​How can you ​plant a new vineyard?

We come back to speak about vineyard tasks as we published in some posts this year. This time, we had the option of speaking about vintage carried out in this season. However, we have preferred to speak about new vineyards what were planted in 2015... We'll speak about vintage in a future post.

A few weeks ago, our friend Oscar (who is from El Provencio) sent some pictures about his planting jobs in his new vineyard to us. Now, there is a new restructuring period so you can change your old vineyards (if they are more than 15 years old) in trellised vines or if you own vine rights you can plant new vineyards. Farmers can receive a refund of 57% of these planted works.

As Oscal told us and as you can see in his pictures, he planted a new vineyard. The planting framework is rectangular so rows are fixed at 3m and the distance between grapevines is about 1.4m (therefore, there are 2,280 grapevines per hectare). Once grapevines have been planted (whose price for each grapevine is about 1.33€), the drip irrigation system has to be installed. The main pipeline is buried at 1m (you can see Oscar while he was watering after planting because the drip irrigation system has not yet been installed). The pipe used in each row is 16mm diameter and each dropper is fixed at 70cm. A dropper can irrigate up 4 liters per minute using a pressure of 3​.5bar. The drip irrigation system has a compensation system to keep the same flow rate at the beginning and the end of the pipeline (it is ideal for long pipelines, e.g., of 300m or more).

Finally, you only have to install all posters. They are galvanized and are 2m height (posters used at the end of each row are 2.2m height). Each poster is fixed at 5,6m (between four grapevines) and after that, 5 wires are installed. Each wire has a special function: ​the first wire is used to tie irrigation pipe and it is installed at 30cm from ground. The second wire is installed at 85cm from ground and it is used to allow grapevines to grow. The third, fourth and fifth wires are used when grapevines are producing grapes and they are fixed at 1.1m, 1.3m and 1.4m... After three years, ​Oscar will be harvesting grapes!!

Versión en español.

Sweeping and crushing vine shoots

Once we spoke about prepruning tasks in this post, we carried out the manual pruning. After that, cleaning and picking up jobs have arrived. This is the last job in the annual pruning period.

We visited our friend Oscar again when he worked in his vineyard near his village, El Provencio - Cuenca. We have to remark they have a great wine thanks to the passionate farmers put every days.

As you can see in our videos and pictures, Oscar's vineyard was absolutely clean after this work. We published some posts about this task, where we can see some farmers who don't crush vine shoots because they are picked up to burn. In another post, we discussed about problems if you don't use a front sweeper. Oscar think the best option is crushing vine shoot to generate organic matter. He has to be really careful if there were any disease in the vine shoots, in this case they have to be burned.

We tested the General Agrícola crushing machine, as you can see in our second video... the results were really pretty convincing. Each vine shoot is torn in small pieces in order to quick rottenness when he will harrow vineyard... we are going to speak about this harrowing task in a future post.

Versión en español.

Videos:

Pictures: