Sexed Semen: It's time to make babies

Alright, the title of this blog grabbed your attention and now I have to explain myself. The fact is that it is that time of year again when I have to think about adding to the herd, and the best way to do it is by applying artificial insemination to my cows. Nine months later: POOF, I have a calf.

Much like people there is a best time of the month to enter the butt end of a cow and place a sperm sample for insemination. So for the last several days I have been walking among the herd and watching the cow's behavior looking for signs that they are entering their heat cycles and will soon be in standing heat. But there is a lot of prep work in order to get to this point which I'll explain in a minute.

I talk to my 93 year old Father once a week, and when I shared with him my activities during the past week, he asked if I thought about this aspect of farming while I was in engineering school 45 years ago. Who would have guessed; I thought about sex, just not animal sex.

I have registered Red Angus cows and heifers. My business plan is to build up a herd of these cattle and eventually offer cuts of meat from them in a cafe associated with the winery. It will be beef that I had total control over, from birth to slaughter, being grass fed without the use of growth hormones, and that meet or exceed the Beef Quality Assurance guidelines. The small herd I have now are the beginnings of my breeding herd, and I am trying to put together good, solid, and healthy stock that have the best EPD's (Expected Progeny Data) that support this endeavor. EPD's are today's answer to the Big T, little t genetic traits we learned about in high school biology. EPD's may include characteristics such as calving ease, feed efficiency, docile mood, weight to carcass ratio, or marbling. There are 12 traits to consider.   In order to get the ones I want, one has to match a cow with a bull that shares these desired traits. You can always buy a prize bull for $20,000 to $30,000, but unfortunately after just a couple of years this bull can no longer be used in the same herd or it will be jacking its daughters. Also, by using a single bull, there is no guarantee you'll get just daughters.....you might get bulls too.

Which brings into the discussion sexed semen. There are dozens and dozens of prize bulls out on the market, each with their own special EPD data that I can use to match with my cows. And once you identify the best bull for breeding, one can purchase sexed semen that provides maybe an 85% chance of it breeding females . This is an important feature for rapidly expanding one's herd: to constantly bring on more females.

So now that I have found the best semen for the desired traits, and then had it shipped to the Vets for nitrogen storage, the next thing to do is to coordinate all the cows to have similar estrogen cycles. Why is this important? For one thing, I don't want to have all my cows cycling at different times. I don't have 30 days to watch over each of them to understand their heat cycles. Also, my Vet needs adhere to a plan too, without knowing when I would need him to perform A.I. would really mess up his schedule. Hey, how often do you hear about a doctor wanting to stimulate a birth so it doesn't get in the way of his golf game on Saturday? Same thing, but here the Vet is involved in the insemination, not the birth. Lastly, knowing that all the calves are going to be born on or about the same day will allow me to monitor the pregnant cows in late September (after harvest) and if there are any complications I can spot them quickly for corrective action. Just a few days ago on Wednesday my Vet came in and gave the 2 cows a shot to stimulate their estrogen cycle; by each of them getting a shot at the same time they both should come into heat within the next 3 to 5 days.

Which brings us up to current events. Twice a day I have been walking back to our pasture and watching cows. The time for activity is generally the first hour of the day (sun up is 7:10 a.m.) or the last hour of the day (3:50 p.m.). I watch the cows eat. I watch the cows drink. I watch the cows chew their cud. I watch the cows nuzzle each other. And I watch the cows......

That's right, female on female. But that's not the point. The bottom cow is in standing heat (i.e. they stand still while they are ridden by another cow, heifer, steer, or bull) and this is the best time to inject them with the bull semen. Unlike mares where there is a 4 - 5 day window to get this done, with cows we only have 12 hours or we lose our window of opportunity. I gave the Vet a call and we scheduled a rendezvous for the next day, Sunday. There is no rest for the wicked.

There is still frost on the ground when the Vet shows up the next morning. I had already done my mandatory chore of getting the four cattle in the pen adjacent to the sweep pen and the squeeze chute. Our first job was to get the two cows that were to be bred into the chute leading to the squeeze pen, and with just a little prodding we were able to get them headed in the right direction. X406 was the first in line, and she was the one observed the previous night in standing heat. My job was to lock the head into position.....no cow with a hand up its butt will stand still on their own and let the Vet perform his duty. A squeeze pen is a necessity to control a 2000 pound animal.

With a glove on his right hand which extends all the way up to his shoulder, the Vet reached in and felt the inner workings of X406. Everything was in place and sized accordingly. He confirmed she was in heat and proceeded to take a straw of semen and insert it into the uterus for dispersal. Wam. Bang. The job was done in just a few minutes. The Vet's arm must have been warm; the cow never put up a fuss.

Now onto X446. This was the other cow that received an estrogen cycle shot but so far had not shown any signs of heat. That was no excuse however to avoid the tender hand of the Vet. After I opened the head gate and allowed X406 to leave and join the 2 heifers who were eating grass within her view, X446 was prodded into the squeeze chute and I proceeded to close the gate to restrain her. She wasn't happy but she recognized her predicament and took it in stride. The Vet then repeated his prior actions, but this time he was exploring more to see what her inner activity was. He concurred she was well into her cycle, but not quite ready. Tomorrow would be the likely day and I should just be vigilant in my observations in order to spot her in standing heat and be ready for her being artificially inseminated.

This story was certainly more than you bargained for. Ah, life on a farm.

UPDATE: X446 was A.I.'d Monday morning, 5 days after her estrogen shot.

Now the big question is whether we were successful or not. Ultrasound can't be performed for 25 days, but before that time the cows may or may not go into their ordinary heat cycle. If I don't see them perform in 21 days, "we" are good to go. January 4th and 5th will be the telling days. If all is well, the new calves will be warming in the sunshine of mid-September.

Signs - Building the Winery: Part 6

As you can conclude from my previous posts, there is more to building a winery than just throwing up some framing and a roof. There are so many things that one must consider beyond the obvious visible aspects of the building. As the winery gets closer to completion (we are still a long ways away), one has to consider other things. One is just making sure you have enough product to sell (more on that later), but the other is to consider the marketing part of the project. Without people coming to the winery, all is lost.

So I took a careful look at all the signage we will need and then began reading the County statutes that apply to putting up signs. There are nine pages specifically dedicated to signs and how they can be installed within the county limits. Nine pages! Recognizing that nothing is smooth sailing within this County, I started to read through these to see where my particular signs fell within the codes.

The regulations began by talking about how the signs shouldn't interfere with the pleasant rural scheme that has unfolded over the last 300 years. I guess that kind of eliminates huge billboards (think: "400 miles to SOUTH of the BORDER"), which I don't have. Whew !

As you read more and more of these statutes and other regulatory manuscripts, they all tend to have  a phrase like" intended to protect the health,safety, and welfare of the public." If this isn't a catch all, I don't know what is. Almost anything you do will either piss someone off, or at best they might not care. This one little phrase, influenced greatly by someone with a legal sense, allows County administrators to get in your face and try to tell you what to do in every imaginable way. And what better way to make their presence known than to get involved in the approval process of a simple sign. A sign is your entry way into the market. It is a way to say "I'm over here !" It is your defining message. And it is open to government intervention.

How's this for a line in the regulations: "Distribute equitably the privilege of using the public environs to communicate private information." Huh ?

So I plod through the regulations. There are general requirements. I'm OK with these. These things include location, construction,materials, manner of illuminating and/or securing or fastening, and number of signs applied for, and the wording of the sign or advertisement to be carried on the sign. I suppose if you have a "normal" sign, none of this is worth arguing about.

And then there are Prohibited Signs. Wind sail signs (think of those in front of an auto dealership on Presidents Day), flashing signs, signs on a roof, signs attached to vehicles, or those put on an unapproved supporting structure. So far, so good......missed that bullet.

There are exempt signs,traffic signs, No Hunting signs. There is the typical disclaimer that the County does not wish to stifle free speech by limiting political signs. There are on-premise signs, and off-premise signs. There are rules for signs within an Agricultural - Residential District, and an RVC District (whatever that is), a R-1 District (I know this one, it's a level of residential), a B-1 District (i.e. Business) , a B-2 District (which is kinda funny since our downtown has a single traffic light and has maybe a dozen buildings total, but somehow we managed to have 2 levels of Business), an M-1 District as well as a M-2. Really ?

Now in each of these areas the sign is restricted in different ways by how large it can be, where or how it should be mounted, how high it is allowed, whether illumination is permitted , and possibly how long they can be up before they must be removed.

