Recent content by Dustyfj

Those are both Amazon jobs. I think the optimal height is probably between the two.

it wasn’t our idea, but it has worked out really well. Spent some good time out there again today.

2024 season here we go. Pruned all morning. Hoping to get two full rows done today. With my wife and I, we are taking about 5 hours to do two rows. That means about 35 hours of solid pruning left.

In central Maryland we were at 9 degrees a week ago and 74 on Friday. I was a little concerned about our cab franc because the buds got fuzzy and look like they swelled a bit. If we get another warm spell, we will probably prune to try and stunt them till temps go back down.

We had some of that action last week.

Laid out some three new rows for 2024. 220 new cab franc plants. Fun to be back out there.

In addition to our own wine, we have a couple wine kits going atm:

We collected/squished several hundred SLF this evening. The damage in just two days is a little staggering. We used a method to catch them I saw on youtube. They seem to jump straight up when frightened. Holding a bottle above where they are perched makes them jump right in the bottle. (80%) of...

Sevin took the slf down a bit. We are getting advised to spray mustang Mac and Imidacloprid. I’ll report back with results in a few days. Edit* not sure the sevin helped at all. Numbers seem to be way up. No sign of dead slf We pressed off all our grape varieties together and they have been...

They are pretty much throughout. Very disappointing.

We probably squished 200 but I don’t even know if that helped. We put some sevin on early this morning but pretty heavy rains came through about 11:30am.

Zero spotted lantern fly last week at harvest. Now 5-10+ per plant. They don’t seem to like the Sangiovese as much. 0-2 per plant on those.

Chardonnay, Sangiovese, cab sauv, and cab franc Not sure what we will add in the spring. Maybe a white hybrid?

With the temperatures real high and brix readings around 20.5 we decided to harvest the few grapes we had yesterday. Very tiny harvest due to some mistakes the first year. We were also getting some bird pressure that was making us nervous. I have heard that first year vines tend to ripen a bit...

I’ll defer to more experienced growers, but that looks like efficacy from your captain spray. All the mold/disease dies but infected leaf surface gets damaged from the spray. You must have had an emergency downy/powdery event. Saves the plant but doesn’t look pretty.