Tag Archives: Vineyard Layout

Finishing the Highway Stakes

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Since we put the vineyard at an angle to best ripen the grapes on both sides (see earlier post) the machine that could push in the stakes can’t get to the edges of the field. So, I’m left with putting them in by hand. This seems easy at first, but after a while it is difficult, especially where the land was not tilled very well along the neighbors fence.

So here is the routine. First you carry the stakes to the location on the field where you need them, 150 of them over 1.3 acres. They each only weigh 10 pounds. Next you take the 35 pound “hammer” and slide it over the 8 foot stake and lift it into position and pound until it is in the ground 2 feet. Where the ground is soft……not to bad. Where it is hard…..very tiring for just one of them.

I can do about 1.5 to 2 hours per day and then I have to say “enough”.

I have about 50 to go on the tough ground…..should finish in 3 more days…….next up is the irrigation.

PS Just figured out how much steel is in the ground. 4.5 Tons of endposts (166 @ 55 pounds) and 3.2 tons of stakes (660 @ 10 pounds). I probably carried around 1/2 from the pile near the barn to the spots in the field. No need to go to the gym!

End posts and vine count

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IMG_5131What a job! We are almost done having the end posts installed. We had originally planned on having 88 diagonal rows but as it came out we have 84. The others would have been to small for the expense. There is a little tractor that basically pounds the end posts into the ground. I swear you can hear the pounding all the way to downtown Sebastopol. We are hoping we did not get them to close to the fence. 10 feet to turn around on the diagonal and around 15 feet when the row is vertical to a fence or a tree. It will not make much difference in the first few years, but if we decide to have a small tractor, it might be a problem.

Last week we decided to count all of the knives in the ground and see how many plants we will need for the vineyard. Joey and I went up and down every row and found out we had 3138 vines before the end posts went in, hundreds more than we had planned. When the end posts went in we lost a few so I think we will have more than 3100 vines. Anything over 2916 (again, our lucky numbers) will be planted in Chardonnay for our own consumption. With only 200-250 vines we will probably have to go in with one of our neighbors to get a barrel…but it should be enough for 20 cases of good Chardonnay. I just met a couple who are recommending Clones 76 and 96, so have to do more drinking, I mean research, to see what to order.IMG_5163

Laying out the Vineyard – Joey sets the starting place

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Layout vineyardOn Thursday we started to lay out the vineyard. It would have been so easy had we put in the vines going east-west….we could have started by the fence and done this ourselves. (OK, maybe not after having seen a crew of 5 spend almost 3 days here on our land and they are not done yet.) Greg wanted to make sure the sunshine was equal on both sides of the row and we wanted a good view from our Dining Room and Deck…..both of these coincidentally made the orientation 40 degrees from north-south. As you can imagine that makes laying out 3000 vines at a spacing of 5 foot rows by 3 1/3 foot vine spacing a little more difficult. Try to imagine a wire with markings at the vine spacings and geometry to get row spacings and you can see this would take a long time. We are hoping that in the next few days they will have it all done and we can count the little plastic knives in the ground to make sure we have enough plants in the spring. We were both a little freaked out now that they have most of them in……it looks like a lot of plants spaced very close together. The picture on the bottom is the first row of knives in the ground.