So now having an in depth understanding of how confusing all these rules are that need to be applied  (square footage and an associated height requirement are the most mathematically challenging), I put my sign request together, showing the signs I wanted (3 copies required with each request), descriptions of each sign (materials, fastening, method of support), its location including number of feet from roadways and access points, and description & purpose.

I had four signs, and to be honest once I was in the groove cranking out all this info., it didn't take too long. But to really understand which technical statute they each fell into was beyond me. Was a sign intended to promote the bank a "Construction Sign"? This is one of those temporary signs that state "Another building project financed by ABC Bank" . And then I had a sign to be mounted just outside the building promoting the Winery. It was 500' off the major road and you couldn't see it in a drive buy if you squinted. Why does this need to be approved anyway ? And then there was the sign by our entrance. I sort of knew where this one fell, and fortunately it was sized appropriately. And then there is this sign, being used as a directional sign out by the main road that is a 1/4 mile away from our entrance, so I guess this is a "directional" sign.

So in the end I was able to get them all approved, with no debate I might add. I would like to think it was because of my prep work, but deep down I suspect it might be more because I am one of the few people who actually tried to follow the statutes before I erected a sign. The Planning Director said that about 7 signs come in for approvals annually; my request was over half their quota.

C-Projects: What you do in the off season

I have a personality flaw (or at least one I'll admit to). I tend to work on a gazillion projects, most of which are well publicized, and many take forever to complete. These projects, when started, seem to be very important at the time, but as other jobs come along, these projects slip backwards in priority and some may never seem to get done.

There are several downsides to this. First, because these are apparent to those that are following the building of the winery, or the expansion of the vineyard, I am asked repeatedly how this project or that project is coming along. All I can do is try to defend why it is delayed.....there is only one of me and other things jumped ahead of it. The other downside is that I generally collect all the materials required to complete the job, so some investment has been made waiting for the job to regain momentum. If I start a project, I will have a pile of tools next to it that will stay on "Ready Alert" status until I get back to it. Fortunately I have accumulated seven hammers, five sets of wrenches, numerous boxes of screws and nails, a half dozen tape measures and Sharpies, and easily two dozen various clamps (C-Clamps, F-clamps, pipe clamps, & pony clamps) such that I am seldom looking for that tool I put down somewhere to start a next project.

All this gets me to my list of "C-Projects". Somewhere in my management training I was told to prioritize my to-do list every day. This is very easy to do while in season (March through September); the vines take firm hold of the top items on the list and become A-projects. Of course when the winery needs attention, it has a season that overlaps with the vineyard in August and September, and oftentimes it easily bumps vineyard items, especially if there is manpower available whom I can delegate some of the vineyard tasks to.

A-Projects are required to be done right away. B-Projects need to be done but they aren't in a life or death category. B-Projects delayed can easily jump up to A-Projects instantly. And then there are the C-Projects. These tend to fall within the definition of needing eventually to get done, and their primary level of importance is tied to future improved efficiencies, so to ignore them completely only adds more work later on. A good example of a C-Project is the spraying of weed killer. Not to do it in a timely manner means tall weeds may ground out the electric fence (which leads to cows escaping & hence chasing them around the County), or requiring days upon days of weedwacker work when the weeds get too tall for traditional mowing to handle. Do not ignore C-Projects !

So here I am in the off-season with all these C-Projects. Some of which I'll move along a little, but still not completing them. Others I will review and analyze and possibly change completely how I will conquer them. Still others might fall off the list entirely. Then there are others I prefer to do when it is a little warmer, or when it either is raining (like inside projects) or is not. I am not sure if it is clinically defined ADD or just a desire to keep entertained by jumping around in these assignments. Never the less, the important ones do get done, and others just get completed because I am tired of walking around them.

There is the portable wine lab for Diane. Here is this 8' x 12' lab I am making that is perched up on skids, so when we expand in a few years I can just pick it up with a fork truck and move it to a new location. Diane needs a place to keep all her winery materials, and to remove her testing from our kitchen to a more appropriate place. Our kitchen has piles of lab data, pipettes, alcohol and sulfur and acid analysis equipment, 2 scales, and gallons of distilled water. I think this stuff deserves a home of its own. The lab is almost done except for the finish work, which was halted so I could get some giant-sized plastic bags to put over all the wine tanks and protect them from airborne dust that I would be creating when I finished taping & sanding wallboard joints. The job was delayed, but the bags are now in. It is now firmly a C-Project in hold status.

Then there is the cattle feeder. A welded framework which holds a halved plastic barrel so I can feed the cattle cracked corn or baled hay without it being spread everywhere. Almost done, just need to find the time to finish mounting the barrels.

How about sanding the back porch? After several trips to Lowes to identify the perfect color, and the priming & painting method I wanted to use, the paint sits in our foyer waiting in line for the perfect day to spend on one's hands and knees to prep the porch. How exciting.

The chickens have had some unfortunate experience in being introduced to a neighborhood hawk. One of their sisters took one for the team and became a filling meal for the hawk. The hawk has seen that they are easy pickens because they are truly free range, and spend more time looking down for bugs instead of looking up for incoming danger. I need to do something here or my egg output will drop below usage. Why didn't the hawk grab Fred?

The list goes on and on. A pump house needs to be built and another one repaired. Irrigation systems need to be built or fixed. A hay pavilion should be built. A hoist system for the winery has all the parts in a pile that require a day's worth of installation on high ladders. The Virginia Health Department says we need to set up a closed room specific to our wine bottling operation prior to our February bottling effort. And I am juggling the demands of building the winery and pulling its marketing together, along with completing a research project I am involved in with Virginia Tech.

So much to do, so much to do.

"Love That Dirty Water" - Building the Winery: Part 5

You put the words: "For Public Consumption" in front of any endeavor and automatically someone in the regulatory system recognizes that "whatever goes in must come out". Hence a septic system that resembles a 7 silo rocket launching facility. Unlike private residential septic systems where the homeowner can quietly cover up the access panels with a few inches of dirt and sod, a system such as this requires geo-engineers to design a system that includes three huge concrete tanks and seven manholes (all visible to the tourists we hope to cater to), 2 control panels and multiple pumps, one of which is intended to grind up solids before transport up hundreds of feet of discharge piping to a drain field. I think it is intended for that occasional use by three busloads of retirees, all of whom have "issues" and need the trip to a winery to use their rest rooms. Geez.

Any way, the area in front of the new building was dug out to allow the tanks to be dropped into place. As I mentioned in a prior blog, this needed to be done before the seasonal rains came in. If the backhoe went down and broke through the water table such that water pours in faster than the hoe could remove dirt, then these concrete tanks, as heavy as they are, would begin to float in place, much like an aircraft carrier. Not a great way to place and locate them in position so they could be tied together.

The contractor completed his work in about a week, grading the area around the "silos" as best he could, but recognizing the final grading and landscape work would be done months later. Shy of testing the system (of course, it needed to be tested), he felt he was done. That is until I looked over from a distance and said "No way".  The black silos were almost 2 feet out of the ground; about as ugly as it could be designed. Apparently the engineers that came up with this system didn't consult with an exterior landscape designer or have any understanding of aesthetics. But I'm sure it was operable!

The testing was scheduled for a few days later. So here were all these guys standing around. A couple of electricians to temporarily wire up the controls, another two guys who installed the system(who had a personal interest in getting paid), the G.C. and his son, the system designer, and me. Everyone kinda just stood there looking at each other until I decided I was going to be the first one to ask the first dumb question. Once that got out of the way, questions flew in all directions among these contractors, who up to that point just did their job without understanding the bigger picture of an operating system. I also voiced my displeasure with the height of the 2 black manholes; the contractor quickly got on it and removed 12" from each. The tests then got underway.

Garden hoses were run from my house to fill the concrete tanks. When the power was made available from a portable generator, the pumps were then started. There are two of them: one to grind the solids and another to send the pulverized waste up a slight incline into the discharge field maybe 200' away. The designer had certain specifications he was measuring against, and this was basically the number of gallons that could be moved in a specific time period. If it was too fast or too slow, the controls had to be tweaked for adjustment. If you removed a lid and looked inside of one of these silos, you'd see float valves and even more electronics controlling the movement of  excretions. Even our personal discharge has gone high tech. Ugh. Really, is this necessary ?

But when it was all said and done, regardless of how efficient the process is or the value it silently adds to the operation, the fact remains that is an eyesore. We are open to ideas, but our latest is to border the front lawn with boxwoods and then plant pachysandra all around the silos such that they will eventually cover them up. Or we could build tables over them and use them as footstools for a front cafe area (no, I'm kidding !)

