Snow is all but gone in the fields by the last week in March, very similar to spring 2016. usual trellis work starts, repairing winter damage, upgrading trellising, wires etc. Awesome time of year, as the vineyard and everything around it satrts to come to life..bees and butterflys aready out and about, a few frogs noticed here and there and so early in the season the sky so blue with no smoke.
Typical for this year we are continuing the switch out of the original treated wooden posts for metals posts and earth anchors. Remarkable that several of the treated posted brok off about 6" below the ground level as we worked them back and forth to get them out of the ground.
We have noticed that alot on the wooden posts out here..just how easily they get to rottinging despite the so-called treating they received. We started noticing that in the original test vineayrd that after about 6-7 years the posts were breaking off at ground level.
So we have moved to metal posts and notwithstanding rusting, they should survive for decades vs the wooden posts. Likewise the earth anchors should have a similar life.
The vines were not budding yet, so we don't as yet have a great guage on the survival rate of the buds on the vines but in all the commercial varieties we cut into the canes were good for the most part. We did som bud cross sectional cutting to see how some made out and every one we cut into was good on all varieties. Thats not a to say there is no bud death but the few we looked at were good.
Adding a bit of Calcium/Magnesium as we spotted areas with vines that that showed deficient last year... typical for sandy soil.
Pruning will start at the end of April as we'll have a better idea of how the vines look at that time and we are going to leave extra bud count in the even of primary bud daamage.
