Ripping!

Week of May 23rd

We are getting nearer to having our fields ready for our new vines. This week was spent ripping the old plants out of the ground following the previous week where we took out the posts, wires, etc...

But first a shot I took from the top of the Pring field looking down towards Belleisle Bay. Suffering a chilly winter does have some rewards with vistas like this :) 

Here you can see the ripper attached to the PTO. The blades are adjustable to however we like, so if we choose to rip alongside the planted vines to refresh the soil we can. Or, as we plan to for our new vines, we can leave a single blade on to rip a row.

Here you can see one of the old vines I've just ripped out. 

And here it is much closer up. What is interesting here is even in slightly rocky soil, the vines can still grow to a healthy size. The problem with these vines is they were planted too deep. The thick root here was underground when it should have been planted a bit higher so the root rose out of the ground. All our new vines will be planted better (Fingers crossed!).

A row finished which took quite a bit of tooing and froing with the ripper. To be fair it is not perfect for this task at hand. But fortunately we have an excavator coming next week which will just pull the whole vine out in one go, much easier.

Still, it was a good learning experience to use the ripper, even if we are going to only use an excavator in the future. I did work up a good sweat, even sitting in the tractor as I had to keep twisting around to see what I had just done. 

Cheers,

Alan

(P.S. My gosh do I need a shave and a cut!)