Instead of the customary four weeks between vineyard blogs, this clocks in at about three weeks. And the reason being there’s plenty to write about that needs an airing right now. For example there’s the paradox of the birds.
There are many paradoxes with our vineyard first and foremost why would any sensible couple persist in spending money on what sometimes seems like a lost cause? The last two years in our vineyard have been pretty depressing. Basically no grapes and a number of diseases. We’ve struggled and no use saying we ain’t. But we continue to spend, spend, spend.*
A more fundamental paradox has been our relationship with nature, especially animals. The creatures in question has varied, most typically it has been rabbits. I think I mentioned in previous blogs that we have spent a fair amount of money on putting up rabbit-proof fencing. When one of these bunnies gets into the vineyard and my man up there tells me with great glee that he has ‘got’ it. I close my ears. I do not want to know what ‘got’ means although I can guess.
If I somehow apprehended a rabbit I know I would not kill it, just pick it up and deposit it the other side of the fence with a stern warning not to trespass on my land again. On this visit the trespasser was a bird stuck in the netting, and I’m sorry to say I can’t tell you what kind of bird except to say it was young and not very bright. It kept pecking me while we were trying to free it from the netting.
There has been an on-going paradox between us and the locals and birds, specifically birds of prey in the form of red kites. We think they are beautiful but the local gamekeepers hate them (and probably shoot them illegal though it is).
The bird in question, in this case, was definitely not a red kite and was trapped in the netting that we have spent the last two days trying to restore to our vineyard. In the past we have been slow with the netting and our country cousins / feathered friends have eaten our grapes. This time we may even be a little premature.
If there is a worse job than replacing, or putting in place for the first time, netting I haven’t come across it yet and hope I never do. Netting is a swine. It gets stuck on every possible protuberance, natural or man-made. It is a most unfriendly medium, if you haven’t had experience of using it my strong advice is don’t. I repeat it’s a swine.
Anyway back to the bird story. Mrs Summerhouse found a young bird trapped in our partially installed netting. It was well and truly stuck and when I happened upon them she was busily cutting the netting to release the enmeshed bird. So in effect she was cutting holes (her job was to repair existing holes) in the netting and free the very creature we were trying to deter. You had to laugh.
Just another example, and there have been many, of our standing in the community as city folk and completely unsuited to country life. But at least we give them a laugh – I hope and they will never know this story.
The other paradox with the netting comes in the form of science. Simply put, too much netting or netting too soon reduces the amount of sunlight on the vines which impedes grape development and ripening. It’s all to do with photo-synthesis, I think. Too little netting and the bloody birds eat them, ripe or not and we have hard experience of this.
The birds as a problem are a result of us not being on site and so we cannot use any of the strategies other vineyards seem to employ. It wasn’t that we didn’t take advice. Most other vineyards don’t net they’re generally too large to make this an economical tactic. They seem to use either bird-scaring kites or bird-scaring shotguns. If we were here on a permanent basis we too would probably use the shooting (noise rather than killing we are after all city folk); shouting – oi, you get off my grapes or civilised reasoning – now come on can’t we all live in peace together?
So there we are, netting that’s what we’ve been doing the last couple of days in our vineyard. When I wasn’t spraying that is. Spraying the Mutiple Pro ‘our’ agronomist delivered. At that price we’d be silly not to apply it. But then the sprayer didn’t work and I had to strip it down and re-assemble it. To my great surprise I was successful, it worked. Not like me to be so handy with our vineyard equipment. So the final paradox for this month. Me as the hands-on kind of country-guy. Who’d a thought?
In the meantime, and just by the way, our grapes are growing as you can see by comparing photo above with that in last blog.
*Two lots of £275, one on agronomist visit and fertiliser spray and the other on 80’x 80’ netting.