I’ve started pruning. Honest to God, I am the slowest pruner on the face of the earth. It’s pretty fun though, I like it. Today it was 50 degrees, sunny, the dogs were playing outside with me, it was just a really nice time. I pruned up the muscadines pretty good. I think they’ll do really well this year…they started a little slow last year, but they really took off later in the year. I pruned them up nice, and expect to get some good fruit in 2008.

The Pinotage grew out nicely. I lost maybe 10 plants in the frost last year, but the remaining plants are doing well. I cane pruned all of them. Barring a hard spring frost, these plants should do well this year.

I started on the Cabernet Sauvignon near the house. I redid many of the cordons last year, so there is less work this spring. However, some of the plants lost a cordon during the Easter 2007 cold snap. Thus it takes a little more work to lop off the dead (or partially dead) cordon and train a new cane on the wire. I also had a few plants that were just trained poorly, so I am lopping off those cordons too and putting down new canes. I am pruning to one bud spurs this year. lst year I was hesitant and left two buds per spur, but it just resulted in too much growth and too much fruit.

I make pretty good attempts to keep the cordons of equal length and containing equal numbers of buds. I am much more comfortable pruning this year. However there are many more vines to prune this year…so it’ll be a lot of work.

It’s such a neat time of year. I am so geeked up for bud break, even though it’s still three months away. I think thi syear will be a fun year…I didn’t turn over the soil this year, so weed growth should be less. There are far fewer vines to train this year…90% of them are now up to the wire. This will be the first year where the vineyard should really fill out. It should look neat!

I am going to have Mt. Airy Tractor come and pick up my tractor and service it before the season begins. I still need to put down some more lime and some boron. Once the pruning is over, I hope to spray a lime sulfur spray to eradicate any disease remnants from last year. Once harvest was over, I stopped all sprays. To me, it makes sense that after harvest, the purpose of the vine has been fulfilled. Thus I am not going to worry about downey or whatever after harvest. You can dote these vines all you want, but I am not having any part of it.

I’ll whack them with a lime sulfur solution and focus on building up the soil and plant strength so that the plant fights off disease. I really dislike spraying, so hopefully it will be another somewhat dry year, that helps reduce sprays immensely.