Canopy management

Field trip!  Vineyard post.  There are some very exciting moments in vineyard life.  I’m not sure that this would qualify as one of them.  I have been doing what I am going to call “canopy management” for lack of a better term.  It’s taming wild vines – making order of chaos.

(photo 1) – The vine – this is a syrah – is on its trellis but it is doing pretty much what it wants – shoots everywhere .. it’s a mess.  Syran is known for needing help holding up its canes, hence the trellis, but it needs me too.  I come along and pull the shoots back in the retaining wires and hop! (as they say here) it becomes photo 2.

(photo 2) – This tidy little vine has had all of its long shoots put neatly back inside the trellis wires.   It also means that in a few weeks if I left this poor syrah looking like photo 1 the tractor would break those shoots off driving down the row.   In photo 2 we keep all the leaves to ripen the grapes with no tractor breakage.

Such a deal, I know.  When I was doing it it made me think of trying to get Lili’s hair into a pony tail (Lili age 5).  In the vineyard the shoots sometimes break, which is not fun, but at least the vine never gets mad and says, “Mom, you’re hurting me!”