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.

Pre-bloom

My last couple of weeks have been trying to play catch-up regarding the first pruning of the season. It really can be described as our final dormant pruning prior to the start of the new year, but since the vines are well under way it is a real stretch defining them as dormant. What we are now doing is limiting the number of buds and/or shoots were are allowing on each vine. Though there is a complicated way to determine this, we are basically leaving 24 shoots per vine.

Rich has been busy on the French vinifera, while I am on the Nortons which require a completely different mind set in how they are pruned. I also hired an intern this year, and assigned him to the Cabernet Sauvignons to prune. It is a great place to start a new guy. The vines aren't overly complicated to understand at this point. He is primarily setting their height for cordon development this current year. He also will be on weed patrol, inter-row ground cover cropping, trellis repair, "sucker patrol", and irrigation repair. It is a good way to be introduced to the vines without being overwhelmed.

Though I wish all this work were behind us, to get it done by June 15th is still OK. It must be done before the shoots get too long and the tendrils are fighting against your desire to spread out the canopy for proper light distribution among the vegetative and fruit growth of the vine. The vine is growing at its own speed and now they are at pre-bloom stage.

At first you would think you are looking at little tiny berries on a stem, but upon close examination they really look more like tightened tulips that have yet to open. Many are closely packed, while others are a bit more loose as in the picture. The designs for these bunches follow the genetics of the type of grape that they are. Some tend to be rather tight, while others a bit more loose. Loose bunches are ideal where we are, because it lets the breeze dry out any moisture that can be trapped between the grapes, providing fewer places for fungus spores to hide and grow.

This is a critical stage in our spray program. When we spray we need to get into all those little crevices with the fungicide to prevent any kind of spores from making these small spaces their home. If fungus is allowed to stay there, they will remain invisible until it becomes really hot and humid in July and August. Our berries will be fully formed at this time, starting to go into a stage called veraison where they change from green to the color of the grape, either a deep red or a vibrant yellow-green. It is also a time when the skins begin to soften some and that is when they are most susceptible to  fungus invasion. Bunch rot, sweet rot, sour rot, black rot etc.etc. all bring nightmares to a vintner. And bugs aren't much help either. If they penetrate the skins looking for some sweet nectar, that it all it takes for the fungus to spread wildly.

It is so much easier to grow grapes in California, where their weather is a lot drier and there is a steady breeze from the Pacific Ocean. They are not plagued with all the diseases we experience in Virginia. It is the choice I made.

Modern Veterinary Skills

Convincing a cow to do something it is not inclined to do is another one of those animal behaviors that has no easy solution.

Even though I don't have to milk the beef cows three times a day, they do require some care. A month ago Rich and I steered them into a squeeze pen where I administered vaccine shots to the 2 calves. The pen is a lifesaver, holding them still to be able to lift some neck skin for needle insertion. Via mail order or at your local farm supply store, it is easy to purchase hypodermic needles and the  vaccines required for periodic administration. Just don't know what all the fuss is about in the inner city pertaining to getting these needles, but I suspect a heroin shot with one of these babies would make your eyes roll up into your head fairly quickly.

Anyway, with that task behind me, my next caretaker item is to address the fly situation. Cows attract flies like crazy. Especially with all the poop around. Last year I used a small hand held pressure sprayer and it didn't go over real well. One shot of mist at a cow led to the herd running away. So I had to keep my eyes out for a better solution. They make these insecticide saturated ropes that extend between 2 poles, thinking that the cows "just know enough" to walk under it, rubbing their backs on the rope. My cows are likely to use the poles for scratching and not go under a rope; the cow would ask what the rope is for.

The solution came around this year, as technology met the need to satisfy a farmer's craving for new toys. They now have a paintball gun designed for shooting fly repellent globules at the sides of a cow. One application lasts for 5 or 6 weeks.

As with all things that send out flying projectiles, there is a 20 page booklet of instructions, 18 pages of which are dedicated to legal obligations and warnings. Geez. There are only 2 moving parts.....a trigger and its safety. Well, one of the warnings had to do with acclimating the cows to the sound of the gun. They suggested that you go out and feed them some corn (or equivalent as a positive reinforcement) and, standing 30' away, shoot off the gun a few times. They said this may have to be done several times until the cows get used to the sound of the gun and associate it with the other good things going on.

I loaded up the gun with a CO2 cartridge, carried the gun oh so carefully out to the field, paced off my required 30' (no, not really), and proceeded to shoot the gun at the ground, unloaded of course. While the cows were eating from their pails of sweet corn, I pulled the trigger and then the gun went........poof. That's right: poof. Not BANG, not CRACK. Just a "poof." Think of a rolled up pair of socks being tossed underhanded against a wall. Poof.

The cows didn't turn an ear. They didn't look up at the sound. Corn was all they cared about. So, Rich and I then scheduled the next day as our day of reckoning. I loaded the gun with the globules; bright orange ping pong ball sized spheres were placed into the chamber. My CO2 cartridge was still in place. We walked out knowing we had to approach the cows from the side and be about 15' away before I could shoot at their front shoulder area.

As you would suspect, Rich and I were the greatest excitement that the cows had seen all day. They raced across the field as we approached the gate. Almost had to push them out of the way to allow the gate to swing to allow us in.  I backed up as per the instructions and located the spot on X446 to make my first shot. It had been a long time since I fired a gun and I thought the bigger target would be a good place to start. Holding the gun as if it was a machine gun right out of a Chicago gangster movie, I took aim, pulled the trigger, and then poof, followed by a SPLAT ! Orange slime slipped down the cow's side. The calves now were nearly right on top of me, and without missing a beat I went poof, poof, and one last poof. The job was done. In a matter of minutes all the cows had this insecticide applied to them. They seemed disinterested in the whole process, other than maybe some disappointment that I didn't feed them their sweet corn. Bummer.

I went back the day after to do a fly count on the cows, and I can truly say that they are fly-free. It really worked.

More vaccinations in a couple of weeks need to be done. I think however I'll leave the artificial insemination scheduled in the Fall to the Vet.