Vine transplanting

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Today I got nice and muddy. We did some transplanting of vines this time, digging holes and placing the young roots in them. We dug them up out of the nursery area in the garden where Cliff had planted them. We tried to keep as much of their roots in tact as we could, which was surprisingly difficult as many of their root systems were just as big if not bigger than the vine twig itself! We took several different varieties of vines bundling them up in batches of ten or so or each with labelled pink tape and stored them in buckets full of water (to keep their roots from drying out). Then we carted them up to the vineyard where we planted them among the rows, replacing old/dead vines and filling out a few empty spaces along the wires on the right side. Cliff did most of the digging, which I planted them, so it went by pretty quickly (even though we had to stop for a coffee break in the middle, since I needed the extra energy boost!). The vines were actually much easier to transplant than the trees had been since we didn’t need to dig quite as deep holes. As long as they were deep enough for the main roots to reach down and we didn’t bury the feeder roots too deep, we were good to go!