Chronicles of the Long Shot Farm

Grape

Planting Corn and Trimming Grapes

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Now that the wedding weekend is done, it’s time to get caught up with our garden and grapes.  Jeff and Duff installed the second level of catch wires for the Chambourcin grapes earlier in the week, and started trimming and thinning the grapes.  We finished the last row this evening.

Earlier today, Jeff picked up more fertilizer (at the Cumberland Valley Co-op), and planted our first “batch” of corn – 5 rows of Spring Snow, an early sweet corn with only 65 days to maturation and as the name implies, it is a white corn.  Funny thing is that this variety was not sold by weight, but by the number of seeds – we bought 5000 seeds and used straight 10-10-10 fertilizer (about 100 lbs of fertilizer for this section of ground).  He also planted 3 full rows and the short rows behind the pea patch with “Incredible” corn.

Installing Drip Irrigation

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Those six rows of new grapes are actually pretty long!  About 500 feet, or 150 meters each.  This evening we drug two drip irrigation lines and connected them to the main feeder line, and then just had enough time to  install the emitters for the top row.  Every one of them is working and the irrigation is running right now, we’ll probably leave it on for 4 hours this evening yet.

Finished planting 500 Vidal Blanc vines

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It took a little longer than anticipated, but we finally managed to plant all 500 vidal blanc vines.   I checked the almanac just for fun, and this actually was listed as a good day for planting vines!
Right now, they are just little brown sticks in the ground – but with buds – and they all had very nice root systems.  Next we will need to run the irrigation hoses, add emitters and install the trellis system.  Seems like planting the vines was the easy part…

Weekend Brings Showers

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After planting over 250 grapevines on Friday, Saturday brought saturating rains…no chance for working in the garden at all.   Luckily we had another type of “shower” planned for that afternoon – Gracie’s surprise bridal shower, which sure made up for all the rain!

It took until late Sunday afternoon that the ground was ok enough to start planting more vines – got another 60 in the ground, then it got too dark.  About 200 more to go (the root stocks are safe in a trench, soaked, and covered with peat moss and soil).

Deer Repellent for Fruit Trees and Grapes

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Bought 3 yards of netting today (the kind you would make little girl’s ballerina skirts out of) – in a drab brown color.  It was 50% off, so I think the cost was 75 cents a yard.  I doubled up the fabric and started sewing strips together, just wide enough for the bars of soap we have been collecting. Most of the soap came from Zach, who travels the most 🙂   I cut each 3 yard strip into 6 pieces and then inserted the soap. This made a total of 48 “bags” for the soap.   Tomorrow, I will tie one bag on each fruit tree, and space them out along the grape trellises.  Not sure how many more I need, but I think this might work.