After Jeff, Bill, Barry and my husband finished tiling the field, we paused and said, "Oh, what a beautiful field this is!" And then came the realization that we were going to have to find a way to plant 6804 grapevines that we had ordered from Mercier, CA. I proposed to my husband that we send out an SOS (Facebook, I was thinking) for 6804 people to come and join us in planting our vineyard. Wouldn't it be neat to have 6804 people, each with one vine, shovel in hand and at the signal, start digging and then plant the vine. I had visions of YouTube video going viral. One minute, nothing, the next minute an entire vineyard! My husband quickly brought me back to reality by asking me questions like, "How are 6804 people coming up to our land? Do you know how much one shovel costs, let's say it was $20.00, we would be spending $136,080.00 to plant the field." Okay, back to the drawing board.
We really had our hearts set on getting some one to laser plant our vines but because of the unusualness of the tall grafts, it wasn't something that is normally planted by vineyard managers, let alone people with laser-guided planters! We talked with Steve Mudd on Long Island and he said to have Mercier ship 6 plants and he'll try it with his device. Mercier sent the 6 vines to Steve and when Steve received them, he mentioned how healthy the roots were and how well the graft union looked. We were happy! Happier still, Steve mentioned that his planter could handle the tall grafts. So, on Tuesday, March 26th, Steve was in our area and came to visit us on our land. Steve said the land looks good. It is a good thing to be on a hill because cold air is like water and runs to the lowest point.
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