We seemed to have turned the corner on winter! This coming week the temperatures will be in the high 50's so it is time to get out to the vineyard to prune our vines. Although we planted 6800 vines in 2013, when budbreak came in 2014, we learned that approximately 500 vines survived, or less than 90%. (You can read this blogpost about our
Lessons at the School of Hard Knocks.)
During the summer of 2014, we took care of the hardy survivors and a recent test cut of a side shoot and a close but cursory inspection of some of our buds and shoots gave us some hope that even though the winter was brutal and the snow lasted seemingly forever, we will have a cohort of hardy 2 year old vines to take care of.
There are a number of dormant pruning presentations on the Internet that we consulted that provide some excellent information on why proper pruning is important:
We went to the land on Sunday morning and using the chart below, we worked our way through the 36 rows of vines, pruning the survivors that we had tagged in the fall.
It took us about 5 hours to go through all of the vines. We tried to leave a renewal spur below the cane that we pruned, as suggested, although in some cases, this was not possible. Most of the canes that we pruned showed a green interior and the sap was running, so we took this to be good signs of survival.
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