruner was and how it works. After the prepruner is finished, hand pruning is done to further prepare the vineyard for fruit production. We (the children and I) are now hand pruning the rows which have been prepruned.
Below, you can see what a vine looks like after the prepruner. The cuts are rough and jagged.
As with any job, it seems getting started is the hardest and most time consuming part of it. To get us started, John gives instructions on how many spurs and buds are to be left. The spurs are the wood coming up from the cordon (the horizontal trunk of the vine). The buds are the bulges which contain new growth on the spurs.
Even after John returns to prepruning, there is much discussion and questioning among ourselves.
Finally, a picture of a finished vine – pruned and ready for spring.
Our goal is to prune an acre a day. We are close to that goal and as we go we do get faster! That means, we should be finished in a little over 20 days!
It is that time of year – time to prune the vineyard. For us this year, we will be using a mechanical prepruner.
What, you might ask is a mechanical prepruner and why do we want to use it? It is a hydraulically controlled machine, pulled behind a tractor with computer assisted cutting blades. The spinning blades are actually stacks of blades which can be easily moved about the vine cordon and the bottom blades cut the spurs to the desired length. The rest of the blade stack shreds the old vine structure leaving behind twigs and sticks which will easily decompose over the summer. This saves quite a bit of time and is well worth the rental.
Here is a close up of the blade stack. If you zoom in, you might make out the warning label about not loosing fingers and hands!
As the tractor pulls the prepruner down the row at 1.4 miles per hour, the two sets of opposing blades do their work on two vine rows at a time. Someone (our oldest son in this case) sits on the prepruner watching and adjusting as it goes. For our vineyard, we want to leave about 4 inches of spurs coming out from the cordon.
From the rear, the operator has a good view of the vines. There are seats for two people – one to operate each arm. Two people are needed when a vineyard is not uniform in growth or the ground is uneven.
Since our son competently controls both arms, the second seat is vacant. But not for long, since there is a long line of eager children ready to help watch.
What a beautiful day we had yesterday! Knowing that vineyard work was soon to begin, we have been doing concentrated schoolwork in preparation to take time off. With the temperature near 70F, we decided to enjoy the warmth. We began laying the drip irrigation tape for this year’s planting. We will be adding 2 1/3 acres of grapes in March, 2 acres will be Petit Verdot and 1/3 acre will be Muscat Canelli. Our rows are 1/3 of a mile long and 3 rows equals one acre, so we will be adding 7 more rows.
What made this year’s expansion even more exciting for us was the fact that we are using our own tractor! John had tried to arrange to use a neighbor’s big John Deere = speed and GPS accuracy. Since our ’54 Ford tractor is not equipped with a GPS system, the rows were first marked off at the 8 foot spacing. (This tractor was generously gifted to us by a friend who got out of farming.) The dry, hard ground was then ripped to a depth of about a foot (broken up with a blade) to make it easier for the tape to go in the ground. The vine rows are 8 feet apart and drip tape will be laid down the center of the rows. The picture below shows the ripped lines where the drip tape will be. The rye stubble protected our land from blowing away in the wind storms. The small green plants are the self-seeded rye that will provide the next year’s protection.
As with most things, getting the tractor set up right seems to be the most time consuming part. The taping rig, courtesy of our grape consultant, is essentially a blade that cuts into the dirt and allows the irrigation tape to be placed at an even depth in the ground. It is first attached to the tractor, then the depth of the plow can be set and finally the roll of tape put in place. The irrigation tape will spin off the roll in the arms above head clearance and feed down through a tube at the back of the knife blade into the ground.
At the start of a new row, the tape must be held in place by a lucky volunteer until the tractor is far enough ahead so that the weight of the dirt prevents it from being pulled out by the tractor.
I know our tractor is old, but I really do not think it needs to be pushed along! Then again, a little help never hurt anyone  
Normally, someone sits in the seat or walks beside the rig to prevent the tape from twisting. (Did they put sunblock on?)
At the end of the row, the tape is cut. These cut ends will be connected later to the vineyard irrigation system.
The tape at this point is flat with emitters, or holes, every 2 feet. When it is all hooked up, water will fill the tape and evenly come out the holes for the grapevines. Each of these holes drip at ~0.24 gal/hr. Every now and then, a gopher will make an extra hole in the tape, but their holes leak quite a bit faster!
Once all the rows are finished, the boys will go back over each one with the tractor packing the dirt down. Gophers are very prevalent here in west Texas and they love to dig in fresh dirt. Packing the dirt down will hopefully keep them from digging and chewing through the drip tape.
