Chronicles of the Long Shot Farm

Vineyard

Repairing Old Trellis

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Now that spring planting of vines is complete, we have moved on to repairing the trellis.  Some of our earliest vineyards were built with wooden posts.  Unfortunately these older posts are collapsing under the weight of the mature vines.  We have been replacing the old posts with metal orchard posts.  These have a much longer lifespan and will hold up to the crushing weight of the fruitful vines.  To install the metal posts we use a Skidril.  This tool is like a jackhammer.  It slides over the top of the 8 foot post and hammers it into the ground.  One person holds the post while another stands on the tractor bucket with the drill.  It is a hot and sweaty job.  If only they had a cup holder on the old tractor.

Cleaning Tree Tubes

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In our vineyards we use tree tubes to protect the vines from wandering deer.  Once the vines reach the top of the trellis they are safer.  Last month we cleaned out some old tree tubes with a hot water pressure washer.  We set the temperature to about 150 degrees and used a sewer nozzle.  The nozzle had one jet of water shooting out the front and five angled backwards.  The pressure washer tip and nozzle were then attached to a saw horse.

Rachel slid the old tree tubes over the nozzle which blew out all of the dirt, dead leaves, and spiders.  It was a wet and messy job but it will be great to reuse 300 tree tubes on the Pinots, Cabs, and Corot Noirs!

Dear Deer

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Dear Deer,

You are so majestic, graceful, and sometimes tasty, but your insatiable appetite for delicate grape vine flesh leaves me heartbroken.  Year after year we tend our field, prune our grapes, shower them with care and love and still they don’t all grow.  The perimeter of our vineyards, exposed to your vicious, nibbling, mouth, is trimmed to sad bushy plants, never reaching their potential.  But no more!  This year we thwart your malevolent habits with tree tubes.

Clad in workwear, mallet in hand, we heroically pounded hundreds of 4 foot stakes into the ground and attached the tubes to the stakes, protecting the young and tender vines. These young knights, protected in armor, will someday reach the top of the trellis and produce a worthy harvest, despite your constant assault.  Beware wandering deer, your feasting days are numbered.

Best wishes, until we meet this fall…

 

Posted by Anja Weyant

Irrigating Traminettes

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Last fall we had a well drilled near the Traminette patch. This area has been hit hard twice by drought: the first was the year they were first planted and the second time was this past summer. We should have had our first substantial harvest from these vines. Instead the drought stressed the plants and our Traminette harvest fell sadly short of expectations. So we decided it was high time to make sure this doesn’t happen again.

Fortunately there is plenty of water underneath this area of the vineyard and drilling a well was straight forward. Now we are left with the task of getting the water from the well to each plant. We decided to suspend the irrigation line along the bottom wire of the trellis and put an emitter at each plant.  The emitter controls the flow of water at each vine. We suspended the line to prevent rodents from chewing through it and also to simplify servicing and trouble shooting the line.

Hanging the hose was a fun task, and all the Neill children were excited to participate. Lars and Duff held the roll of irrigation hose and Freyja and Leif took turns running down each row.

 

Then we slowly went down the row and attached the line to the wire with little curly-q’s.   The final task is to run a line from the well to the end of each Traminette row.  The line will need to be buried at places so the tractor can get through. But digging is not a winter job, so this is for our next visit.

Posted by Anja Weyant

Harvest 2019

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It’s near the end of October and our 2019 grape harvest is done!  This year was so much better than the rainy mess we had in 2018. We harvested 13.5 tons of grapes at the Long Shot Farm, and Zach and Rachel harvested an additional 1.5 tons at Ripplebrook Vineyard.  We had lots of help from our family and friends as we hand-picked 30,000 lbs of grapes!

We harvested the following grape varieties in 2019:

  • Chambourcin
  • Chardonel
  • Concord
  • Corot Noir
  • Niagara
  • Traminette
  • Vidal Blanc

Check out our harvest season video

   Posted by The Long Shot Farm