some grub growing&dissection, and pruning day one at the annex

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Today I went to the Amherst Mill to pick up a handful of some red clover, rye grass and blue grass, which I brought back to the train station where we mixed it into some vineyard soil and put it in an antfarm as food for some june bug grubs that Cliff had found. We also added some store-bought milky spore powder (0.02% vol) to the mix to watch them crawl around and try to see if they get infected (hopefully) and what happens when they do (yay for more dissection), how long it takes, ect. Then Cliff took three of them that looked pretty down/diseased already to dissect under the microscope. It was revolting and kinda cool at the same time. Then we checked out their fat bodies under a stronger microscope hooked up to the computer.
Next we headed out to SBC garden where we did a bit of pruning on the vines in the garden, along the shed/barn wall and on the first row of the annex vineyard. First Cliff killed two vines that he didn’t want anymore by chopping them off at the base, drilling holes into them, and adding RAID in the holes. Then we walked around with the wheelbarrow and our sheers and started hacking away at the vines. Cliff basically cut off the main stems and placing the few essential vines where he wanted them so that they would grow back next year while I tried to remove the thinner excess vines near the top. I was a bit paranoid of cutting the wrong one, but I managed to get into tearing down the tangled twigs after a while. They were really twisted and difficult to untangle from the wires sometimes, but we managed to get through enough vines to make a decent sized brush pile. We still have five rows left though, so I’m going to head back over hopefully to finish them off on Thursday when the weather is supposed to be warmer. Very exciting!
Also, later tonight I did some research on Japanese beetles and milky spore disease while I was doing my laundry. Very fascinating stuff what people have done to gain knowledge that seems so seemingly irrelevant but when all strung together actually is extremely useful.