Starting a Vineyard from scratch. Part 2 - Planting Vines

Okay it's quite an exciting day today because we've actually got our vines that have arrived today. Would you believe that inside this box there's 300 300 vines which look a little bit like that. I think they're bundled in 20s and these are a Bacchus variety on an SO4 rootstock and the the tops are coated with wax to keep the buds or the potential buds nice and moist I guess and the roots look in good condition but they've arrived and we haven't yet got our vineyard ready to plant them so it's not too much of a disaster so I'm going to put the vines just in a bed give them a nice good watering so they don't dry out and then in probably about two three maybe four weeks time we should be ready to transplant them from here into the vineyard. Okay these are the vines that we planted about a month ago just in the raised bed here just to keep the roots moist. Okay after we've plowed the field and got it all nice and level it's now time for planting our vines in our nice bare field as you can see. Anyway Sonia's starting to mark out two and a half meter width between the rows and the distance between the vines is going to be roughly one and a half meters so each row it's only a small field but each row is going to have 27 28 vines on each row we're going to have 10 to 11 rows so that's all we're doing so very sort of heathcliff episode in that I've just made a board which is two and a half meters long and measuring it out along the string so we get nice straight straight rows and that's about it very simple. To get the end posts at a rough 20 degree angle I made a very simple jig which is 20 degrees and all I'm going to do is just put that next to my hole auger machine when I drive the holes or drive the auger into the ground and that should at least start the post off in the right direction. between the rows and this is my meter and a half and 75 centimeter jig so that I get the right spacing at the end of the rows so what I'm doing that's this little mark here is where a vine's going to go and so 75 centimeters in from the last plant that's where we put our post and where these two boards come together that's where we're going to put a post so just about there there we go so that's where our post is going to go and that's where we're going to drill our hole so just get the string nice and tight so that our vines are going to be in a nice straight a nice straight line and what we've done on the string itself is marked off every meter and a half we put a little twist tie in not that one because that's where I joined the rope but this one here is a meter and a half away and the next one another meter and a half away so all we've got to do now with the post auger is to drill a hole where one of those cable ties is and put a plant in so that's what we're going to do now right okay we're ready for planting this is our little Bacchus variety white wine vine and as you can see it's just starting to come into leaf which is good and we've got a nice root on the end of it there which is good and the graft union is just here so it's on a rootstock a SO4 rootstock this particular one which means it's a little bit better for difficult draining soils and various other things but the most important thing is that it's grafted which means it's resistant to a whole heap of bugs and pests and it should be resilient I can't remember the exact name of the bugs and I don't know parasites I guess that it's resistant to anyway we're going to put the plant them and we're going to leave about 10 centimeters below the graft union there so around about that sort of level and give it a good pack down it's been raining a lot these last 24 hours so there's plenty of moisture in the ground for it to start and hopefully that should grow into a nice vine these roots dry out quite quickly so you want to put them in the ground as soon as you can put some soil tuck that in make sure that the graft union there is about 10 centimeters from the surface of the ground give it a nice heel in and move on to the next after planting just give it a good soak just so that those roots bed in nicely next thing we do is we just put some rabbit netting around each vine and we use this sort of diamond shaped plastic netting with the ends turned up just it's just rolled up over itself we just put that gently over and then we put some soil where it's looped up just to sort of anchor it down a little bit just give it some weight at the bottom like so didn't have to be that neat and tidy and then once that's done we just put a stake through the top and the bottom like so and then that's a bit of protection from the rabbits or any deer that come in now here's the vine we've planted um this is quite a good example i think we've got the grafting union there which is about uh 10 centimeters or so above the ground which is good uh we've got the scion which is this area here and they're shooting there's lots of little buds on here there's two two i think coming through here which you can just about say maybe one um anyway the ones which are absolutely ideal the ones closest to the center of the if sometimes you get ones coming down along you know underneath they can just be snapped off we don't want shoots which are coming downwards we want ones which are coming going upwards obviously and ideally we don't want ones right at the end of these little twig bits here they just tend to be a bit delicate but ones right in the center there they're absolutely ideal so i'm hoping this little one is going to do well here's another one which is showing a couple of shoots three shoots all together uh there's a nice center one there that tall one which is doing work really well there's another little side one there and there's a tiny one just there coming through as well um i'm not going to touch these until they grow a little bit bigger and then i'll decide which one to keep to train up the the rod here up to the main trellis line but that one's looking nice okay the final one i'm going to show you this one's got multiple buds on which is a good sign i'll leave these three top ones just to see which one develops into the the best shoot but again we've got this downward pointing one there which we don't want so we can literally just snap that one off just so all the energy goes into the other ones okay we've got all the vines in the ground now all 300 it's taken slightly less than a week to get all the vines in the ground since the local farmer did all our plowing and harrowing and seeding of the soil so even though the ground is still you know pretty bare looking it should be about another week or so before we should see the green shoots of the grass seed coming up at least we've got the vines in the ground which is what i really wanted so as you can see we've got all the rabbit guards around every single vine as well as the stakes we've got the end posts in you can see that and really the next stage is getting the main trellis wire in along the rows and then tying the these steel posts to the or steel rods to the main trellis wire once we've done that what we're really then trying to look for is the shoots coming up from the vines in a nice straight orderly fashion up the up the stake up to the main wire now of course that's not going to happen because our plants never really do what you want them to do so we're going to have a look at them and pick out any buds and things which are growing in the wrong direction and we really want buds or