Nothing But Hot Air

With all the hot air I've been hearing, it's nice to see some of it put to good use.

I tend to wake up pretty early in the morning, and when I do I work my way through breakfast, brew a pot of coffee, and then move myself up to my office located in the turret room on the second floor of the house. It is still black as night then, especially now that we have screwed around with the clocks. I start up the computer and go through my morning ritual by checking in on my favorite news outlet to see if any scandals have surfaced overnight or to see what the day's news cycle is going to repeat over and over again. I answer my emails, or generate some. Pay some bills, start making a list of stuff I have to buy to continue on some of the many projects I am juggling to get done. I tend to be fairly deep in thought doing all this.

 Let's face it, no one is bothering me. It is quiet at that time. Employees aren't due to arrive for another few hours. My mind is busy.

And then I hear this buzz.Without being conscious of it, the sun has popped above the horizon and started to show some light. So I look out the window and I see that there is a balloon crew setting up on my front lawn. The balloon is completely unfurled and the chase car is pointing towards the bottom of the opening; on the front of which is this huge fan blowing air into the balloon. On occasion Mark, the owner of "Balloon Explorer" (was Virginia Balloons) would go over and give the balloon a quick zap of flame from his propane tank. There is continual straightening of lines, more flames to heat up the internal air, and a gradual lifting of the balloon until it becomes fully vertical.

Today he is giving two female passengers a ride. Must be a bucket list item for them, for they are officers at a local naval base and one of them will be retiring from duty soon.

Things happen quickly now. The three of them jump in the basket. A balloon this size tends to move with the slightest wisp of air. They are nearly impossible to control while still being on the ground; it is best to get them airborne and then only be concerned with the 3 mph breeze pushing them in a southwesterly direction. Height is easily adjusted by those quick bursts of flame that the pilot commands.

I get those "happy waves" from the new adventurers. They have learned my name and, in unison they yell out "Bye Dave". I have seen it many times before, so I give them a quick wave as they rise above my house and get pushed by the wind. The chase car driver picks up any loose items that have been left behind and then comes over and thanks me. He tells me the intended route, about 15 miles towards either Wakefield or Waverly, depending on the winds aloft of course.

But Mark, whom I have known for years, takes a.moment in his flight duties to snap a picture of the winery we are building.  From his vantage point it certainly is a unique perspective. And a nice way to start the day.

The Building Pad: Building the Winery Part 4

The basic process for putting in a building pad is to first scrape off the topsoil, going down maybe 12 to 18", grading the area, and then back-filling with a compact-able sand soil mix. Seems simple enough. So the contractor who had put in our service road (see prior blog entry) proceeded to drive the blade of his bull dozer into the earth and push dirt out of the way.

The corners of the building were staked out with those little tiny red plastic flags. They were like the ones you see when someone surrounds their property warning they just put up Electric Fence for their dog. Nothing really sophisticated about it, other than we had a surveyor come in and verify their location. I wanted the building to run parallel with the roadway we just had put in, which runs in a perfect east to west direction. It'll mean our front door will aim true north, and the rear of the building will face true south, which will be ideal for when we eventually install solar panels on the back roof.

A good machine operator can get the dug out plane to within an inch or so in variance over the 5000 square foot area, an accomplishment only achieved through years of practice and a drive towards perfection. He didn't need all the new fangled monitoring devices found in the newer dozers......he could tell how he was doing by the "feel" of his treads as he slowly moved back and forth. And if there was a mushy area he felt that too, as his 18 ton machine dipped ever so slightly while moving from one end to the other.

As with many contracts and quotes, there is the always present escape clause or fine print that a contractor uses to resolve unforeseen things, and not really knowing what one will find below the surface of the soil is reason to have wording that covers the contractor if a surprise is found while excavating. Wouldn't ya know it that after he dug out the required depth, a quick walk around on the newly graded surface inspecting suspect areas pointed to a major problem which he quickly shared with me.

There was this one area, maybe 20' x 50', that felt like you were walking on a trampoline. The ground, seemingly hard on the surface, floated under your feet as you walked on it.So a person of less than 200 pounds made the ground seem wishy-washy. This wouldn't bode well if you poured a slab on top of it and then added a building on top of that. Though the slab might hold true, eventually it would crack under the weight stress and then cause a nightmare in the integrity of the the structure.

The apparent cause for this is that soil has a skeletal structure, with pores filled with air or water. Normally this isn't a big deal, however when something of massive weight is put on it this honeycomb structure is compromised and collapsed. It is best to have a solid base to work on and not depend on the massive weight of a building to be uniformly dispersed throughout the footprint. The mushiness we felt was the sponge-like nature of our soils, where my weight was just moving the water around that was within these pores. There are two real choices one can choose from to resolve this new found problem. One is to wait it out and let the water table drop, and then compact the region and put in some additional fill. That wasn't likely to happen since we are entering our wet season here and the soil wasn't going to dry out any time soon. The other option is to dig it out and hopefully we can find the extremes of this soft spot, get out all of the weak earth, and then back fill once again. We had to go with option #2.

But this required bringing in the excavator, for the bulldozer is not meant to remove specific chunks of earth out. So the next day the contractor brought in another massive machine (same one he used on clearing the edge of the pond) and proceeded to dig down until he hit solid ground. When he was done digging, much like a dentist performing a cavity removal in a rear molar, he had made a mound of dirt 3 stories high. He had successfully identified the weak spot and removed all the weak soil that was doing the shifting. It was now time to back fill, and back fill, and then still more back filling.

When the project was "finished", 38 dump trucks of fill were brought in, along with another 27 dump trailers of sandy fill. To put this another way, a dump truck holds about 20,000 pounds of fill, which at about a ton a cubic yard comes to about 10 yards of material. The dump trailer each holds about triple this, or 30 tons of fill. Certainly makes you want to reconsider suddenly jumping in front of one of these vehicles on the highway ! So all in all we had 1190 tons of fill put into our front roadway and building pad. This equals over 2 million pounds of fill that would equate to having a 9" layer of sand put on an acre of land.

We are now ready to go onto Part 5 of Winery Building, installing the septic system. This is needed to be done sooner than later in order to jump ahead of the rainy season and to know where drains need to be roughed in before we pour the concrete foundation. We must hurry; it is the middle of October.

Runway 27 - Building the Winery: Part 3

There is a lot that needs to be done before the first nail is pounded into the first 2 x 4 that is to be part of the building framing. Previous posts talked about laying out the footprint of the building and performing soil tests in and around that area to determine locations for a well and the septic field. Those decisions have been made and now it is a race to get certain things in place before the rainy season comes upon us. Normally by now we have had a threat or two by hurricanes coming up the east coast. Not this year however. And then there is the winter season, but with us being near the shore we are likely to get more rain than snow.

Big heavy equipment do not like wet earth. You may think that if the ground is rock solid during the summer, than how soft can it get with just a little rain ? It gets more mushy than you can imagine, and even a bulldozer, an excavator, or heavily laden trucks can get mired down and need assistance to be moved. Which is the reason why we have to think of an access road being put in place before anything else gets started.

All is not for wasted however; the road that is to be put in will be resurfaced later to become the one-way road in to the Visitor's Center ( aka Winery Building). There is very little of it that will have to be removed in the final tweaking of the design before we invite the general public in. The idea is to have the vehicles enter from our county road, driving up an entrance lined by huge Magnolia trees on each side, and then after bearing right passing in front of 45 rows of grapevines before they are then introduced to the new building, a Carriage House that will be the home for our new Winery.

I call it "Runway 27". For the pilots out there it makes perfect sense. Running perpendicular to the grapevine rows, which face a perfect North-South, this roadway will then be in an East-West direction. With its one-way operation, a car enters this road facing true west, or 270 degrees. Pilots would make note that it is not a magnetic orientation which is what normally dictates runway number assignments, but I beg for their forgiveness here.  So runways are named after their heading, dropping the final digit. Acronyms and the use of abbreviations seem to be synonymous with aeronautics.

This road will eventually exceed 1000' in length as it passes by the Visitor's Center, parking lot, and eventually back out to the road. It will be straight as a bullet, and will , as time allows for further planting, be bordered by maybe another 100 rows or more of grapevines.

I do not necessarily recommend that this road be used by general aviation planes however. It will be only 15' wide or so and have a slight crown in it for water run off. It will have drainage ditches on each side to control water flow from the road as well as the huge amount of water that needs to find a way to run off the fields in heavy rains. And remember, just off to the right on the north side of the road there are all these vineyard posts.....one every 9'. A slight cross wind would certainly make landing a plane here a real challenge. But then, versus crashing, it might not be a bad choice !

Picking, Pressing, and Primary Fermentation

The harvest season for us is nearly over. Though we still have some grapes to pick (Nortons and Scuppernongs), they won't be ready for another 1 1/2 to 2 weeks. Our attention lately however has been devoted to the French vinifera, where we picked tons of grapes, first whites, and then the reds. They have already been put through their paces getting them well on their way so they can "just hang around" in the stainless steel fermenting tanks, mellowing out for the next 5 months prior to bottling in February.

We had a great crew working with us this year. And though they seem motley, the fact is that these guys just clicked. I try to train as best I can, telling them the hows and whys for what they are doing. There is a definite step by step process we follow as we prepare the vines for picking, and then finally getting down to the task of clipping off the clusters one at a time. They were able to anticipate where the work was needed to be done, jumping in whenever extra hands were needed. They also grasped the flow of the operation to eliminate unnecessary movement, efficiently getting the grapes into the lugs, then onto the trailer for shipment back to the winery some 11 miles away.

Preparation for the harvest really began several weeks earlier by putting the shoots in place and then removing any leaves around the fruiting zone. This left all the clusters visible and easy to grasp and snip.This crew of yellow-shirted dudes pulled in 3 1/2 tons of Seyval Blanc in 3 1/2 days, and that included all the processing too, which included destemming, crushing, and sending through the press to remove the skins and seeds from the juicy pulp. This resulted in about 1500 liters of fermenting wine, enough to make 2000 bottles of dry white table wine.

Two weeks later this crew with the help of 2 more harvested the Cabernet Franc and brought in another 2 tons of grapes in only 12 hours. I shouldn't need to remind you that this is after an entire season of working with these grapes as I have described in prior blogs.

This was also the first year we purchased grapes from another vineyard to supplement our own vineyard production. 500 pounds of Petit Verdot were brought in one Sunday afternoon and Diane and I processed them into our MacroBins to begin the fermenting process, where they would soon be combined with our own grapes.

The 2014 season will soon be over, but that only signals the start of the 2015 season. Preparation for next year starts right away; more on that later.

It's About Time

That's not a comment of exasperation, it's the recognition that, after all these months of pruning and spraying, leaf pulling and weeding, that we are finally here. Harvest time is literally right around the corner.

We seemed to quickly get to veraison (where the skins turn color from a pale green to a deep golden color and begin to soften) and then it seems like we have to fast dance for there is still the feeling that we are way behind in our chores. The leaves have to be pulled to allow sunlight in to the grapes, and also to provide some air flow for the breezes to dry the clusters. Now is the time when we closely watch the weather, along with any fungus that might creep in, and then lastly the sugar content of the grapes themselves. That's a picture of me out in the field, taking a refractometer reading that will give me the sugar content. What the little gadget does is read the light reflection through a small droplet sample of grape juice.......the more solids (sugars) the more bent the reflection is which is then shown on a scale.

It is a balancing act that normally comes together all at the same time. You are looking for a Brix of maybe 21 or 22 (percent of sugars in the grape flesh). But if there is an oncoming wet weather pattern, a compromise must be made to accept lower sugar levels. No sense jeopardizing the entire harvest for a point or two in sugar content. And then there is the fungus. It starts out as a single grape within a bunch that is slightly discolored. Come back the next day and there might be 6 times that many. One more day and you lose the entire bunch. It spreads rapidly. The other day I walked the vineyard and threw out 3 dozen bunches that were beyond hope. We now have a prediction of 4 straight days of rain next week (not counting the thunder storm we received last night that was not forecasted). Our Brix registered 21.4 yesterday morning.

I think it about time to start picking the Seyval Blanc.

We have Monday scheduled to start picking. With a crew of six we might get done with the picking by mid day. From there we start the processing.....destemming and crushing, performing a "free run" through our press, killing off any airborne yeast and initiating our own fermenting process. To do all this should take the entire day.

And then next week we do it all over again with our Cabernet Francs. Their Brix is about 19.6 right now. Another week would ordinarily make them ready to harvest, but the rain might bloat the grapes and water down the sugar content.  Do we pick anyway? Will these be affected by the fungus as bad as the whites?

I'll let you know.

Winter Injury

You  may  think this is a rather odd time to bring up winter injury, but as I mentioned in the last blog, we are constantly walking around the vineyard and inspecting, touching, and analyzing what we see in order to make changes or adjustments which get us closer to our ultimate goal: perfect fruit.

Even new workers and helpers are advised to bring to our attention anything that seems unusual from their day to day observations. Lets face it, after pruning a couple of rows of vines, even a novice can see a bug, or a different colored leaf, or a mechanical failure and be able to decide that something is wrong. As part of my instructional dialogue, I explain to them that this understanding of differentiation is what divides man from orangutans. Nothing convinces them better right up front to be more observant than the possibility that they might be called a monkey if they don't spot something odd. And every time something different is brought to my attention by these extra set of eyes, it is an opportunity to instruct and teach....it makes for better employees.

So we walk the rows, grabbing samples of leaves that are compared against resources I have for IPM (Integrated Pest Management). Whether it be insects, diseases, or chemical disorders, we can generally get fairly close in our diagnosis. Sometimes it leads to a change in a chemical cocktail we spray on the vines, other times it may mean altering the timing of an application or defining a needed nutrient to apply that the plant is lacking.

But one of the most perplexing problems we have recently spotted is what I call "Sudden Death Syndrome".  An otherwise healthy vine, with plenty of leaf structure and sometimes a full array of grape bunches, just out and out dies for apparently no reason.

You first think that the trunk sustained a major injury, which would lead to an immediate lack of water and dehydration. We had this problem years ago when I tilled our Nortons and found out, albeit a day late, that the tiller was cutting through the major root structure that had advanced near the surface of the soil instead of reaching down out of the typical tilling path.

This was not just a single occurrence. For those one time events you get to the point of brushing off the problem and blaming it on nature taking its own course. A lot of attention worrying about a singular occurrence is not very productive. However in this case, we lost dozens of vines throughout the vineyard. They weren't the older vines with solid trunk structure. These had smaller trunks, maybe less than 3/4" in diameter. And our losses were within all the varieties, though the Viognier, the Petit Verdot, and the Cabernet Sauvignons were the hardest hit all showing identical symptoms.

I sent pictures off to Virginia Tech to see if they could identify what the primary cause was. Their immediate observations were similar to mine: "Was there any trunk damage?"  They also hinted at cold injury which we both ruled out because, relatively speaking, our winters down in this coastal part of Virginia don't get that frigid to create this kind of damage. However, we were too quick to dismiss this possibility. My final conclusion is that it was an injury sustained by winter snow and cold. You see, initial Spring growth  begins by a mechanical uptake of water and nutrients in the xylem cells (though not a direct comparison, think of these as being like the rings you see in a tree trunk), but as development continues, the woody portions lack the live cambium tissue that was killed during the winter but is required to transfer these needed nutrients. The vascular cambium is the region that produces new phloem cells (those just under the bark) and the xylem cells. Without a replenishment of these cells, the transpirational (think evaporation) loss of water from the leaves exceeds the ability of the damaged vascular system to transport water. Hence you can understand why our immediate suspicion of trunk damage had the same symptoms as this winter injury.

With all this being said, it meant that there was very little we could do to have prevented this. Some of the vines had new base shoots this season, and we will use those to replace the dead vines. Others however show absolutely no sign of life, and these we will slot to be replaced in the Spring of 2015.

Such is farming.

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Before Its Time

It's that time of the season when the grapes begin to change color and the skins tend to soften some. With soft skins the grapes can expand and the clusters begin to tighten up. Only now can the sugars start to accumulate until you get the Brix reading you're looking for.

But it also is a sensitive time within the growing season when everything can go wrong too.

I remember when we had our first batch of grapes in Block One, and, though we were aware of the "bird issue", we didn't put a great deal of concern on the damage they could cause. Little did we know that birds are keenly aware of the sugar content of the grapes. Before we could pick the whites, the grackles flew in one night and completely cleaned us out. Anticipating a repeat, we watched the sugar level within the reds, and decided to pick these early. So did the birds. Again they came in at night and ate every grape hanging on the vines. Only skeletons were left.  Since then we have been using Bird Gard, an automated sound system that screams out Red Tailed Hawk sounds along with distressed bird calls. We have had great success with it.

Late summer and fall tend to bring on the rains, and be a time when tropical storms and hurricanes race up the east coast dumping buckets of rain on our otherwise well cared for grapes. The vines tend to soak up this rain and send it straight up to the grapes. Where once you had a 16% sugar and climbing, following a rain it might drop down to 13 or 14% as the sugar levels get diluted. Two to three points may mean an additional week the grapes have to hang on the vine to regain these losses.

And with summer heat and rain comes humidity. All those latent fungus spores are rejuvenated and can't wait to get growing again. If there has been any skin rupture from the grapes expanding and cracking the skins, that means there is plenty of sugary food for them to have a population explosion. It'll make the bunch of grapes it is growing on no good, and possibly cause it to spread throughout the entire vineyard. It doesn't take long.

So we walk the rows, tasting samples of the grapes to see if they turn from tart to sweet. It is amazing how variety makes such as big difference. One chews a red grape, a Cabernet Franc for example, and you wince at its "sugar-free" pulp. Spitting out the seeds is a reflex action; these are not seedless Concords. From here you  move over just one row, where the Seyval Blanc are; a greenish-yellow hybrid grape that have grapes maybe twice the size of the Cab. Francs. A similar taste test is performed, and the sweetness is incredible. If it wasn't for the seeds, you'd reach in and grab some more. Using a refractometer, I measured the Brix on the Seyval Blanc at 16, which if it was converted to alcohol it would only provide a little more than 8%. (NOTE: the actual conversion includes many factors, like what yeast was used. The true conversion can range from multiplying  Brix x .55 to .61) The Cab. Franc registered just a 6 on the Brix scale....no wonder why it tasted bitter.

This year we also are seeing our first grapes from our Petit Verdot and our Cabernet Sauvignon. They deserve to have their Brix determined too, even though we expect a very small harvest. The bunches on the Cabs. are full and plump, a deep red, almost black coloring. While the red grapes in Block One are just turning color, from their grassy green to their final blue-red color, the Cabernet Sauvignon have already turned completely to their final shade. But how is their Brix ? One would think that they would be farther along than the Cab. Francs strictly based on the color, but the results prove they are at about the same sugar level at 5.5%  The half percent is well within any margin of error, in as much as my sampling technique is rather weak because I don't want to waste valuable grapes to do a sampling many weeks before harvest.

So this is the process we go through. Checking the weather. Continuing our spray program. Still pruning to get rid of suckers. Leaf pulling to allow sunlight to reach every cluster (and dry out morning dew). Checking the Brix levels weekly and increasing our frequency of checks as we approach a 20 Brix  or so.

We have looked over our past harvest data and have found that our harvests tend to begin about August 24th and last about a month. Whites first, followed by the reds. I suspect the Seyval Blancs will be right on schedule.....I was hoping maybe a little early but we just received a few days of rain to screw this up. Then the Viognier, followed by both Cabs., the Petit Verdot, and lastly the Nortons. We may actually get to pull some Scuppernongs this year too, but our experience with these grapes is rather on the light side so I have no idea when we will be picking them, though I am guessing later, not earlier.

Core Drilling - Building the Winery: Part 2

There seems to be a bunch of "little things" that need to be done before you can invite the local paper to see "dignitaries" hold chrome plated shovels and collectively dig a ceremonial hole indicating the start of the building process. We have already had a surveyor come in and establish where our building will be located relative to our property lines. And we had our perk test done so we know the best places to have our septic system located.

So following this we needed the input of a GeoEngineer (a combined soils engineer and geologist) to determine whether all of our plans could be implemented and how far towards China we have to sink our footings in before we actually start pouring the slab and putting up framing. That's where the core drilling comes in.

The process is really quite simple to understand. Stratums are determined using a split-spoon sampling method which pulls up soil from varying depths and defines its composition. Going down 20', we had three stratums identified. For our first 5' we had silty & clayey sand. From 5' deep to 14' this soil changed over to a well-graded sand, and from about 13' deep to 20' down we had a lean clay composed of a lot of shell fragments. Since our farmlands were well under water thousands upon thousands of years ago, this was no surprise. Then there were the "blow tests", where a 140 pound hammer is allowed to fall 30". Counting the number of hits it takes to go 12" provides an "N"-value. In our 1st stratum it was 9, in our 2nd stratum it increased to 14, and then in our lowest / 3rd stratum it was reduced to 6 (we found mush). Using these two bits of information it allowed the GeoEngineer to define relative density and soil consistency, which then led to the engineering recommendations regarding construction footings. Simple, huh ?

There are a few other tests done too. Like putting the sand through a sieve to determine granular size, and by doing various moisture tests that allows one to conclude how compaction of the soil will be influenced by the weight of the structure.

We are still waiting for our septic system design, so once we get it we can apply for our building permit !

Know Thine Enemy

There are few bugs in the field that get you up in arms quite like the Japanese Beetle. Most just take a bite here or a bite there. Some, like the honey bee and lady bug are actually helpful in as much as they pollinate or are predators which search out and eat harmful bugs. But the Japanese Beetle is the terrorist within the vineyard. Throughout the winter months and well into the Spring, the vintner has convinced himself that this must be an off year for the Beetle; nary a sign. But keeping to a yearly routine, June 1st is when they raise their ugly head and soon thereafter you'll see one or two.

In a previous blog I mentioned that we had insect traps set up around the vineyard looking for signs of 2 particular grape pests. All of the traps have come up empty, meaning the Japanese Beetle is our #1 problem this year. It usually is.

Chemical warfare is not to be taken lightly. Putting aside the "Greenies" who believe that nature should be more closely involved in controlling insect pests, the fact is that there are no known predators of the Japanese Beetle that can make a difference when the need arises. There are some wasps and ants that like to eat larvae, but that doesn't stop these beetles from flying in from adjacent pastures to eat their preferred food: grape leaves. There are these pheromone traps you can buy at your garden center, but all they do is attract the beetles from outlying areas; not something you really want to do. And besides, they would be filled before you reached the other side of the vineyard.

It is said that a grapevine can lose 10 - 15% of its foliage before it starts to affect the health of a plant. The dilemma lies in the fact that Japanese Beetles are gregarious, meaning that hundreds of them may sit on a particular vine eating their way though the upper canopy leaving nothing but a skeleton behind. For a small vine without a lot of leaf structure, this can be deadly. And for an older vine, this loss of photosynthetic ability may affect the fruit.

There is a concept that vintners use called Economic Loss Threshold. Like the name suggests, the vintner will hold off on applying costly chemicals until he believes the expected loss will exceed the cost of preventing that loss. So he waits, and waits, until he finally can't take it anymore and it forces him to add an insecticide into his spray regiment. Each application costs $160.00 With honeybees in the area added considerations must be made to reduce the negative impact on their populations. Day before mowing (to remove flowers on neighboring ground plants) and early evening spraying (hoping the bees are back in their hives) now enter into the scheduling of these lethal sprays. They are non-selective; anything with 6 or 8 legs will be toast if contact is made.

Sevin XLR and Carbaryl 4L are the insecticides of choice. Neither is available for the casual gardener, though some Sevin can be found on home store shelves. I suggest against using the Sevin powder unless it can be put only on the leaves on non-flowering plants (that wouldn't attract the bees anyway), because with morning dew the powder can stick to the legs of the bees and be transferred into a hive and cause its damage. Dried liquids have a reduced chance of being transferred and carried.

I can attest to the effectiveness of these 2 insecticides. We had been on an every other week schedule with our insecticides, starting in the last week of May. Into about mid-July we thought we had our bug situation under control, when I missed an insecticide spraying. My excuse was that I didn't have any in stock when my scheduled spray day came along. Anyway, this past week, the 3rd week in July, from my own observations and from field reports from our other fields, we were being inundated with Japanese Beetles. Tens of thousands of these bugs were everywhere. The Cabernet Sauvignon were horribly attacked. So going out one evening I applied a 1/5th dosage application on the leaves (that's all I had left), and the next day I saw only 2 beetles (1 dead, 1 alive) that managed to not fall to the ground in a death spiral after they were dosed.  I cross  my fingers that we got to them in time.

Start Of Something New - Building the Winery: Part 1

For those that have been following my blog, though it deals primarily with the goings on in the vineyard (and I throw in a cow or chicken story every so often), it really is all about the Winery. As logic would have it, one needs grapes to make the wine, and it takes years of work to get enough grapes to be able to harvest and produce a decent amount of wine.

We are at that time in the growth cycle to be able to think about that now. Last year was our first real harvest year (we had a couple of false starts prior) and this year promises to yield even more grapes. Going from one ton of grapes to maybe 7 or 8 tons this year will be a big jump. But the crop looks real good, and where I wasn't expecting much from the Petit Verdot and the Cabernet Sauvignon, we do expect to get some off of these vines for maybe a small quantity of a Bordeaux blend. We'll see.....we haven't reached the veriason stage yet.

So as the progress chart shows, it is now time to seriously start thinking about the winery. To confuse matters, it really isn't about the winery but the Visitor's Center. We already have a building dedicated to making wine. In it we have 14 huge stainless steel tanks, our crusher-destemmer, macrobins, our filling and bottling area, along with pallets of empty bottles waiting to be filled. What we need is an attractive place to greet customers, offer them wines to taste, and hopefully purchase some of what we've made. The Visitor's Center is our means of doing that.

In the style of a Victorian Carriage House, it blends well with our adjacent home and promotes the grandeur of the early 1900's when Harry Spratley owned the house and raised carriage horses for the New York City carriage trade. For those that are as old as I am (well, maybe as old as my Father), this is the same Harry Spratley that the song "I'm just wild about Harry" was all about. Go to YouTube and punch in the name of the song and you'll hear versions from Judy Garland et al.

The Visitor's Center will have the typical tasting room of a micro-winery, plus a function room, a gift shop, a central hallway big enough to showcase goods from other Surry County businesses, and next year a small cafe and the addition of a commercial kitchen to support weddings, functions, and meetings. This Visitor's Center has been a year in planning, and this is the year to get the building of it in motion.  Ideally, we hope to have it up and running by year's end.

Running Wire

As pictures go, this one isn't very exciting. What you are looking at is a Spinning Jenny. Don't ask me where the name came from, but I suspect it was some farmer's raw sense of humor when he designed this apparatus and named it after someone near and dear to him.

The roll of high tensile strength wire weighs about 80 pounds, and is made up of 4000' of coiled wire. As the vines grow, there is a need to add wire to the trellis to allow the tendrils to grab onto something as the vine lengthens and, theoretically conforms to a shape that the vintner thinks will provide the best pattern for vegetative as well as reproductive growth (i.e. the grapes).

These particular rows of Petit Verdot are 408' long, with each row having 68 vines planted within them. There are 6 wires required in each row, so this particular row is going to need just shy of a half mile of wire to be dragged into position and held in place by a barbed staple at each line post.

Now let's consider the weight involved. Each vine, when fully mature, will yield enough grapes to make about a half case of wine, more or less. And when you figure the liquids are about as heavy as the skins,seeds, and stems that are removed in the process, that means each vine represents a case of wine hanging in position when it comes time to harvest. So if you do the math it comes to about 1300 pounds of grapes will be hanging from these wires in just one row.

I spent the day dragging the wire for these grapes, holding on to an end and then walking down each row while inserting the wire through a staple that had been previously hammered in position.. The spinning jenny makes it an easy process, allowing the wire to unwind as it is being pulled. It was a productive thing to do, since I had sprayed them the day before; the re-entry period before I could actually continue working on the vines is over a day. It is a milestone project, for it means that next year we should start seeing a good harvest from Block 2A. The brown color you see in between the rows are the prunings I made from a prior day; the bush hog mower will shred these up and allow them to decompose and re-enter the soil.

Petit Verdot - Before & After

In time I think the Petit Verdot will be one of my favorite grapes.

We planted nearly 1000 of these grapes back in 2010, and you would think right about now they would be pushing out tons of gapes. The fact is, this has been a tough variety to get hold of. Literature about this grape supports our observations. It is late to harvest and difficult to grow. Most of France has given up on this grape, favoring the Malbec for its earlier ripening qualities where it is equally used as a mixing grape. Those few in France that have held on to growing this grape however (primarily in the Medoc region), swear by it for the contribution of alcohol, acidity, and substance that it adds to a blend.

One rarely sees Petit Verdot as a varietal that stands on its own, and if you see it on the shelves grab a bottle and taste its presence and personality and then you will be able to understand how it positively affects a Bordeaux blend.

Two years ago, about when these vines were in their second year, they got hammered by both insects and disease. By my past posts you can see how this is a never-ending trend down here in Virginia. But to be honest, because they were so early in their growth cycle they were also ignored to some extent in favor of the grapes in Block 1 that were further ahead. So last year I decided to pretty much leave them alone and allow them to recover on their own. For me to get in there and try to prune, or micro-manage their recovery seemed like a futile exercise, and besides it would only be a crap shoot as to whether I was cutting off the parts that were truly infected vs. those that weren't. So I let them grow.

Rich and I did get in there once (in Block 2A) and perform a little sucker pruning, but that's about it. We didn't force certain cordon structures to be made, we just let them grow. And grow they did.

 Now I recognize that here it is, almost July of 2014, and I am still pruning. But if all goes well I will have completed the Petit Verdots by the end of June.  What you see in the picture is an out of control vine, that until today was allowed to do whatever it wanted.

When I teach pruning I first start out by asking the new pruner to envision what they want in the way of a trained vine. This is important because it sets in their mind a picture of what they are striving for, and provides some direction as to where to start looking and where to start chopping. It is also important to understand that it is up to the pruner to train the vine and not let anything that the vine has done dictate the training decisions. To leave a lateral (a hyper-growing shoot) alone because it's doing so well is really counter-productive.

Which gets us back to this vine, which unfortunately gets us back to the fact that this vine was intentionally "let go" so it could recover from black rot. It raises the degree of difficulty up some from normal pruning, but many of the basic rules still follow.

To begin, I am generally in the field at about 6 a.m. It is downright pleasant then, maybe 73 degrees with some of the vineyard still shaded by the surrounding trees that are blocking the rising sun from peaking over and increasing the glare and the heat. By noon it is 86 degrees, but with such a high humidity and only a minor breeze, the "real feel" is more like 110 degrees. Need less to say I try to prune as much as I can by noontime.

You see a vine like this one and just say the words "Geez, where do I start?" But after pruning thousands upon thousands of vines, the procedure generally falls into the same pattern. Getting down on one's knees, allowing the morning dew to saturate your denims, you reach in and start pulling away the frontal foliage to see what is really happening behind all those leaves. In this case there were three well-developed trunks coming out of the grafted union at the base. All three had some firm bark on them, but they were different from each other in regards to (1) what direction they were coming out of the knuckle (this is what I call the enlarged area where the rootstock was grafted to the vinifera) and (2) the trunks are of varying size....some the thickness of a pencil while others the diameter of a nickel.

As you look at each of these trunks you follow them up to the second wire, the wire where the cordons are developed and eventually tied to. This is about 36" off the ground. Ideally you want to see a Y or a split in their upwards growth so you can immediately tie them off to begin their cordon development. If this split isn't natural, it can still be created but that means losing another year in the vine's development, pushing off significant grape cluster growth for another year.

Those are the top three conditions one is looking for to decide which of these trunks remain. First the natural Y (to make the cordons), and then it is a managerial decision as to whether the direction of the vine growth   (is it naturally straight up or taking a weird twisted turn out of the knuckle before it heads "northward") is more important than the current diameter of the trunk. Sometimes a bigger trunk starting out sideways but recovering to the upright direction is the better choice, other times a smaller trunk is chosen if it comes out of the grafted union in a  mostly vertical direction and hence having less stress on the joint where the new trunk exits the knuckle.

Makes sense, right ? Well it does after thousands of similar decisions. After about 5 to 6 minutes the vine has been completely pruned and the scraps lay in the row centers for the mower to shred on its next pass through. The final version is a completely different creature than how it began, now allowing the vine to properly develop and put its energy where it belongs, in making the grapes large and plump, and storing the necessary carbohydrates it requires to get through the next winter. No sense putting energy in growth that doesn't contribute to either of these two things.

And voila !

Fred

I have been told countless times never to name your farm animals. The fear is that at some point in time you may have to destroy the animal, and by giving it a pet name it would cause significant mental trauma were this to occur. And by putting the animal in "pet status" you couldn't deal with the animal in an objective fashion. It no longer is a farm animal, it is a member of the family.

Well, I have decided to make an exception, by naming my new rooster Fred.

This rooster came to me courtesy of my brother, who blessed me with six chickens a few months ago. Turns out that not one, but two of these chickens were males dressed in hen's clothing. Trojan horses so to speak. Which basically means my egg laying capabilities have been reduced by a third (actually more than that since one of the chickens bit the big one for who knows what reason).

So, much like a new parent trying to figure out a name that would best fit their newborn child, I sat and reviewed dozens of possible names for this rooster.

