Our vineyard went from a backyard hobby to a major enterprise in 2004 when I had some logging done to make a sunnier space for more grape plants. I had some soil testing done soon after that but didn’t worry about fertility. After almost 20 years of dithering about getting some baseline numbers and setting… (read more)
Learning the hard way by making mistakes is a tried and true (though often painful) path to knowledge. Looking back on what I have learned, it seems more like a lifestyle. It starts by taking chances. You seldom do that unless you think there is something to gain. I get a lot of ideas from… (read more)
The Grass is Greener With this very wet Spring everything looks especially green. The green color is from chlorophyll, the molecule critical to photosynthesis, which turns sunlight into plant energy, specifically sugars. Looking at the chest-high grass and purple vetch which has taken over the aisles between my rows of grape vines, I had to… (read more)
How Sweet It Is The quest for evidence-based information is ongoing. So are the efforts to dismiss it. As Yuval Noah Harari pointed out, science is based on the admission of ignorance. With science, as soon as you think you know something new, other scientists are going to poke holes in your ideas and try… (read more)
When I was a younger and less knowledgeable gardener I tried starting apple trees by planting seeds. Johnny Apple Seed right?! It didn’t go very well and I asked Larry Geno, who owned Bear Creek Nursery at the time about how to do that. He laughed in my face and proceeded to tell me that… (read more)
The snow has thawed and I have inventoried the grape plants that are for sale. To look at that information, go to Plant Inventory 2022.
This is a busy time in the vineyard. So to avoid writing a long post I have assembled an album. Hope you like it.
It’s the time of radical changes back and forth. High temperatures without rain have persisted since June but now low temperatures and rain have returned as well. The Fall equinox sounds like one of the most even times of the year for the length of the day and night. But that balance is only a… (read more)
It’s raining right now. Through April we had hardly any rain. It was the driest on record. Since the beginning of May, it has been raining every few days or even more often. And so it goes for Spring as a whole, weird. The human side has been very different and except for the rain,… (read more)
This virtual tour is posted since an actual tour scheduled for our Slow Food group on April 19th, 2020 has been cancelled.
