Twin Vines Vineyard progress report
The vineyard was planted with no trellis, the plan being to follow the old world "goblet" or head-trained method, which essentially leaves the plants to grow in a sort of manicured bush fashion. As previously noted, this caused problems due to the afternoon wind conditions that can occur, coupled with the high vigor of the site.
Progress so far has been rapid. Over the last week or so we have accomplished the following:
- All vines have been pruned, leaving one whip (which will become the cordon), and an extra spur as insurance just in case we need a backup. These spurs will be removed later as the cordon health is verified, otherwise they provide us with additional buds from which to grow a new cordon if need be.
- Currently, every 4th plant had a t-stake - these are in place to support the drip hose wire. These stakes have all been raised out of the ground by 6 inches so that the top of the stake is at three feet. This has two benefits - it raises the drop wire (which was really too low before) to around 13 inches off the ground, and it will allow the stakes to be tied into the cordon wire at around 3ft to form part of the trellis. Raising the drip wire makes it much easier to do weeding under the vine row, which has also now been completed.
- The end-posts (which were t-stakes) at the lower end of the vineyard have been removed, and the plants that were located there have been relocted to other parts of the vineyard to fill in gaps (due to gophers, mostly). It is really fairly brutal to move a vine like that, so we'll keep a careful eye on those ones. The end posts had to be removed to make way for the new ones, and the plants had to be removed as there would have been nowhere to put a cordon.
- All the trellis stakes have been positioned in the vineyard ready for pounding into place. We're placing a slotted trellis stake every 4 vines, which means that half the vines in the vineyard will have either a trellis stake or a t-stake for support. The remainder have pencil rods as training stakes.
- The end-posts have been positioned ready for pounding into place. The end-posts are 9ft long used oil casing pipes. These will be driven 4ft into the ground leaving 5ft protruding. They will be set at a slight angle to offset against the tension in the trellis wires, but since our rows are only a maximum of about 250ft we will forgo any other type of anchor. 4ft of pipe in the ground is not going anywhere!
Pounding the line stakes is ongoing as I write this, and we expect that to be complete in a day or two. The plan is to pound in the end-posts using a compressed air post pounder over the coming weekend.
The plants will be trained in a unilateral cordon style - basically each one will have a main "trunk" with one "arm" (cordon) so that it looks like an inverted "L" shape. We are doing basic VSP (vertical shoot positioning) training, which means that along each cordon there will be a series of spurs, each of which (after the first year) will be left with two buds. These buds will produce the fruiting shoots each year - only the first few buds of each shoot are fruitful - the rest of each shoot provides the foilage for the "canopy" of leaves which collect energy from the sun, and also provide a certain amount of shade for the fruit later in the season. Above the cordon, or fruiting, wire will be a pair of wires which are known as catch-wires - the growing shots from the spurs on the cordon will be trained to grow through these wires so as to maintain order and ensure that the canopy is formed over the cordon.
I will snap some photos over the next few days and post them here. So far, it is looking great and we are very pleased with the results. Thanks go to our neighbor and vineyard expert Jon Gerard and his crew for organizing and undertaking all the work on this vineyard project - we could not have done it without them!
Steve Wetherill
Escafeld Vineyards
Jolon California
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