Our major task as we head towards harvest is to keep our grapes as clean as humanly possible. One thing that is going to help us this year is that we changed all of our netting wire from fixed to moveable.
I blogged about why we went to a moveable netting wire in
A Tale of Two Net Positions in June of this year.
When we had our netting on the fixed wire, while we could bring the netting around our fruit zone, we could not really close the netting around the trunk of our vines. Now with our moveable wire, we were able to bring the netting lower so that we can cinch our clothes pins around the trunk of the vines like so:
What does this do for us? In our previous netting position, the gap around the trunk of the vine was large enough so that birds, especially our Baltimore Orioles could get in and then peck away at the fruit. This is bad news. The open wound on the ripening grape is a call signal for yellow jackets followed by fruit flies. With the net close to the trunk the gap is closed and hopefully no birds can fly into the netting. Our hope is that the bird pecking will cease and the yellow jackets can more elsewhere for sustenance.
This is how our happy, netted grapes look:
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