Vineyard Floor Management

I came across an article in my email feed that interested me regarding vineyard floor management. For the past few years, my husband and I have taken a no till approach to our vineyard floor. The vineyard floor is divided into that region where the vines are growing called the row and that region between the rows which my husband and I refer to as the alley.
The article lists the following benefits of planting dormant-season cover crops in the alleys:

• minimize runoff from winter rains
• protect soil from nutrient and sediment loss in winter storms
• suppress weeds
• harbor beneficial arthropods
• enhance vine mineral nutrition
• increase soil organic matter

Knowing the benefits of planting a cover crop, we did that in every other vineyard alley as well as the perimeter of our vineyard in 2013. In the rows not planted with a cover crop, we put in grass seeds. To this day, my husband says that he knows which rows had grass seeds and which rows had a cover crop.
The following photo shows the vineyard as it looked in the spring of 2014 compared to this year, spring, 2022. The photo shows the west side of the vineyard looking from south to north.

Here is what the article says are the benefits of putting in a cover crop:

• the clear benefits of cover crops were increased organic matter in the alleys and reduced sediment loss
• microbial biomass was increased in cover-cropped middles and there were indications that this effect extended to under the vines
• the benefits of cover crops are concentrated in the alleys where they were planted, but this benefit must be balanced with the compaction observed over time by the use of cultivation

In writing this blogpost, I found a blogpost that I wrote in November, 2013 called Methods of Seeding a Cover Crop, which brought a smile to our faces as the video shows the raw state of the vineyard at that time.

References:
1. Richard Smith, Larry Bettiga, Michael Cahn, Kendra Baumgartner, Louise E. Jackson and Tiffany Bensen, "Vineyard loor management affects soil, plant nutrition, and grape yield and quality", California Agriculture, Volume฀62,฀Number฀4.