Woody: This is really a woodpecker's name, not a name for a rooster.
Reginald: Sounds very regal, but this rooster has feathered feet and makes it seem so fairy-like
Butch: Now there's a name for a rough & tough rooster, but that's not really the vibe I'm getting for this bird
Gorgeous George: Sorry, my affection for this rooster is fairly shallow
Roo: Too simple
Big Bird: Really, this is the best I could come up with ?
The Poop Nazi: I suspect all the other hens can out produce this rooster in this category

The fact is, this bird was the first to escape the pen and spend a night out of its coop all alone and live to talk about it. While the other birds are pecking away at their food, this bird wanders around the coop wondering where all the pecking is coming from. As birds go, not too bright. But none of these things really bother me.

What bothers me is that this rooster starts cock-a-doodle-do'ing starting at about 4 in the morning, and it is non-stop until I let all the birds out of the cage in the morning. Now ordinarily I am up that early, but to hear this noise that early makes your skin crawl. And then if it feels like it, it continues this attention getting noise throughout the day. The other rooster follows suit for a short period of time, but it doesn't quite have the pipes this one does.

My brother says this is an Americana, so it stands to reason that it needed an all-American name. So the name Fred popped into my mind. I guess somewhere along the way a Fred must have been rather annoying, which immediately reminded me of this association with Fred name.

But remember, it is not a name of adornment. His name is Fred, who, if he keeps up this nonsense, might end up.....well ....d___.

Good Bugs, Bad Bugs

There are good bugs and there are bad bugs. The sad part about it is that it is a lot easier to control the bad bugs than it is to manage the good bugs.

With bad bugs one just has to wait and observe when they arrive, and then slam them with some kind of insecticide. Of course there is the school of thought that you shouldn't apply a chemical until the damage by the bugs has reached the "economic thresh hold". I have been told that a vine can easily sustain a 15% loss of leaves without any significant detrimental affect.  Unfortunately, what this ignores is that much of the damage is caused by larvae or caterpillars and by the time you spot these in the vineyard it is already too late.  In a previous year one of our vineyard blocks was attacked by yellow fuzzies (Virginia Tiger Moth), and in a matter of just a couple of days all the leaves on 1400 vines were wiped out. This led to nearly every vine dying because there wasn't enough green matter left in the late summer to provide the carbohydrates needed to be stored in the trunks and canes to last through the upcoming winter.

So what we do here is a preemptive strike, putting insecticide on the vines about as soon in the season as we can coinciding with any visible signs of bugs. As I have discussed in the past, Japanese beetles tend to be our most hated bugs, arriving in the first week of June and causing grief for about two months. Though our earlier applications may be with an insecticide called Malathion, as soon as Japanese Beetles are seen we rapidly switch over to Sevin. The good news is that it also kills the Virginia Tiger Moth, so our two worst bug preditors are being challenged.

Earlier in the season an Agricultural Inspector came through the area and asked if she could put up several traps to see if certain insects had expanded their territory into the Tidewater area. These traps have a female mating peromone in them as an attractant, and once a mate enters the trap a sticky surface captures them. Of course I applauded any help I could get handling these creatures, so she placed 4 traps around Block 1. As of early June there haven't been any of her bug subjects caught; European Grapevine Moth and Light-Brown Apple Moth were the bugs being sought.

Good bugs on the other hand are a bit more difficult to deal with, because they arrive early  and tend to prance around the vineyard throughout the entire summer. They are affected by the same insecticides as the bad bugs; Malathion and Sevin are killers of good bugs too.

Our vineyards have three beehives located on the borders of our three main blocks. All are occupied by a New World breed of honeybee. In the Spring a hive may have as many as 10,000 bees in it, and this number will grow as the season warms up, possibly growing to as many as 30,000 to 50,000 bees. Depending on how well the hive prospers, the need for frames (those honey-comb panels that you often see a beekeeper handling) will increase. It is not uncommon for 1000 bees to be on a frame at a time; it takes 10,000 bees to generate a pound of honey and 30,000 bees to fully pollinate an acre.

So, what'll we do ? Since the vineyard  manager needs to deal with the bad bugs, but doesn't want to adversely affect the good bugs, the best thing to do is remove the nectar source within the vineyard. On the day before we want to spray we mow between the rows, clipping off the flowers of the weeds and ground cover so it doesn't attract the bees. Inner-row blankets of white clover turn green again. We then do our spraying very early in the morning or late in the day when the bees have returned to their hive. Once the spraying is completed and has dried on the vine leaves, the risk of exposure greatly reduces and should not affect the health of the hive.

 2013 was the first year we had hives, and their health had mixed results. One hive did extraordinarily well surviving the really harsh winter, while the other two hives were hard hit. Talking to the beekeeper (not me thankfully), he blamed himself on the loss of the two hives, having not cared for them in a way that would have insured their well-being. I was hoping for a little better feedback to see if our process was well thought out or whether we needed to tweak it so that we in the vineyard could be better partners with these bees. I guess we'll have to see how it goes at the end of this season.

Not Your Everyday Peas

I go north for just a few days and when I return (after a day or two of trip decompression), I notice how far along the grapes have come. In one of my earlier posts just a week or so ago I was talking about bloom. We have rapidly jumped forward ten steps to Step #31 out of an industry standard of 47 stages of growth. This step is officially defined as "Berries Pea Size", where berries are 7 mm in diameter and the bunches have enough weight to start hanging down.

From here the berries will expand in size, and bunch closure will occur simultaneously. This is when I cross my fingers and hope all my spraying has done what it was supposed to do.

The particular berries in the picture are from our Seyval Blancs. They are a French hybrid which appears to do very well in this section of the state. We harvested a ton of these last year, and the wine Diane has made from these has been bottled and is ready for consumption. I can attest that is tastes great. . We expect maybe triple this amount this year; the grapes just look like they are developing well.

Our other grapes are all at varying stages. The Cabernet Franc which are right next to the Seyval Blancs are coming along fine too. Last year they got walloped by Black Rot, but appear to have recovered well and are producing some nice sized bunches. The Viognier immediately adjacent have been through some hard times (fungus issues the last two years) but they seem to be doing a lot better, though we only think we'll get a small crop this year. The Nortons, an American red, look rather weak this year. Though they normally do not have the vibrant green leaves as the French varieties, they appear to be rather faded this year even after we gave them a dose of Nitrogen fertilizer in the Spring hoping that would pep them up. There may be some reasons for their anemic appearance.They were unusually hit with Black Rot last year too, and they don't like the toxic affects of sulfur, which we used for a brief time last year before I found out it wasn't a bright idea. As I may have mentioned more than once before, there are no easy lessons in this business.

Time in the vineyard is a combination of catch up and typical maintenance. Along with the weekly mowing and spraying, I had to pull Dale (our intern) over from his Cabernet Sauvignon duty and have him trim for suckers and arrange the shoots in Block 1 where most of the grapes we will harvest will come from. They are growing like crazy and it is not uncommon for shoots to be extending well above the trellis, 7' in the air. He is trying to redirect the energy from a non-productive area to where it can do the  most good, and by rearranging the shoots with their leaves, he is maximizing the sunlight potential for energy conversion for photosynthesis (remember this from 3rd grade ?). I on the other hand am still delegated to getting the Petit Verdot pruned, putting their cordons in the right position. We may get a very small crop of these red grapes this year if we're lucky.

Move Over Wine, Here Comes The Beer

When Rich turned of "age" I brought him down to a small brew club where he was able to make a case of his own beer. It was a Killians Red knock off, and for his first attempt it came out fairly good.  Since he has gotten more involved in our vineyard episodes, he has taken on a rather exploratory role in drinking wines, where now he regularly chooses odd brands and little known grapes to share with dinner. He introduced me to Carmenere for the first time; a Chilean wine with French origins which has become one of my favorites.

Rich enjoys the outdoor work in the vineyards. A sense of quiet but with the urgency and caring one needs to provide for the vines as they struggle to get through another year of harsh weather and pestilence. But he still likes his beer.

The last couple of trips down, Rich has gotten into making some hobby beers. The first time he made an Indian Pale Ale; a little light on the alcohol but strong on ale taste. This most recent time around he opted for a lighter beer. It is in the bottles waiting for its proper time to pop open and help us define its taste. Taking queues from how we started into the wine business, he is stepping up his game each time he makes a beer. The first time we rolled the barley on the kitchen counter. This last time he purchased a mill cutting the time from a couple of hours down to ten minutes at best. He is also exploring non-traditional aspects of the business: trying to grow hops.Rich purchased six plants and had them shipped in. All bunched up in their little pots, we kept them watered and in the indirect sunlight  for two weeks. The hops have names I had never heard of before. Cascade. Brew Gold. Chinook. Fuggle. Newport.

