Wine from 200 Vines Part 2: Layout and Soil Preparation

One of the challenges over the last summer has been the hot, dry north sun killing many of the plants in our garden. Advice from Bruce at Chalmers Vineyard suggests that some new vineyards are being planted in an East-West orientation instead of the tradtional North-South to enable leaves to shade fruit during the hot, dry months of February to April, leading up to harvest.

Therefore the site was pegged out in an East-West orientation.

The goal here was to mark out the rows to enable a tractor to come in and rip. Ripping breaks the compacted soil and allows nutrients and moisture to deeply penetrate the land. In turn, the vines will be able to send roots down to find water, thereby minimising irrigation - a key goal in the process.

Row spacing is 3 metres as advised from several wineries. Overall row length for ripping is calulated on a vine spacing of 1.5 metres, plus an extra 1 metre before and after the first and last vines respectively. This means for 25 vines the length is (24 x 1.5) + (2 x 1) = 38 metres. Pegs were then put in an addtional 3 metres before and after this to avoid them being dug up by the tractor, which means peg spacing of 38 + (2x3) = 44 metres.

We are trying to avoid ripping in the areas where the fencing end-assemblies will be, to ensure they are in stable ground.

Measuring the row spacing and marking with chalk.

Using string to align the pegs.

Now that the site is pegged out the ripping can occur. This is done via a single, winged tine (known as a Yeoman's Plough) which can rip to about 500mm deep. The rig is also fitted with a spinning plough to help break up the topsoil and kill weeds. The tractor made two passes over the ground to ensure a deep rip.

Here are some photos of the ripping process:

The finished result.

Now we have prepared the soil, we move on to a standard approach for growing fruit trees. Add gypsum, adjust the pH, fertilise and sow a green manure crop.

Gypsum was bought in bulk from Dellavedova in Maryborough. 350kg for $27 is great value. This was applied evenly to all 8 rows.

A pH tester (bought from the local Home Hardware) showed the soil at three different locations to be a surpriing pH7. It was fully expected that the pH would be acidic (< 7) and that lime would be required. It was good to avoid this step.

Finally, a full trailer load of chicken manure was bought for $13.20 from Hazeldene's Chicken Farm at Bendigo. This is great value because they will fill whatever size tray you have for that price. This is also a good way to ferilise the area as the chook poo is mixed with a lot of grain husks from the chicken feed which adds an additional amount of organic matter to the soil which will rot away over time.

At the same time as the fertiliser is added, a green manure crop is also sown.

Green manure crops are a mixture of seeds from cereal and legumes that help to fix nitrogen in the soil and are also ploughed back in 6 weeks after sowing to add further organic matter.

The green manure seed mixture was bought from Bush's Produce in Bendigo. They recommended 100g per square metre. We have 320 square metres, therefore we need 3.2kg. We purchased 10kg for $25 so that we could sow additional crops if necessary.

This was a mixture of barley, wheat, oats, peas and lupins, 50:50 cereals:legumes.

Here is a photo of fertilising and sowing:

Sowing a green manure crop.

Now that the preparation works are complete we are relying on Autumn and Winter rains to wet the soil and germinate the seeds.

We expect to be ploughing the manure crop in 6 weeks, before any hard stems develop which facilitates the decomposition process.