In my, now not inconsiderable, experience it is generally a good thing to plan your retirement around certain key goals. For example, in my case, writing a blog, playing music and creating and maintaining a vineyard. Perhaps it would be wise, however, not to see these goals as a forever thing. Inevitably, I think they will time limit themselves if you do not. It’s naive to think they’re going to last for the whole of your retirement years. And so it is with me and our vineyard.
In the last of these vineyard blogs, number 98 I wrote that the vines had been neglected over the last year owing to my ill health. I also wrote that the last time we visited the vineyard which, as I’ve already said in that blog, is an hour’s drive from our main residence, what we found was, and I quote, ‘chaos’.
We haven’t visited again until this last week and, in between the last visit and the previous one, we had a gift from nature, namely about a foot of snow (part of Storm Eowyn), which has brought about genuine chaos. If we thought what we had before was chaos well then we seriously over-used the word. If you take a look at the photo above you might get some small idea of what confronted us on our very last visit.
Briefly, the snow had weighted down the netting (which I hadn’t removed, as advised, for the winter) and so the extreme load had snapped a large number of posts (as you can see). The vines are probably OK, they have bent rather than snapped but posts and wire and said netting have suffered badly. All of which means we’re going to have to replace all of the above. A bit like starting from scratch but not quite.
The first job for this coming weekend will be to remove all of the netting that we struggled to attach to the posts to protect the grapes, which we didn’t have last year anyway, from the birds. You might think that removing netting would be easier than putting it up. Wrong. It is a pig of a job.
We made a start last week and, as I say, we will continue with this thankless task this weekend. It would be a challenging job if both of us were in tiptop condition, but we ain’t. But it has to be done otherwise we can’t replace the posts and the wire and so on. I gave up counting exactly how many posts were needed and I’ve ordered 30 new ones from the local timber yard. They’re being delivered if the driver can find us, next Wednesday.
Then all I have to do is find somebody willing and able to put the posts in. Last time when we established the vineyard in 2013, the local farmer bashed them in with his tractor shovel. That’s not an option this time around because the tractor would not be able to get down the rows. Which leaves me with our 83 year old helper and whoever else he can round up.
But I’m getting ahead of myself, we haven’t removed the netting nor taken delivery of the posts, so one challenge / worry at a time. And we’re hoping that we can get some help, paid or otherwise, with the up-coming tasks, relatives included.
So there we are, if we continue with our commitment to this, probably our most ambitious retirement goal, there are likely to be a number of future vineyard postings on this blog. Rest assured if we do continue (and we plan to) I will keep you, my readers, informed as to our progress. After all you may have similar schemes in mind for your retirement and I’d hate you not to be in possession of the full facts.