Vine Down: Lessons Can Be Learned

It is always a hazardous thing to bring a wheeled line trimmer into the vineyard to get rid of weeds under the vine and I unfortunately, brought down a healthy looking vine in row 14. In minutes, the leaves appeared to lose turgor pressure and seemed to shrivel up. The next day, the vine looked totally desiccated, in other words, brown and dead.
We took this opportunity to carefully dig the plant up to inspect the root system. The soil appeared to be only moderately moist. The last soaking rain that we had was on July 15th and 16th and that amounted to approximately 1/2-inch. The root system was still in the orientation that the laser planter had placed them in, when the vines were being planted in the trench. There were a few signs of new root growth.

Our realization is that the problem with our dead vineyard goes deep, as in soil deep, but one of the components that can help growth of a young vine is...water. Last year, after planting our vines in late May, we had a deluge of rain from tropical storm Andrea on June 6th and then just spotty rain until August 9th! This is in an area that expects to get an average of 4-inches of rain a month. One of the things that we need is a well and irrigation. (Stay tuned for this blog post.) In order to get the irrigation part correctly implemented, we need to get our line posts and trellis wire in. We now feel that the trellis is key, may even trump laser planting. So, do we get all the trellis material in the ground and then hand plant? That is the question we're grappling with these days.