Hummingbirds come on out!

It's long before harvest, which is when you have to worry about birds eating all your ripening grapes, but I've read in several places (including this Clos LaChance press release) that attracting hummingbirds to a garden will keep other birds away, given their territorial nature. True?

So, knowing that once you start you can't abandon the poor hummers, we decided to go for it and attract some the vineyard by putting out hummingbird feeders - and, in the longer-term, hope some of our hummingbird-attracting California native plants take off.

It took a few weeks, but today it looks like they're downing 8 oz/week from the feeder. I'm guessing when push comes to shove, the tasty scent of mature grapes will overpower the hummingbirds' territory, but it's a fun experiment.

Today I also sprayed the vines - 1.5% Stylet Oil solution pretty thoroughly given that there's a good amount of space opened up in the canopy AND temps have been in the ideal PM range (80s).

Water Log

The vines are growing like crazy, but some of the grape clusters look like they're drying up too much, so I watered for about 4 hrs today. Here's what we're looking like:

Leaf Pulling

We noticed that fruit on the vines is starting to set, so realized it's time to pull leaves from around the clusters. So, we had our first annual leaf-pulling party. Friends not afraid of a bit of farmwork with sturdy boots head out and pulled all the lateral shoots under the fruit zone, AND the leaves around the clusters such that they'll be able to grow trouble-free and with 'dappled sunlight'.

Here's a video from Wine Spectator that provides an example of leaf pulling - this is WAY more aggressive than what we did, given the latest research and our location, but provides a cute overview.

It ended up being very hot out, so we pulled late (7-8p), and enjoyed snacks before and dinner afterwards. All with local wine we selected the weeks before at the Santa Cruz Mountains Vintner's Festival.

A use for grape leaves

Yep, that's my mom! We harvested, washed, and par-boiled those Cabernet leaves; then Mom made some incredibly yummy rice & spice filling, and rolled 'em up.

Homemade Dolma!

Seems like THE perfect appetizer for the leaf-pulling party later today.

Lab Results!

Today I got the lab results back from the vineyard's petiole analysis. Yeay! Most minerals were within a normal range, but zinc, iron, and boron registered a little low (and magnanese, magnesium, and copper to a lesser extent). Zinc is the one that I should have sprayed before fruit set.

So, given that fruit is setting now, today I sprayed them with their normal dose of Stylet Oil along with a Zinc & Iron supplement (which can be applied in their water or foliar spray).

Little Brown Spots

These little burnt/brown spots showed up on the leaves this week; my best guess is that it's where the Kaligreen went on a bit too thick, or undissolved, as it comes and goes throughout the vineyard. I'll continue to monitor of course.

Watered today - 5 hrs. A few of those flowers are starting to shatter and turn into mini grape clusters. Yeay!

It's June

It's June 1, and the vines are still growing and looking pretty healthy! This weekend I sprayed a 1.5% solution of Kaligreen, in case varying our organic sprays makes a difference (both Kaligreen and Stylet Oil are contact fungicides, but work in slightly different ways). I watered only a little bit (2 hrs); because the vines look plenty vigorous.