Monday, April 04, 2011

Bud Break at the Home Vineyard

I've been having some terrible issues getting pictures off of my Samsung Fascinate so I've been slow on putting blogs up. Verizon and Samsung like to send out updates to the phone regularly. Here's a picture of the Engineering and QA teams at Verizon and Samsung preparing for their next update.

So basically every updates totally and completely breaks picture transfer and it takes hours to sort it back out. With that little rant out of the way, here's some happier thoughts.

We've had bud break in all the vineyards now and as usual the home 'Haut Tubee' vineyard led the way. This is a Thompson Seedless vine in the front parkway. One of our neighbors asked us if we would plant some table grapes so we did.


This is one of the remaining 'old boys' from the original planting. This is a Grenache. That's Italian Parsley growing around it. Stefania planted all kinds of herbs and flowers around the vines. We've been using the parsley a lot and I actually discovered that the stalks get pretty thick and if you peel them they are a good addition to stews.


This is a Mourvedre vine with some California Poppy's in the foreground. This little plant will send runners down the line this year that will become cordons. The plants in the background are a mix of Crimson Clover and wildflowers. It will be another two weeks or so for the colors to really start coming out.

Here's a more mature vine closer to the house and some Crimson Clover that's already started to bloom. This plant will send out the start of spurs this year and should produce about 10 pounds of fruit.


This is one of the 'old boys' in the backyard that we've retrained to cordon and spur training. I used this particular plant in past blogs about pruning and thought I'd give an update on how it looks this year.

Another one of the 'old boys' in the backyard sending up two new shoots from its spur. This little growth here will eventually produce four clusters of grapes that will weigh in at about 6 pounds. Everything in the backyard now is Syrah.

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