I know I have mentioned our winter business working with grapevines, but I can't recall whether I've done a full post on it. Perhaps back in 2017 or '18? Even so, it seems like a good time to talk about it again.
Essentially it works like this- We get contracts from nurseries. Generally they also deal in assorted flowering trees and berries, but grapevines are their bread and butter so to speak..at least here in upstate NY where vineyards and wineries are plentiful.
The contract consists of many different grapes- Concord, Catawba, Niagara, Cayuga White to name a few of the seeded varieties, and there's also seedless such as Himrod, Lakemont, Vanessa etc.
Then we work out a deal with vineyards in the surrounding area- about a sixty mile radius from our house- after their trimmers come through the vines are left hanging on the wire, so they have to hire another crew to pull them down into the middle of the rows. Then another crew comes through that row with a machine and chops them up for mulch.
What we do is save them the labor cost of pulling those vines down in exchange for taking the viable ones home with us.
So we pull the vines into piles, then once done with the row we gather these piles into bundles, tie them and take them home.
Once at home we snip the long vines into 12 inch cuttings in a very specific way.
Firstly the vines have to be set on the table with the buds pointing away from you.
Then you make a straight cut across the bottom a couple centimeters from the bud and a diagonal cut a half an inch from the top bud. And this is important- there has to be at least three buds to ensure the cutting will root and grow when planted.
Since this is mother nature, every variety is a little different, for example this variety is Colobel and we generally get three buds per 12 inch cutting. Others it might take fourteen inches to ensure that third bud, and still others may have five or even six buds per 12 inches.
After that we bundle them into one hundreds with this wire:
I just took a load out to our main nursery yesterday and unfortunately didn't think to take pictures of the finished product, but essentially it looks like this except we only use one wire around the middle.
Then we stack four of them together and tie them with this rope, and generally load between 20,000-25,000 onto the truck for delivery.
We used to handle a much higher volume, our weekly loads were closer to 40-50 thousand, but that was when the Amish worked with us. These days we're hard-pressed to find sub contractors who are willing to work out in the cold, so we scaled back on volume.
Fortunately the prices also went up, so we still make a comparable salary.
*This is the driveway to our delivery location. The source of the majority of our contracts for the season. *
In years gone by this was just one of two locations for our biggest contracts, both up past Buffalo NY, heading towards the PA border around three hours from home.
Now we have this one, and one in Vermont for which we use UPS to ship. I would love to deliver it myself honestly, but it's a good six hour drive and would only be worthwhile if we could bring the bulk of his order at once.
It doesn't work that way, different vineyards trim at different times, so it may be weeks between different varieties. And they can't sit for that long or they run the risk of drying out.
And that is the essentials of what we do for our winter business. I'll likely do one more post at the end of the season, you can see what the vineyards look like in the spring, and also to tell the story of how we got into this in the first place.
I like to combine activities when I can, and since this is once again a Wednesday, I'm submitting it into the Wednesday Walk, an excellent initiative brought to us by 