Pruning

I haven't really written a lot about pruning this year, but it has been going on. We're already done with Crimson Clover, Home, the Church, and almost finished with Chaine d'Or. We still have Split Rail and a couple of smaller vineyards to get done, but we think we can finish those soon.

The pictures below are actually out of order. You can tell by the fact that there is fog in the last one and then it's gone in the first one.

This is from a small vineyard in Los Altos that we pruned on Monday. The picture below is the finished vineyard. About 225 Syrah vines in total. The vines are young and just now being trained with Cordon's and spurs.


Below Stefania and I had just arrived and she was inspecting the vineyard. The little section she is in has a lot of dead plants and we're going to ask the homeowner to get the soil tested this year. The problem area is in a swallow from the home in the background. It looks like something is draining down that hill from the house above and into the swallow and killing the plants.


It could be a chemical that's decades old, maybe even something left over from the original construction. It may also be something as simple as a weed and feed fertilizer that they are using on their lawn and that is running off through the vineyard. In any case we won't know if it's a chemical problem until we test.

The total number of plants effected is small, just about 20, but we'd still like to find out what is going on as the rest of the vineyard looks really good.