Harvest 2024 begins.

All of our estate fruit, estimated at around 300 pounds, was unfortunately enjoyed by raccoons this year. Its not the first time they have cleaned us out, a small family of raccoons can eliminate out small harvest in just a couple of nights, we are going to try to make sure it is the last. Unfortunately, planting a small vineyard is often only enough to feed the local wildlife population while leaving no grapes for the overworked vigneron.

Fortunately, we are not the only grape growers in Missouri and we were able to procure a little more than 2 tons of Norton from Cave Vineyard in Ste. Genevieve. The grapes were unloaded late last night and we plan to begin direct pressing them tonight. And so it begins..

The buds are out, the bugs are out.

Just one week after planting the new Redstone Vineyard and many of the buds are already pushing. The weather has been really favorable to new growth, warm days and plenty of rain, but, these conditions are not exclusively beneficial for plants. They also triggered an eruption of insect life that was not present last week, most notably, the first Cicadas of what has been reported to be a once in a lifetime emergence.

Pictured above, a Cicada that found a resting place on one of our new vines after dawning its adult form. Cicadas are beautiful and I personally love the almost deafening noise they are able to produce in large numbers, but we are slightly worried as they have been known to damage young grapes by laying eggs inside the woody stem. There is nothing to be done because there are not really any ways to prevent this without putting insect netting over the whole vineyard, which if not impossible is certainly impractical.

Another insect also made its debut in the vineyard this week. I spotted what are most likely Armyworms in our more established Vineyard. They are known to have a healthy appetite for grape leaves and if given the chance will help themselves to a tremendous amount of foliage. I went ahead and sprayed the vines with Kaolin Clay in order to make the leaves less appealing. The clay is totally natural and will not harm any insects but the tiny clay particles are quite annoying for the bugs to chew through, think if it like bread that has been baked with a cup of sand added to the dough. Not very nice. It’s important to keep an eye on these pests and we will see how they persist.

But alas, there are larger threats on the horizon. Most of this past weekend was spent installing a high voltage electric fence to keep deer out of the Redstone Vineyard. Deer love tender grape shoots and group of them can easily consume all our young vines in a day or less. Hopefully one good shock will send them looking elsewhere. P.s the shock of the fence is very starting but not dangerous. I accidentally tried it out and can now confirm that it’s working just fine. We are extremely grateful for a small grant that we received to help cover the cost of the fence awarded to us by the Missouri Coalition for the Environment’s Known and Grown initiative. They provided grants of $1000 and under to help small farmers with projects like ours. Learn more here https://moenvironment.org/blog/knownandgrownstl/

With a little help from our friends.. and family

A vineyard is planted! 275 Vines in the ground in about 4 hours. With a lot of help from family (It’s a lot harder to get friends to commit to manual labor on a Saturday afternoon). While it threatened to rain the whole time the weather held off till we were finished and the rain came the following evening just in time to water the grapes in typically a job that would take an additional 4 hours).

And now we wait and work and tend to the vines. With one eye on the task at hand and the other looking ahead to future harvests.

And thy name was..

Names, imbued with meaning, are powerful incantations that, not only describe, but create the world around us. For naming this vineyard we only had to look down at the rich iron deposits streaked through every piece of sedimentary sandstone our Dirt Dog ripper brought tumbling to the surface. It would have been easy to call this place “Red Rocks”. Unfortunately, that name was already taken by a somewhat popular concert venue. Luckily, whomever named the county road that runs directly adjacent to the vineyard, already did the work for us. Redstone was the name they chose. But, if you asked them they’d probably say that building the road was harder than naming it. Funny how a name, that seemed so ordinary as a road, carries so much weight as a Vineyard. Speaking of carrying weight we moved over 8000 lbs of composted cow manure and planted some apples.

To new beginnings.

This past saturday was spend preparing for the coming vines, own rooted Vidal Blanc that will be planted on a little over 0.5 acre of an east facing slope that looks toward the pond. The vidal will share the space with a small planting of Apple trees started from seeds that were collected from Arkansas Black apples last fall. All these things are very exciting and represent a large amount of labor and hope in the future, the real reason for this post is to share a new farm implement! We picked up this Dirt Dog ripper a couple weeks ago and finally got to try it out on saturday.

Rippers improve aeration in the soil as well as breaking up our hard pan clay and making a more desirable planting bed for the coming vines. It is essentially a knife that cuts a thin line through the soil and will cause less erosion than a plough while still breaking up our heavy soils. Enjoy the video if my dad on our old ford tractor with ripper in toe.