Bird Damage and Wedding Bags in the Vineyard

While we were busy with putting in the irrigation, there were things that got pushed down the list of thing to do, such as cluster counting. Cluster counting is not an onerous thing, it just needs to get done. Our friend Mary, came by on August 2 so that we could have some idea of how much netting we needed to order. Last year, we had our first, very small crop of grapes and we ordered a netting called tightlock, from our supplier. It worked perfectly to keep out even little insects.

So, after Mary counted all of the grape clusters that she could see, my husband called our supplier to order the netting. We then got some very bad news, our supplier was all out of tightlock netting. We should not be surprised since this type of order should really be placed much earlier than the middle of August. We were in a quandry, what to do, what to do. Then, we remembered that on one of the forums that my husband belongs to, there is a grape grower in Japan who bags all of their grapes. We decided that we could do that for our grapes as well, so my husband went on line to check out how much these bags would cost. It was little cost prohibitive for the 1000 or so clusters that we have. Ever the resourceful person, my husband looked up wedding organza bags and we decided to go with wedding bags in the vineyard.
We ordered 1000 wedding organze bags about 10 days ago. Our son was here this weekend so we put him to work.

Most of our Chenin blanc are around 8 ^oBrix or so. But some of our Chenin blanc grapes are at 16 ^oBrix! It's a little early this year, compared to last year when we saw turkeys eating our grapes, this year, we are seeing bird damage. With our son's help, we were able to bag almost half of the Chenin blanc grape clusters.

Irrigation Manifold Assembly

At the same time that Tony and his crew were installing the pump and motor, my husband was busy assembling the irrigation manifold.

My husband made the assembly in three sections so that each section weighed approximately the same amount and will make it easier when it comes time to disassemble the system for storage during the winter. I'll walk you through the system beginning on the lower right hand side of the above picture.
First is the well and the blowout pipe on the ground. The wire that you also see in the picture below is for the pressure sensor:

On the scaffold, the first section of the irrigation assembly consists of the following:

The Y-strainer and a backflow preventer come next in the assembly.

The third section consists of the following two pictures. The disc filter and the continuous air vent:

With the manifold assembled, we are ready for the water!

Irrigation: More Things To Do

Tony and his team came to put the pump and motor into the well, so it was our turn to get busy putting in the irrigation lines. The first thing that needed to be done was to mark the line posts to indicate where the wire must be secured. Then, the wire had to be paid out and secured with the clip as shown on the photo at the right. After those two things happened, the hose could then be placed on the wire with plastic "curls", and with a nod to the (winter) Olympics, in a task that we called "curling".
Then, my husband married the flexible riser hose with the irrigation hose using a permalock valve.

When all was said and done, we had 7 irrigation zones.

As soon as we had a zone completed, we activated the irrigation and have been doing rotations since July 23rd when we started with Zone 6 and 7, our eastern most zones comprised of Chardonnay clones 76 and 96 and the red varieites, Cabernet sauvignon clone 412 and Cabernet franc clones 214 and 327.
Phew!

Rain!

It has been more than 10 weeks since the last time that we recorded an inch of rain. We have watched with hope as rain systems made it's way across Connecticut, only to be disappointed as the gray clouds parted and the sun shown through right as the rain bearing system approached our vineyard.
We were not to be denied on August 10 and August 11th, we had a continual rainfall that accumulated to about 1-1/4 inches!

Here is the rainfall that we have been having to date:

DATE	AMOUNT of RAINFALL
May 30	1 inch
July 29	1/2 inch
August 1	1/4 inch
August 10-11	1-1/4 inch
August 22	1-1/4 inch
September 6	1/2 inch
September 19	1-3/4 inch
October 22	2 inches
October 30	3 inches