Our Vineyard Rocks

We are waiting for our trellis supplies to be shipped to us and in the mean time, we have been hoeing and picking up rocks. Dave came to our rescue again by providing us with a dump trailer. So, the first use we made of our narrow Landini was to hook it up to the dump trailer to pick up the rocks in our vineyard. While the width of the Landini is 56-inches wheel to wheel, the dump trailer's width is 68-inches wheel to wheel and this presents a challenge when driving down our 7 foot rows.

On Thursday, the start of our mini heat wave when temperatures were predicted to rise to 90 degrees in inland Connecticut, we went up to our land at 9 a.m. and had a strategy to pick up our rocks. My husband drove the little Landini down one row and we picked up the rocks on either side of that row and the row itself, in effect doing 3 rows in one pass. This was a nice strategy until we filled up the dump trailer with rocks in no time flat. Despite hydrating ourselves every chance we had, by the time 11 a.m. rolled around, we were overheating. We decided that we had to stop and come back in the evening. At 6 p.m., we returned to the land and finished the 3 rows that we started in the morning. 1 days work = 3 rows of rock picking.
We decided on Friday, that we needed to go up to the land even earlier. We got there at 7 a.m. and this time, we hoed the rocks into the middle of the row first, thinking that this would make it easier to pick the rocks up with the dump trailer. My husband went to start the Landini. Click-click-click. Yikes! Was it the alternator? He called Russell who suggested that it might be the battery. Yes, Occam's razor should be applied to farming work, too! When my husband jumped the Landini with his John Deere, it started. He took the battery to get it tested to see if it would hold a charge. It did. So, he looked carefully at the fuses, and it was a fuse!
The photo below on the left hand side shows the rocks in the alleys and on the right hand side, the alleys with the rocks removed. Picking up the rocks will make seeding the vineyard alley easier.
No matter what, the vineyard is rocking our world!