Babying our babies!

Well, we finally finished all of the pruning this weekend. What a relief! This is the first year (after only 3) that I felt like we were finishing right when we should be. The two previous years I’ve felt like we were behind, but not this year. I guess I’m just used to being late!!

Spending a lot of time in the vineyards you tend to see some pretty amazing bugs, spiders etc. Take a look at this really cool praying mantis that Matt found the other day. It’s pretty amazing, isn’t it? We always see them as a good sign. They like to eat lots of other bugs, so we’re happy to have them crawling around in our vineyards. Plus, anything that is as incredible looking as a praying mantis has to be a good thing!

Over the Easter weekend, we decided that we had to water our newly planted vines. The ground is rock hard; we haven’t gotten any of the spring rains we have been hoping for. The weather forecast will say rain, and then it will just drizzle a bit not even penetrating past an inch or so. I think we are going to have a long summer! So Matt and I were out there watering the little guys. Over the past few days most of them have shown signs of life, one baby leaf opening up. On some of them you can just see the buds getting ready to burst. It’s very exciting given that when we put them in the ground, I never would have guessed that they would actually grow. Now the question is, what do we need to do next?  I’ll have to ask around and see. One thing that I was told yesterday was that the local hunters have just release a bunch of rabbits so we’ll need to put plastic sleeves over all of them to keep the rabbits from eating the tender leaves. Can you imagine? Releasing a bunch of rabbits just so you can shoot them? All of this just because they over-hunted them in the first place so that there aren’t any wild ones left. Can you tell I just love the hunters???

Comments

[Iris]

I hope you've had the same gentle rain coming down during the last two days as we had here in the Hérault back mountains. Here too, we've finished pruning just in time and I'm rather proud about this! Everything is growing very quickly now, we'll have to start brush-cutting very soon, then the first sulphur treatments against oidium, cleaning the wine stems from extra leaves and so on, and so on.

I hope you'll have some more gentle rain from time to time, because watering the young plants is a lot of supplementary work - we had the same problem in 1991/92, when we had very dry soils and the young plants were suffering.

I also know your hunter induced rabbit problem - we ended up in being happy when we saw that they were dying from mixomatose (the rabbits, not the hunters...). Our wild boar problem is also partly due to the fact that years ago, they found that there weren't enough boars for all of them, so they released some extra ones which were unfortunately cross breeded with domestic pigs and which are one reason for the actual "cochonglier" plague we have around here.