When the Barbera vines at Sorella Ridge emerged from their winter slumber several days ago, they took off with abandon.  Every day when I get home from work and walk the rows many of the shoots have literally grown a few inches in just one day. The first thought that comes to mind when I look out and see all of my vines growing right in front of my eyes is the firefighting phrase “fully involved”[1]. Like an aggressive fire that is moving in all directions, the vines too are teeming with growth. Life indeed is good in my little vineyard!

The downside of all this activity is that I’ve had to catch up on some of my vineyard duties. The most important task at hand was to install the upper wires on my trellising system. With the new shoots reaching towards the sun, I needed something for them to grab onto. Originally I had planned on just a single wire for both the upper and lower supports. Recently, however, I’ve been rethinking the upper wire and thought that 2 wires would result in a fuller canopy. The idea for the upper support is that the shoots grow vertically inside the top wires, over the wires to either side, and back down towards the ground. Since the fruit zone for the vines is just above the lower wire, the growth from the shoots coming back down from the top wires provides a shade canopy for the clusters.

I had two concerns with a 2-wire upper support. First, since my rows are pretty narrow, I had to be careful to keep these wires somewhat close together. If they were too wide, there would be a risk of the rows growing into each other and blocking sunlight to the clusters. Besides uneven ripening of fruit, this would make the vineyard much harder to maintain. Second, since the  support stakes that I installed in the middle of the rows weren’t designed specifically for a vineyard, I was concerned that I wouldn’t be able to find wire support attachments that would work for my stakes. To hopefully solve these concerns, I visited Valley Vineyard Supply in Lodi.

It turns out that Valley Vineyard had multiple wire support attachments and at various widths. They had supports that were 4″, 6″, 8″, and 12″ inches wide (and probably wider). After eyeballing each length, I settled on the 8″ supports. Also, they had simple U-bolt assemblies that would fit my stakes perfectly. The staff was very friendly and was eager to help even a residential grower like me. See the photo below for one of the installed wire supports.

So with the upper wire supports installed, the next task was to pick up the necessary permit and materials for dusting the vines. More on this adventure later…

[1]I picked up the term “fully involved” from my sister and brother in-law. They’re not firefighters, though. They are in the process of opening a Firehouse Subs restaurant in Las Vegas. Firehouse Subs was started by firefighters in Florida and they use “fully involved” to describe one of their sandwiches with everything.