As May approaches, we are realizing we really need to kick it in gear. Every day that goes by we think by the end of that day we will be able to finish the fence... Not the case. BUT, very, very, soon. We did have to put the fence on hold for a couple hours, however, and mark out our vineyard rows. This seemed like a daunting task when we set out to decide how we would actually accomplish this. With experienced farmers in the family, this task was simplified...
Dad... Brilliant farmer, father, and equipment modifier, (amongst other things). We hooked up a row cultivator to a 8420 John Deere tractor and jacked up and chained all but two row units to give us the spacing of 10 feet between rows.
Saving us even more time - Seth, (king of technology), set up his auto steer GPS system in the tractor and locked in at 0 degrees (North) and 180 degrees (South), and tractor spacing of every 20 feet. To begin the row, the computer would tell us when the tractor was on the right mark, Seth would lock the steering and the tractor would basically drive itself to the end of the row. We were able to mark all of the vineyard rows in just about two hours going perfectly north to south and with a spacing of exactly 10 feet between rows. This would have taken us days to do on our own but with the help of family it went very smoothly.
Next on our list... We will be spraying round-up using a four foot wide sprayer attached to a four-wheeler, to kill the grass under the vines. We did receive our soil samples back from ISU, which were totally different from our first sampling, but we are waiting to receive our recommendations. Once we receive those, we will be able to apply our amendments and use a rotary tiller to incorporate.
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