After some debate as to where the best place was to install a hops trellis on the farm, we decided on putting it over at our Bacons Castle location, allotting it Row #25 adjacent (but not too close) to the Cabernet Sauvignons. Strange bedfellows they make.

Hops grow over 20' in height, so the trellis we needed to make would look nothing like those we have built for the grapevines. Our heads churned, but typical of many of the solutions I have come up with, at 3 a.m. I had another "Ah-Ha" moment and realized we had all the items on the farm needed to make this super tall trellis. Typical of many farms, there are piles of stuff all over from past projects that are kept around never knowing if there will be a need sometime in the distant future. Our farm is no exception. I have a small pile of steel tubing left over from a chain link fence installation from a previous owner, and in that there were two 20' rails of fairly heavy wall piping.

We strung high tensile wire between these, at exactly the same distance apart as the vineyard poles we intended to lash these to using 6"-7" pipe clamps. We then tied six pieces of twine to the wire, allowing 4' of spacing for each hop plant. Rich and I hoisted the pipes into place and secured them to the wooden posts that were already in place, watching as the twine dangled loosely down to the intended locations for each plant. Rich planted the hops and then placed a stake at each spot to tie the twine to.

Where the plants were tall enough, Rich wrapped the hop around the twine. "Clockwise" he said, "The hops like to follow the sun around as they grow vertically each day." Sounded good.

They have been watered daily since their being planted on May 18th. They all have gone through a shock period as they got accustomed to the bright light, drying wind, and strong heat. But they are still allive. It will be interesting to see how far up they grow and how fast.

Rich will have to decide a couple of things however before it is time to harvest. What will he do with the buds when it is time to use them in his process. And how will he get them down !

47 Rooms

These past few days have been the culmination of our 7 year journey to move ourselves from New England to the state of Virginia (both Commonwealths for some fluke reason).

When we bought our (first) Virginia home back in 2006, we recognized that there would be several years before we were fully moved down. The time frame was loosely set, but it more or less coincided with when we thought we would be getting our first harvest. And of course let's remember that selling our home up north, along with selling my plastics business, and along with getting a winery up and running each played an important role in determining the exact time of an official move to Virginia.

There were several years when I shuttled back and forth, usually with the truck, but sometimes flying if I required a quick turnaround. This is when we first planted Block 1, and new vines needed very little care at that time, or so I thought.  It was common for me to say that watching vines grow was much like watching paint dry. The vines just didn't need my full attention. For every week I was in Virginia, I spent 3 or 4 weeks back up in Massachusetts. Whenever I took a trip south, I easily had a fully packed truck, and during the first two years I frequently was pulling a U-Haul trailer.

In year #3 I was now spending 2 weeks in Virginia with the balance of the month back up in Massachusetts. The vines needed more attention now. I was doing a fairly sloppy application of pesticides, being only worried about the Japanese Beetles wiping out all the leaves. There was now also a fair amount of pruning too, trying to establish the cordons and in some cases directing some newly grown shoots. And each of these trips meant bringing more stuff down.

In all the trips I made coming south, I think only once I came down without a real load of stuff.

Bigger items were also being directed down to Virginia. On a least two occasions I flew north so I could rent a large 20' truck, driving down and unloading it with whomever would help with the unpacking. The house was now getting full, while the homestead up north hardly looked like it had been hand-picked of items felt important enough to ship south.

And then in February of 2012 we bought our house in Elberon. The one with a name: White Oak Farm. It is a monster of a house. Our plan was to empty the first house, forever named [the Vineyard at] Bacon's Castle, and rent it out. All the stuff there would be brought over to where we were going to live, and of course being a much bigger house it provided us greater opportunity to find places for even more stuff from Massachusetts. Again I rented trailers a couple of times in 2013, rented a truck once too to bring down that 17' canoe and anything that could fit around it.

During this time I finally sold my business, and with the sale of a manufacturing facility comes all the stuff that didn't get transferred in the sale. Other than the numerous files (easily 100 trees worth), there were all the neat tools and things that the company had bought during its active 27 years but had become obsoleted as the product mix changed in the plant. For instance, there was a huge, and horribly heavy, granite block that was originally used as an inspection surface, but could be a chocolate maker's dream in a candy factory.

The surge of items that were too cool to throw out and had to be moved south didn't get fully understood however until we sold our house just 2 month's ago. At that time we recognized EVERYTHING must go.I rented a Penske 22' box truck and jammed the thing as full as I could. A 22 footer should be able to hold 3 to 4 rooms of furniture. Rich was available to help with the packing and later the unpacking on this trip. It had bedroom sets, chairs, a dining room table, a craftsman lawn tractor, slate from a pool table (I had to dismantle it to get it out of the basement), a couch, you name it. What was left in the house were the bare necessities for Diane to live until the closing. A queen-sized mattress (on the floor), the washer-dryer, a bureau, some wicker furniture that acted as her living room set, and all sorts of miscellaneous stuff where the time, or the lack of pressure, hadn't motivated us to box them up for safe travels.

Our closing was scheduled for a Friday, so knowing we had "so little" stuff to pack I flew up Wednesday to rent one final 22' truck. Chris was the designated packer with me that Thursday, so he and I went over and picked up the truck around 9:30 am or so. As soon as I backed the truck in position, we were loading the big items in. However, as we pushed these big things to the front of the truck, it left a lot of room for boxes to be jammed in tightly. There was to be no compromise on the use of space. If there was a hole, it had to be filled. We couldn't afford the luxury of getting to the end of the truck and finding there was still more stuff that needed to be packed. Diane was inside doing the box packing, and it was a good thing that her sister Annie came over to help. There were all the dishes, pots & pans from the kitchen, and reading lamps. Glassware and china needed to be wrapped. There were all the clothes still hanging in the closets, and being hoarders we fortunately had kept wardrobe boxes from our 1986 move to Andover that were useful once again. There was the snowblower, that had done a round trip to Virginia and back because of the bad winter Massachusetts was forecasted to have. There was an entire barn full of garden tools and a mower that needed to find a place in the truck. Try to find an efficient way to pack a garbage can with rakes, shovels, fishing rods, and loppers sticking out of the top.

Chris stayed until after mid-night and Annie hung on till around 2. We were all exhausted and there still were items on the ground adjacent to the truck that needed a place. Hoses were ultimately flung into the back of the truck; we were numb to the possibility that the tangled mess that ensued would have to be undone when we unpacked. Diane's car was designated to carry some of the breakables, mostly pictures and flat glass items. We also had 4 coolers of refrigerated items to bring down which we shared our front seats with.

It was way too late to get a room at the inn, so Diane and I crashed on the carpeted floor for the night. We were too exhausted to care about less than soft accommodations, and we knew the anxiety of Friday's trip would make the aches and pains be of minor consequence.

We got up late by normal standards, around 7 a.m. From here we packed up the few things we had lurking around, did a final walk through (or two), started the engines and, I can't answer for Diane, but I never looked back. Virginia had been my home for over a year now. By my calculation, between the trailers, pick-up truck loads, and trucks, we had moved 47 rooms of furniture and stuff. Way too much stuff.

The 625 mile trip really was about 80 miles longer. With the truck I couldn't take the Garden State through Jersey, and I refused to take the G.Wash.Br. through New York. We took the loop around the City and got back on the Jersey Turnpike about where the Parkway intersected it, and then for the most part we followed 95 the rest of the way until we got to be just north of Richmond. We munched trail mix along the way, and had a very late lunch around 4:30 p.m. or so. Diane and I were beyond tired at this point. When we stopped we didn't even have the energy to complain.

Our trip, though long, was uneventful until we were on the final state road giving us only 27 miles to go. It was around midnight now, and we both could almost feel the comfort of a soft bed at the end of a very long two days. But as fate would have it, our main road was blocked off due to an accident by a  driver who missed a turn and barreled off into a phone pole. There was no where to go but back across the James River and follow Route 5 into Williamsburg to be shuttled via ferry back across the James. At this time of night there is only one ferry an hour, and needless to say we had just missed our chance for an uninterrupted drive. For nearly 50 minutes Diane and I sat in our respective vehicles waiting to board the next ferry. It wasn't difficult to doze off, but when the time came we sprung into position on the ferry for the quiet and dark 20 minute ride across the river. Once landing, it was a seemingly quick 15 minute drive to the house.

We were too tired to do much at this point. The truck would wait until tomorrow to be unpacked. Diane and I did unload the coolers, where much to our surprise the ice cubes still had some mass, being helped by a dozen pieces of frozen blue ice. The cat met us; the chickens and cows were assumed asleep.

"Good night" was all we said to each other. Tomorrow is another day.