Once in a while we do get a relatively warm day – meaning something above 35 degree Fahrenheit (about 2 degree Celsius). On those days, Jeff does venture out into the berry patch and works on pruning the bushes. Lars will join him when he get home from school as well, and they are making some decent progress. It won’t be much longer when pruning will be all-consuming. Personally, I can’t wait until we change time and I’ll get to work outside in the evenings.
We just ordered more grapes!!
This is a 50% increase for us and we are so excited. They will be shipped in early March. About the same time, we should also receive our “Christmas Presents”, the 8 Bartlett pear trees, 2 Bosc pear trees, 10 Wyldewood elderberry bushes and 10 Samdal elderberry bushes.
This afternoon, Jeff and Samantha figured out how to make a basket from grapevine trimmings. After searching for grapevine basket images on google and closely examining willow baskets from Tina’s collection, they just made one:
After dinner Jeff decided to keep working on another basket, on the back porch this time – apparently basket weaving had created quite a mess in the kitchen earlier. It was a relatively warm evening, and they already had a lot of cut vines. What can I say – one can never have enough baskets….
Here are some other things we had made from grapevines previously: decorations around a rustic birdhouse (Jeff made this from old weathered barn boards), and a grapevine Christmas tree (really a re-purposed tomato cage, wrapped closely in grapevines and embellished with a string of brown wired fairy lights)
A little side benefit from growing grapes is an abundance of grapevines that need to be trimmed off every year. We’ve been getting better at making wreaths – one at a time…
The largest wreath we made so far was measured around the outside of our round patio table. We used an old woven wire fence panel to support the wreath. When we had wrapped sufficient vines to make the wreath the size we liked, we fastened the wreath to the fence panel with wire. We then cut around the outside and inside of the panel with wire cutters, basically making a wire form on the back of the wreath to keep it stable. We then fastened several strings of brown wired fairy lights to the wreath. Duff and Caleb helped to get the wreath positioned at the peak of the barn – climbing to the vent from the inside of the barn, they lowered a rope, which we used to pull up the wreath. Inside the barn a very long extension cord with a timer connects the light strings of the wreath to an outlet.
We also made some smaller wreaths and Lars is getting rather good at it:
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| Wreath underneath bell |
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| Wreath wrapped with bells |
We’ve been keeping a close eye on our first Chambourcin harvest. Since this is only the second year for the grape vines, we removed all grape clusters, except one, from each vine during early spring. The grapes have been growing beautifully and we’ve been testing the sugar content every couple of days. Our plan was to wait at least until Labor Day weekend….but our plans did not work out.
A huge flock of migrating black birds attacked our grape vines this morning – Jeff thinks there were thousands of them, he said they were sitting on the telephone wires as far as the eye could see, and every tree was full of them as well. They pretty much demolished our grapes…probably ate 2/3 of what we had.
So this evening, Jens came over and we picked the remaining grape clusters. We used our (sterilized) apple cider press to crush the grapes and then we manually “destemmed” them. We still ended up with about 17 gallons of “must”, which we will be fermenting. The juice tasted great through, just a bit tart, but very flavorful and fruity.
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| Everyone used buckets |
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| Got everything ready first |
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| Crushing grapes |
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| Buckets were dumped into tubs |
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| Destemming close-up |
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| Team destemming |
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| Final (twilight) clean-up |
