The Grape Trellis

The grape trellis is finally finished, and the vines have been trained and pruned. Things are finally taking shape:


We're training the vines in a pretty classic style to have a central leader with arms trailing out along the trellis on either side (known as a 6-arm kniffin). You can see here that this vine only just reaches to the top of the second rung this year, but in the future it should have three arms on each side fanning out from the center. (You can also see that we attached a new rain gauge to one of the posts — it has gotten a workout recently!)


The posts of the trellis are 4x4 pressure treated (sorry, but cedar was like five times as expensive, and we like to pay the mortgage regularly) posts. They are 8-foot posts, three feet of which are sunk into the ground. Kirk dug a 40 inch hole and backfilled it with six inches of stone for a base, leaving five foot posts. Then he repeated that step eleven more times. That’s lots of digging, and I didn't help with any of it. (Too busy pulling weeds.)


We used beefy bamboo poles for our crosspieces, since we had it leftover from some fencing from the Red House. It's free and should be very sturdy. To insert them, Kirk drilled holes in the posts, then predrilled the bamboo and locked them together with a 3-inch screw. The poles are set 16 inches part from each other.  


At the center path, there is an extra post and some small crosspieces on either side to form an arbor. Eventually we will cap it with a little roof so the vines can grow up and over, making a little doorway over the path to the lawn. We'd also like to attach a small bench to the posts on either side of that little doorway. We left room to do so, but that project will wait.


This view of the trellis from the lawn gives you an idea of where the arbor part will be. Imagine a peaked roof spanning the path and bridging those double posts. Also, imagine two small benches facing each other under that roof on either side of the path. 


Best of all, it looks like we should get some grapes this year! Last year we had to pick off our baby grapes to get the vines established, but this year six of our eight vines look like they will bear fruit. We just might be able to make the leap to a No Buying Fruits and Veggies Challenge by the end of this summer!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What to Do With an Unripe Watermelon

Image
Back on the first weekend of August we were so excited to see how big our watermelons were getting. We checked all the signs of ripeness: good sound, firm skin, yellow bottom. So Kirk brought one in: And we sliced it open: Shit. This is not meant to be a yellow watermelon. It only even looks that way in the photo because of the lighting — it's really white throughout. It's Sweet Favorite, and it's supposed to be red.  After the huge wave of disappointment rolled through the room, we all took a bite anyway.  It's not sweet, but it's not sour or bitter, either. It tastes like watermelon, just without the sugar. Kind of like a watermelon-flavored cucumber. It's too big to let go to waste, and we felt obligated to wrap it up and keep it in the fridge until we figured out something to with it.   Dish #1: Watermelon Kachumber Kachumber is an Indian salad that is normally made with cucumber. Here we used some of our unripe w
Read more

So Where's Everybody From?

Image
I don't have any new garden pictures or updates for you today. I have to say, it's getting kind of hard to get a good photo during the one hour of waning daylight left by the time I get home from work. These are the darkest days now, as we hurtle toward the solstice. Without any photos for me to share with you today, I thought it would be a good time to ask: Where're y'all from? If you have never kept a blog of your own, you might not know that the writer of one gets a bunch of stats about who has hit on the webpage. Most of it's not very interesting: I don't care how many of you use your iPhone vs. a PC or what browser you use to surf the web. The one interesting part, though, is the map . Blogger keeps track of what country readers are in when they check out my page. It's fascinating! Here's my readership map for November: I figured my readers were mostly my Facebook friends, and I know where they are. But now my list of countries is gettin
Read more

Last Weekend of Winter

Image
It's the last weekend of winter! Next weekend we'll be beyond the equinox, and the days will be ever-so-slightly longer than the nights.  We still have snow on the ground, lots of wind, and temperatures in the 30s, but we plowed ahead with our almost-spring garden chores anyway. Here's what we did this weekend: 1. Got the chickens out on the raised bed where to prep the soil for planting greens: 2. Poked around the greenhouse tunnels to harvest the last veggies: parsnips and a couple leeks, plus a few leftover fall cabbages for the chickens (which they were very  excited about). We do still have some spinach, mache and kale left as well, but not much. 3. Improved the maple sugaring set-up by building a bigger firebox: Kirk used leftover bricks we had lying around to make a floor (so as not to ruin the bricks on our patio), then got nine cinderblocks to make the three walls of the firebox (solid side toward the fire). He also picked up some steel
Read more