Bunch thinning and Netting

We went through the grapes today to bunch thin them an to do final leaf plucking before starting to place the bird netting. These four shots show it all. You can see Sandra hard at work walking along the rows cutting off green bunches and pulling leaves along toe level of the grape off and dropping them on the ground. After the nets go up we cannot easily work directly with the grapes anymore this season. so this is the last "touch up" to the actual bunches and leaves.

Note that we store our netting in big sacks and slowly pull them out of the sacks by driving our tractor backwords along the rows. You can see in the photos that we use only side netting. That allows full sunlight to shine on the "engine" of the grape factory--the big leaves along the top. There are lots of types of netting but we like this side netting. It is labor intensive to pen them up so that there are no holes to allow the birds into the netting. The hard part of this is to clip the little plastic green grocery ties along the tops and bottoms of the rows. It takes us about a week to clip up all the netting very carefully. Later we go back and do a bit of touch up if we see obvious holes that could allow the bird into the netting.

This is the last labor intensive chore before harvest of the grapes in about 2 months. The rest is easy--just watch them ripen and put a bit of talcim powder on the grapes to absorbe moisture as we near harvest and worry about botryoitus. We look to have a fine crop of both our Cab Franc as well as the Malbec. ONe good thing about the netting being on is that we no longer have to worry so much about hail damage since the nets block most of the effect of any late summer hailstorms. (those seem to be getting more common in Matakana Valley over the last decade.

SO, we are off on a vacation to Tasmania this Sat for 12 days so I will not be posting anything until after we return. We have always wanted to go to Tasmania which is the Australian island south of South Australia. It was the original english penal colony after the states declared independance from England and the Brits could thus no longer send debtors to America. Van Damens Land was what it was called in the 1830ies when the Brits sent down over 30,00o "criminals" May just had stolen a loaf of bread but that is another story!!

More after we go see that elusive Tasmanian Devil!!!!

DrJim and Miss Sandra