Wednesday, February 02, 2011

My Mineral Hill Pictures

This is the picture Stefania was talking about. Bruce the vineyard dog and chaser of rabbits and small fury creatures with some of the rock types we pulled out of the post holes. The first one is a light volcanic pebble. Then some sandstone. Rare on this side of the mountains, and new and brittle. Then an assortment of quartz and serpentine rocks. The last one is a red jasper stone.


We also found an ancient creek bed with well worn river rock. The largest we had to pull out was about 40 pounds. The holes went down 3 feet. Below Jerry and Gil check to make sure the posts are lined up.


Gil had used a two man post hole drill before so he and I quickly had Jerry trained. I was glad though to have them doing it and avoid the wear on my shoulder.


There's a little trick to doing it. You have to drill down about a foot, then pull back out so the dirt doesn't weigh down the drill too much. I was cleaning the sides of the holes and then digging out the bottoms with a hand tool.


In about half the holes we hit either roots or large rocks that have to be dug out by hand. For that we use a cement breaker and shovel. Jerry is going back on Thursday to finish up and I'll try and check on him in the afternoon.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Looks like an interesting vineyard. What varieties will you be planting?

Paul Romero said...

We're putting in a few table grapes at the bottom of the vineyard and the rest will be planted with Mourvedre.