It takes a lot of helpers to keep that work going.

But it is nice to take a little break from it all.

There was quite a crowd on Sunday at the New Grower Session. AgriLife viticulture advisors, Enology Extension Program Specialists, TWGGA staff, and TWGGA members shared their expertise and thoughts. It was a really informative day. Today for the advanced grower session it looks to be even better. Even you ever want to put a vineyard in, or improve your vineyard, this is where you need to be. Lots of information floating around.

There is also equipment to look at. This is a pre-pruner like the one we have at home. I have pictures ready to show you, but I haven’t had the time to finish up that post because – well we were really busy running that machine. In a year like last year, we really needed it to get over the acres. Hand pruning still needs to follow this machine, but it does a great start.

And there were lots of venders showing and telling about their wares. A lot of people just talking and learning among themselves

Then the catered lunch was wonderful, as pretty as it tasted. And it all tasted delicious. It was prepared by My Own Chef. Really, — well, actually that is the name of the caterer. But they were so nice that I felt like they were my own chef. I’ll have to come back with an update from lunch today. There here again, hooray!

Dinner was a BBQ dinner done by as a real Texas chuck wagon.

They looked like real cowboys to me.

Nice brisket & sausage.

The whole set up was nostalgic and pretty!

And the food was delicious!

I had better get back to listening to more speakers now. More later.

Blessings,

Betty

Now these little plants need something to guide their growth and give them strength as they grow. So, we put in a trellis system to accomplish this.

You start with lots of supplies. T-posts, bamboo poles, wire, and I’m sure there is a little gray green tape in there somewhere.

We (I just love that word; since you guys know I don’t really do anything except take the pictures.) start with metal t-posts. Some people originally did this with a post hole digger. The High Plains growers over the past twenty years realized that there must be a easier better way to accomplish this. Hence, the evolution of the t-post driver implement.

Once again GPS is the great enabler. The original plants were put in with GPS to keep them in straight lines. This picture is taken from a cross angle of the row. If the picture were taken in line with the row, the plants would look straighter. The plants in line with the row are put into a furrow that was dug with a GPS driven planter, but the cross angle shot shows the human effort of putting the plant in the ground while riding on a moving plow which leaves a little room for unevenness. (You can read about the planting plow here.)Now we again use GPS to put the t-posts in line.

Here we are again with the t-post driver. We have two guys riding on the implement each with a pile of t-posts riding next to them.

They take a post and place it under the hydraulic cylinder in the spot that it needs to go and the cylinder pushes the t-post into the ground. You do end up with a few bent post, but it is a whole lot easier than with a shovel. You only have a bent t-post when you hit shallow rock which is why they have a hard time using one in the Hill Country of Texas.

My Honey told me not to use this shot because it is so unusual to see a piece of t-tape (irrigation tubing) above ground since we put all of ours below ground. Also the t-tape is put in between the rows approximately 4″ away from the t-posts. I think is was just a random piece of “trash” left out on the ground. Hey, guys, remember to pick up your trash. So just ignore the piece of t-tape there, OK.

There we have our nice row of T-posts with a little t-tape trash laying around.

Looks a little like we are planting “metal” instead of grape plants, a little barren, but it is just part of the process.

Sometimes we put tubes or just milk cartons around the little plants to give them a little protection for the wilds of West Texas as they get started.

Then the vineyards look like this. I like them better when they are filled with organic milk cartons, but sometimes you can’t be choosy when looking for unused, rejected milk cartons to buy. So I’ll just make sure all the milk cartons in our “refrigerator” are organic milk cartons.

Here you can also see the bamboo poles stuck into the ground between each t-post and some of the trellis wire hung between the t-posts.

Wait a minute. Do we really put those milk cartons on to protect the little plants from the High Plains weather, or from the little Binghams checking out the fields?

Blessings,

Betty

Here is the vineyard. (Or rather how the vineyard looked on April 9^th.) Of course this was before the buckets of rain that we had in the spring and the tub loads of rain that we got last weekend. In fact today, I took pictures of the hedger running. The hedger takes off the excess canopy of leaves and vines when they get to thick. Here the vines looked a little scraggly and bare, but that’s the way we wanted it to look till we were sure that we were past the last freeze of the year.

This year we had our last freeze on April 8^th. Our goal was to not have a lot of buds get frozen by a late freeze and thus lose a crop. Most of our vine had bud break between April 8^th and approximately April 20^th, some even later than that.

Buds are what we are looking for in the spring. Not quite sure how to get the best close-up shots of buds.

This is how most of our vines and buds were looking about the 9^th of April.

Every once in a while you come across buds that are more developed like these.

So now is the time that we need to be finishing up our pre-pruning which is getting rid of the old growth that we don’t want on the vines in order to encourage the new growth that we do want. So bring on the pre-pruner.

The pre-pruner comes along and cuts off the long scraggly pieces that would just be a burden and not productive areas to grow grapes.

Notice how close the big blue cutting barrels are to each other on both sides of the tractor.

Then the beauty of this machine is that you can spread those cutters apart in order to stop cutting and move around hard metal objects like the yellow end posts that you don’t want to run into.

Then you just close her back up as you pass like the cutter on the right is closing. So how does it know what to do? There is a metal detector that senses the metal and moves the blades apart to miss the metal. Our kids seem to be really interested in any kind of new technology that lessens the work load and has anything mechanical to it.

But this machine does need some human influences. The tractor still has three brains running the whole operation. Although some people wonder if my kids have many brains at all, but I guess they have enough to get by. For this operation you need a tractor driver and two brains behind on the pre-pruner to work the claws. Even though the metal detector senses when a metal pole is coming up, the humans need to set the speed to keep thing moving along at the right speed.

Once more in case you missed it, we’ll try it from a little different angle. You start with this kind of scraggly mess.

Hmmm, I don’t really, really think that he will run his mother over, but who knows. Let’s see.

See how the cutters are close together.

Now the cutters are separating in order to get around a t-post.

And closing back again.

Opening around the post.

And closing up again.

See the t-posts that the machine is trying to miss.

Going around a t-post there.

Cutting away again. Wait a minute, someone is yelling for them to stop.

Hmmm, the cutters cut a wire from the trellis system. That has to be fixed.

The guys try to avoid the wires that you see at the bottom of the barrels, but as you just saw sometime it doesn’t work out too smoothly.

Woops, this time they caught a t-post. Let’s take a closer look.

Yep, pulled that t-post right out of the ground.

Hmmm, time to get it all untangled and put back in the ground where it needs to be.

After a row is done, the ends of the row look scraggily where the pre-pruner can’t get too close to the end posts without having to open up, but the rest looks good.

Here are some vines that have been pre-pruned.

The barrels can be adjusted to leave different amounts of vine tips.

Now the vines are ready for that personal human touch where our workers go through the fields and finish off pruning each vine by hand.

And then we put a few hearts into the ground, since we try to put a little love in everything we do.

Blessings, Betty