pruning day two at the annex vineyard

Thursday, February 22, 2007

Today was gorgeous outside, but very very windy. When I got to the vineyard, Cliff had already completed pruning the second row, so I picked up all the vines he had discarded along the row and took them over to the brush pile until I caught up with him starting on the next row. I helped trim the excess vines too, but mostly just picked up and carted away all the trimmings that he was dropping as he stood on the ladder and did the main pruning. The wind was strong enough to knock the wheelbarrow over a few times and I got scratches on my arms from carrying twigs, but other than that it was rather rhythmic and pleasing work (for a short while anyway). We took a small break around 3:30 and walked around the SBC garden fence making sure that the electrical wiring wasn’t being short-circuited? somewhere by making sure the hot wires were clear of debree/metal meshing. Then we continued pruning. Some of the vines were rather mangled from the previous year when Cliff had just hacked the vines off with a power hedge trimmer to prune them, (since, unlike CZ, the annex vineyard is mostly left to its own growing devices, so he could get away with that). We stopped after four hours, but we still had a few rows left to do. Our brush pile is getting rather large.