Tag: Canopy Management
Canopy Management, Part II
Here’s some pictures from the weekend class at DuCard Vineyard, thanks to classmate Margaret Frazier, who I have no doubt will one day soon be producing very high quality Virginia wines.
This is the hedger used to trim the tops of the vines in the lyre trellis. It's a bit hard to tell, but the arm of the hedger has whirling blades on both sides, which cuts one arm of the vines.
- Another shot of the hedger
After gaining some confidence, I was able to thin the canopy pretty quickly.
Viognier vines at DuCard after the canopy was thinned. A thing of beauty.
Canopy Management (And Other People’s Vines)
There's something quite liberating about working on someone else's vines.
Through a class at Piedmont Virginia Community College, we've worked on vines at DuCard Vineyeards now on five separate occasions, starting with dormant winter pruning in late winter and moving on through various stages of the vine's annual growth. On each occassion, I started off, as did many of my classmates, staring at a vine, certain that I was about to ruin it, if not forever, than surely for the season, perhaps costing DuCard a small but meaningful share of its harvest.
Most often, I wanted for DuCard's ever-patient owner, Scot Elliff, or his equally patient vineyard manager, Julien Durantie, to show me just one more time how to do whatever it was that we were expected to do that day. At some point, I would begin working on my own, tentatively at first, but with increasing confidence until at some point, I thought myself almost ready to work without supervision. Continue Reading–>
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