I’m struggling towards 100 blogs about the vineyard which, some of you will remember, forms an important aspect of my retirement. It’s that part to do with being outside in the fresh air, communing with nature, creating something, physical labour. So quite an important part of the retirement plan, my retirement plan that is. Or at least it had been until my various illnesses came along. Then, along with a number of other activities, such things disappeared.
So vineyard activities went out of my life for a number of reasons. For one the trip (of about an hour) required a level of energy I just didn’t have. So no working trips let alone the pleasure of the views (see above with Olive the Owl) for several months.
As a consequence, the vines have suffered, they’ve had no replenishment of lost vines, no fertilising of existing ones, no considered pruning, de-leafing, de-stemming, weed-killing, no repairs to posts, fences and so on. Above all very little in the way of grass cutting and /or strimming.
We’ve paid a local guy £200 twice to strim it but he hadn’t been on the job for over a month. So when we finally made the trip last weekend we were nervous about what we going to find. So let me tell you straight away, we found chaos. Well specifically what we found was missing vines (eaten by rabbits let in by the gardener who we think left the gates in the rabbit fence open). Hmm. This we did not need.
And what we really didn’t need was the grass, grass looking like it hadn’t been cut for years and happy to return to its natural state as a sheep meadow for many, many years.
So this was the context for what we needed to do on this first visit for quite a while and a rare effort to try and get the vineyard part of our retirement back on track. Unfortunately as we contemplated the grass far from feeling inspired to renovate, I felt like giving up. I would either hand over the vineyard to our children or to my neighbour to add onto his own vineyard tasks or even giving it up and letting the vineyard re-wild, as they say. All this through my tears.
Or the final choice, take a deep breath, wipe away the tears and do it ourselves (not strictly accurate as our daughter and husband were coming up to join us and work on the vineyard on Sunday, today being Friday, but close enough). So we had two days of ridiculously hard work.
Before our local guy retired at the age of 83, so fair enough, I bought him a brand new Honda mower (over £500 although who’s counting). But now it was me using it and that’s a different story. It’s petrol-driven and heavy and without going into detail, on this surface, it’s hard to control. You can either use the power-driven option and it runs away with you when the wheels ‘bite’, or simply push it up the slopes- very hard. Down the hill and, as in first option – you’re chasing it. Anyway take my word for it, it’s bloody hard work.
And while we’re on the topic. It, the vineyard, needs a strimmer to get the long stuff (about 90% of it) but although we have one, again it’s petrol-driven and like the mower, quite hard (make that very hard), to start so that didn’t get used until the children came on the Sunday and mercifully we’d gone home by then – knackered, but thoughtful.
And there we have it. Two and a half days of hard work and potentially difficult decisions to make about the nature of my retirement life. It would leave a big hole if I gave up the vineyard. So yes, no?
PS. It’s always handy when you’re getting on a bit and your strength is not what it was, to have kids to delegate tasks to. Never more so than with the vineyard, as above. The kids have done a great job in tidying it up this last weekend (with a little help from my retired neighbour). So a big thank you to my daughter and son in law. See video below technology permitting.