OK….so we finished the harvest and made wine….done yet. Nope, we had 3 miles of bird net that is 17 feet across to take in from the vineyard. Don’t know the official procedure, but we put the bags in a recycle bin, took off the nets from the vines, pulled them tight on the ground and then rolled the bin around and stuffed them in the bag. Each bag is about 100 pounds. Took us 24 hours! We had to finish by Sunday as it was supposed to rain Monday-Wednesday and they were on the ground and would have been full of mud. We finished, but you can see Joey was dead tired when it was over. Next year, I’m hoping to take them up the day before harvest so we can enjoy the fall colors on the leaves.

PS This next week I’m going to start pruning for next year.

Time to net….can’t believe it has been 4 years in the making, but our first harvest is almost here and we want to protect it, so we purchased 12500’ of netting (not enough) and netted 70 of the rows so the birds won’t get the fruit. We hired a friend/management company, Carmine Indindoli, who has a motorized tool to net. It took them almost 5 hours with 4 men to get it 90% done. The hardest part is we have 84 rows, with many of them small. The turns are the worst part of netting as you have to tie the nets so you don’t trip over them.

As the guys were leaving, they gave me some tips in the vineyard……I missed to many “doubles”, on the weak plants I should have left only 2 or 3 buds instead of 4, the far side of the vineyard was not getting enough water….but all in all looked OK for one person doing it who is “learning”.