Vine food and body building

We recently had our the soil of our various vineyards analyzed, and found that some of them were  out of balance and that we needed to give them a boost.  As you certainly remember we spread some horse manure this fall, but we decided that it probably wasn't quite enough.  While we were in Germany last fall for a wine fair, we met some other organic and bio-dynamic winemakers from the Loire -Domaine de Bellivière -who told us about a product that is approved for organic viticulture that they used and had very good results with.  We decided to give it a try.   This is definitely something we don't want to do often; number 1, because it costs a small fortune, and number 2 because we'd like to seed nitrogen fixing plants, and find other ways to build up the humus of our soil naturally without having to have to use these types of fertilizers, even though they are organic. 

The product is called Bio-Post Bouchon, and it is, according to the company's literature, it helps regenerate the microbial life of soil and also helps fix nitrogen.  It's full of micro-organisms and microbial flora that help to revitalize the soil, especially ones that have been weed-killed in the past like ours.  So we ordered 4 tonnes of it!  That's 4 pallets of forty 25 kilo bags.  Yippee!  What a way to spend your Saturday!  We asked the former owner of our vineyards, M. Paume, if we could borrow his spreader, and he of course agreed.  We told him we were fertilizing our vineyards (well, we left out the organic part)  and he thought that was a very good idea.  The only problem was our PTO shaft on our tractor wasn't long enough, so he had to loan us his tractor!  That was super nice!  We got it all set up, Matt driving his tractor (I didn't dare)!  So once we got the first load in the hopper, we realized that I would have to transport all of the bags of "fertilizer" up to the vineyards; otherwise, Matt would spend most of his time going back and forth from the vineyards to the hangar to fill up. 

What a great job.  First filling the back of the car with these 50-pound bags of fertilizer and then unloading them up at each vineyard.  Then Matt would slit them open, lift them up chest high, and dump them into the spreader.  By the end of the day we figured I had moved 4 metric tons, twice and Matt once!  Now that's a great way to get in shape for summer. 

Today it's gently raining on our newly spread soil amendment (I hate the word fertilizer!) and this weekend we are planning on using the Weed Badger to work it into the soil.  Though they are predicting rain all week, so it may be too wet in the vineyards for the Weed Badger!  But we'll never complain about rain here, well at least not spring rain, this winter's rainfall is again far below average, AGAIN, so we are hoping to get more before it gets too hot.

Comments

[Steve Lanum]

And there's a soccer ball on the packaging because....?

I'm sure you confirmed that you weren't spending that 'small fortune' on specially bagged horse manure!

[Eric]

Technically speaking amendement is not a fertilizer. Engrais is translated as fertilizer. The big different is that engrais (fertilizer) feeds the plant while amendement feeds the soil. So I can see why you don't like the word fertilizer. I imagine you are not using any.