Our long awaited plants finally arrived this week – all 200 chambourcin grapes. We started planting the same evening, using the small rototiller to loosen up the soil in the already dug holes, we managed to plant about 25 vines each evening. The final 100 vines were planted on Saturday – not much to see yet, just “sticks” poking out of the ground. Hoping this will work!
Chronicles of the Long Shot Farm
Fruit
Fence Posts and Grape Vine Holes
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| Lars and Jeff making holes for grape vines |
Spent time this weekend marking off the grape patch for the soon to arrive chambourcin vines and drilling holes (used the biggest auger we have for the tractor)…this is a rather slow process, but it will be worthwhile having the large holes for easier planting. We are making the holes 6 feet apart, and the rows are 10 feet wide. (5 rows of 40 grapes)
Earlier this week, one of Jeff’s friends had gotten a guy with a portable sawmill to come to his farm to cut up locust trees into fence posts. Jeff helped them most of the week during his free time, and we got about 75 posts plus all the “scrap” boards. Jeff has been spending time “sharpening” the bottom of the posts with a chain saw – for easier pounding. He then drills smaller holes with a hand-held auger, “drops” in the sharpened post, and uses the bucket of the tractor (which he fills with heavy rocks), to pound the post in. Jeff’s been working on this a few hours each day, here is the first finished row of trellis posts in the blackberry patch:
500 More Blackberries!
We learned a lot from last year’s planting and had a much more efficient system going this year, when we planted our second “batch” of blackberries. We knew the plants were to arrive sometime last week, so we spent every evening setting end posts for the trellis system and marking out the rows. Our rows are 10 feet apart (marked those with string), and the plants are set 4 feet apart – used orange spray paint to mark each spot. So when the 500 Triple Crown plants arrived late on Wednesday afternoon we were set to go. We only had enough daylight left that evening to set 50 plants, but Thursday and Friday evening, after work, we got another 100 plants into the ground – Jeff and Lars used the rototiller to dig holes, Tina followed and planted.
We finished the rest of the planting on Saturday – which was good, because on Sunday we got one heck of a storm. Heavy rain and blustering wind quickly turned to ice and snow. We lost power late in the evening and by Monday morning, 7 of our largest pine trees had been knocked down 🙁
It was an extreme temperature change, we went from seeing the first crocus on Saturday to having ice and snow the next evening. But we did order our first set of grape vines: 200 Chambourcin should be shipped in early April.
Clean Blueberry Patch
Took advantage of a beautiful warm afternoon and hoed and rototilled our young blueberry patch. We have 45 plants that all are showing signs of budding leaves – so hoping they survived their first winter.
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| hard to see the little plants, they are close to the irrigation lines |
Waiting anxiously now for the arrival of our new blackberry plants – all 500 of them should be shipping sometime next week.
More Blueberries
OK – so we got a great deal on some blueberry plants – at $2 each on closeout, we bought all 32 remaining plants and thus quadrupled the size of our blueberry patch. Totally crazy…
First we made the patch a lot larger (with the tractor), dug holes with a spade :), planted and then ran irrigation lines. Luckily we still had some line left over, plus enough emitters to make this work. We’ve been irrigating every day since we planted..Also found time to do some serious flower and herb garden weeding (sometimes I think I grow composting materials as my main crop), here is my “kitchen garden” by the front entrance door:
