2020 has certainly had its faults. However seasonally it has provided us with very welcomed winter and spring rains that have helped fill the soil full of plant loving moisture. Vines are quite intuitive and sense if it will be a dry year or not by the available moisture in the soil profile (around the time the vines wake from their winter dormancy and come to life). This soil moisture dictates what type and volume of vine canopy and the potential fruitfulness the vine will carry.

So far this year everything is looking Dandy. Vines are healthy, ducks are swimming in the dams and the yabbies' are on the bite….The work we currently do in the vineyard revolve around spraying the canopy with a Sulphur and copper spray and on occasion some fertilizer in the form of natural kelp mixture. As the shoots grow so fast at this time of year we find that we need to spray upward of every second week to keep spray on the new leaves. The sprays we use are natural sprays and help combat the rise of Mildews and rots that can occur in the middle of the vine canopy and is solely a preventative measure.

We have also done some summer pruning and by “we” I mean…….not me. No sadly I ran out of time so had to get a gang of workers to come in and help out. Essentially summer pruning is a nice way of saying we removed all the water or sucker shoots from the base of the vine. This is done to remove competitive non fruiting shoots as well as removing the potential for disease to migrate from the soil to the vine leaves. And so now we wait.

The flowers have all pollinated and the berries are starting to form. All we need to do is wait and hope for more rain and in the event of no rain we will have to apply small amounts of supplement irrigation to hold the vines till the fruit develops ripeness. So till next episode……Harvest.

Till next time this is Hamish Seabrook Signing off