We have a new toy in the vineyard! It is the Pellenc AP25. What, you might ask is that? It is a battery powered tying machine used to anchor grape vines to either a bamboo stake (for new vines) or wire for older vines. This little baby was not cheap but it is already proving its worth!
Soon, we will be going through the vineyard with a pre-pruner. The pre-pruner will cut off and shred last years growth from the vines. The amount cut off is adjustable and we will leave 2 buds per spur. Our vines are trained up to 4 ft and then 2 arms are tied down horizontally in opposite directions on a wire forming a cordon.
Each arm is allowed to grow 2 ft along the wire. From these arms, upward growing spurs have the buds for the new growth.
Each bud should produce two bunches of grapes. Optimally, we want 20 buds per plant – 10 evenly spaced over each 2 ft arm. These will yield 5 to 15 lbs. of grapes per vine. You can see the fuzzy white bulges in the picture below.
With the pre-pruner we will cut the vines back so that each spur has 2 buds. We will then come through and hand prune, cleaning up each vine to achieve the 20 buds per plant.
Before pre-pruning, it is important to replace any dead or weak arms. This is done by pulling down a healthy looking arm from last years growth to replace the compromised one. The Pellenc AP25 is used to tie down the arm to the cordon wire.
You can see from the picture below, the bulk of the Pellenc AP25 is worn at the back of the waist. (The jeans are designer, by yours truly – call for pricing!) This back part holds the battery pack and the roll of ties. For tying down mature arms, we are using a standard tie designed to last 12 – 14 mths. They look much like bread bag ties. When training our new planting, we will be using paper ties designed to degrade in 8 – 10 mths so that they do not girdle the fast growing young plants.
The handheld part of the Pellenc AP25 looks like a space age gun. You can hopefully see the line of brown ties coming from the back pack and feeding into the rear of the gun.
The open tip of the gun is positioned over the vine and cordon wire (in this case) and the trigger is pulled.
The Pellenc AP25 does the rest. The tie is extruded, twisted and voile!
Until now, we have all had our own hand tapers and done our own pruning (or training, as the case may be) and taping as we go. The old tapers, pictured below, just didn’t last even the season – we went through 19 of them!
To date, we are finding the Pellenc AP25 to be very fast and feel that while 6 or 7 of us are pruning, 1 person using the Pellenc AP25 will be able to keep up with the rest. Pellenc proports one person can do 12,000 ties per day. We will see!
“Use it up, wear it out, make do or do without!”
—— My husband
At the end of 2009, I posted “My Top 40 Frugal Living Tips.” Now, 2 years later, it is encouraging to review it. If you have been reading Dimes2Vines for a while, you know the last 4 years have been challenging, to say the least! Starting a 20 acre vineyard from scratch is a lot of hard work. Hard work without an accompanying paycheck!
With a large family, frugal living has always been a part of our lifestyle but became significantly more important. Now after our first successful harvest, we are continuing our frugal lifestyle. Why? To be good stewards. I am not talking about a miserly lifestyle. Rather, we are continuing to work together for our common family goals.
These goals include expanding the vineyard – we are planting another 2 1/3 acres of grapes this year – and finishing our house which overlooks the vineyard. Hopefully, we will continue the Insulated Concrete Forms (ICF) upward after this year’s havest in Oct. 2012.
Many items on my top 40 list seem to be common sense things but they are also easy to forget about, such as, #16 adjust your thermostat, #17 turn off lights and #18 turn off ceiling fans when leaving a room.
In fact, as I review the list, we are still practicing them all – from tithing (#1),to writing down all expenses in my budget book (#2) to using VoIP as our phone rather than cell phones (#40).
Don’t underestimate the power of the “little things”. The little things can quickly add up! Each of the 40 tips alone may seem insignificant, but, together they can amount to great savings.
While many may not see beauty in a vineyard during the winter, I do. Vines which are growing so vibrant and green during the summer, are now brown and gnarly. I’m not sure “gnarly” is a word but it definitely describes the dried, brown, bare vines.
I guess when I look at the vineyard this time of year, I see promise and the hope of things to come.
Or maybe …
I see a vineyard that does not require work right now … ie… a rest period for us!
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Grab My Dime! 
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About Me 
God has amazingly blessed me, Dina-Marie, with a wonderful husband and 10 beautiful children. Moving from our "secure" life in Alabama to the "exciting" life of starting a vineyard in west Texas has been challenging to say the least. I have had the opportunity to take a crash course in frugal living and become a real farm girl - complete with milk cow and chickens. I have learned the importance of health from the inside out, "traditional" cooking and cod liver oil!
I hope to encourage you to make the most of where you are and what you have. |
