2020 Planting Day

Hopefully, this is our last planting day to repopulate our vineyard that was devastated in 2014. Originally, we laser planted 6800 vines in 2013 but due to a number of factors, we lost 90% of our vines when the spring of 2014 came around. We reordered our vines in 2014 which meant that replanting would be in 2016 because it takes 18 months for a custom grafted vine to be created.
In the meantime, we put in our lineposts and endposts and trellis wire, all things that should either have been put into the vineyard or installed shortly thereafter when planting tall grafted vines.
In 2016, instead of the 6000 vines that we ordered, we received 4200 vines. We replanted vines in 2016, 2017, (had a break in 2018), 2019 and then the last 200 vines this year. Since there were "only" 200 vines to be replanted, our friends came to help us dig the holes. We couldn't have done this without our friends who helped us all along the way. Three nurseries and 6 years later, we are back up to a full vineyard.
This year, we tried something new with the nursery that we are working with. They created the custom graft in January, calloused over the graft union and we are the "nursery field". The live plants were shipped cross country and arrived on Monday. We opened the container and found 200 beautiful, green live plants.

We took one plant out of the crate and planted it:

Our friends came to help us on Tuesday, June 23, at 9 a.m. It was a cloudy, overcast day for most of the morning which was great for planting. The 200 vines spread over 5 rows were planted by noon!
I created this snapshot to summarize when our vineyard replanting occurred with the various varieties:

We still want to verify exactly how many vines are in each row. We will do that later! In the meantime, we want to thank all of our friends who came to help. Many of them said that it's starting to look like a real vineyard!