Some kind of achievement to get to 100 vineyard blogs. They’ve been slow coming these last two years for reasons ranging from the weather – snow and storm damage, to retirement (our man who does a lot of the work) and my health – all have undermined our efforts to keep the vineyard afloat. Certainly in the last two years we have picked no grapes and made no wine and as I recall that’s the purpose of a vineyard.
In addition we have not made many trips up here from our main residence in Leeds. About a month since our last one in fact, so no surprises (except we have had very dry weather this spring and I had hoped that the grass wouldn’t have grown that much) however I was wrong and the grass has gotten out of hand as I hope you can see from the attached video
Not a pretty sight and really quite disheartening.
But the one bit of good news was that our man seemed prepared to come out of retirement and do a bit of strimming. But he wasn’t happy with the current strimmer, too heavy I think. Which is why we all took a trip to our local (but expensive) farm equipment store. I told him to choose a strimmer he was happy with and of course we would pay for it.
He chose one he liked, so that was good but the total cost (not including the new gate, another story) was £400 for the strimmer and then another £200 for VAT, spare strimming wire and oil. So that was not so good, £600 not including the gate which was another £200. Ha, so long as my man was happy and strimming then I too was happy apart from that feeling that this vineyard lark was costing me a lot of money for little / no return.
Anyway some good news, my man in the Dales has sent me a text saying he has used the strimmer which meant the kids could now use the ( also highly expensive) mower and cut the grass. The photo above is a picture of the vineyard when they had cut all the area that had been strimmed. Compare and contrast with the previous video.
So this weekend just gone we popped up to inspect all the good work not done by us but done for us, which is a nice feeling even if it has cost us a bit but then money well-spent I reckon. The return on this outlay is the number of flowers / buds on the vines and there are quite a reasonable number but too soon to say whether we will get a decent harvest this year, certainly the weather has been grape growing friendly. We shall see
Yep, a long way to go and even if we do get grapes the question is then will the birds get them? That will depend on whether we can protect them and that, in turn, depends on whether we net or not and that my friends is a much more complex problem than it might appear. Watch this space.