Vineyard establishment - Nova Scotia - Eastern Canada

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Musirio

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Mar 31, 2013
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Hey everyone,

Last week marked a big milestone in our books.

We began planting the grapes in our small 2 acre vineyard.
The name of our vineyard is Vignoble de la Baie which means The Bay Vineyard - anyways......

We've decided to plant 4 hybrid varieties to start our with:
Lucie Kulhmann
Muscat
Léon Millot
Marechal Foch.

All cold-hardy varities and early-ripening.
They are all vary common amongst grape growers in Nova Scotia.
As we evaluate the success of our vineyard, we are eventually going to expand to greater acreages.

Here's a few pictures!
Let me guys know what you think!

We bushwhacked and tilled the land in early november last year.
We then amended the soil with Lime and a few missing nutrients
in early April.

Clare-20140518-00335.jpg


We went and helped out a few vineyards prune their cuttings early March and in exhange grabbed their cuttings for our own propogation.

We rigged up a planter box with in-floor heat (seen below), where we planted the grapes 3rd week of March. The box was installed in an unheated garage in order to retard the development of buds and promote the growth of roots with the heat underneath.

Clare-20140518-00331.jpg

Much to our delight, the box proved useful and the grape cuttings callused beautifully and had nice long roots.

We made our decisions based on the info located on this website:
http://www.bunchgrapes.com/cuttings.html

roots.jpg


Whooo!

Now on to the planting....(My back still hurts - but it's a good hurt!)

Here we're setting up two posts with a line in order to make sure our plant are nice and straight.
Side info:
- we planted the grapes between 7.5 ft and 6 feet between rows which is a bit on the short side for Nova Scotia as our seasons are short and this can create a difficult time for the sun to hit the grapes. We'll make up for that with careful canopy management.


Clare-20140517-00318.jpg


more measurements.....

Clare-20140518-00327.jpg

Clare-20140517-00317.jpg

We were also really lucky to get our hands on milk cartons for free!
6000 of them - we wont need all of those right now but definitely in the future!

We only have the Muscat left to plant this coming weekend and put some cartons on the remaining vines!

Clare-20140518-00329.jpg


Happy growing!
 
Last edited:
Here's a small update.

After vigourous weeding all summer - things are starting to take shape!

august 2014 - growing grapes.jpg
 
What an amazing project

Way to go!!
What a way to go!!
You have quite a way to go!!

I am totally impressed.

Best of luck in your venture. I look forward to following your success.

Jellyman (dave)
 
We're going to let them sit for now and trellis early spring.

There's only about 30-45 days left of growing out here.
 

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