Our Vineyard, Next Steps

Now that we have been so fortunate to be able to have Steve laser plant our vineyard, our thoughts are turning to pencil rods, line posts, H-braces and gripples. We have been trying to keep the vineyard free of "chemicals", which means shying away from chromated copper arsenate treated posts, otherwise known as pressure treated wood. So, my husband took a trip to Barkhamstead to meet with Peter Hart to check out his black locust, Robinia pseudoacacia. The advantage of using black locust is that it is a very hard wood and it will basically last in the vineyard forever. It's a little difficult to work with (we have heard) because it is as hard as concrete. The other advantage is that black locust is basically an invasive specie in Connecticut. We've already been to look at black locust, about a year ago, but at that time, we were discouraged that the posts cost so much and they were very crooked. So, we're trying again.

We may have better luck this time because instead of using black locust throughout the vineyard, we only want to use it for the H-brace endpost. We will have 36 rows, that means at most 216 black locust posts.