The Plan

We are sore. Wow. Achy. But look at all that was accomplished. It’s outstanding. We are awesome. First I marked off the spacing for the vines, sinking a bamboo stick in every seven feet. Then crossing slits were cut in the landscape fabric and 99 little holes were augered – that was an extreme workout. Some of the holes proved to be a little too damp to use, but they might dry out in time.

Anne was busy following my hole digging with planting. She finished all but three rows today. Each of our rows has nine vines. There is a ton of invasive grass on this hillside — we are hoping the fabric and mulch will take care of that. Anne carefully extracted all the little roots from the holes as she planted.

Next step is to install the grow tubes – they are tubes that help grapes grow

We live on 14 acres in Tama County, in a hilly area referred to as the Bohemian Alps. It gets windy in spring and today combined with low temps it was hell out there. Things need to be planted, though. I put on these “ear muffs” I use to block out the sound of our wood chipper. I rubberbanded the bottoms of my jeans to keep the wind from blowing up my pant legs. This helped, somewhat. I planted only 20% of the daylilies I had hoped to get in the ground today. Ordered these from Oakes Daylilies and was thoroughly impressed with the huge divisions they sent. They generously threw in the more spendy “bonus” daylily I requested. I’ll be ordering from them again soon.

We gots lots of mulch. We were buying mulch by the truck load for about $8.50/yard from Cedar Rapids compost facility. It’s nice stuff. Wood chips. Very dense. Then we decided we would need much more mulch much faster so we bought two truck-loads from Belle Plaine (Pierce Lumber Inc). They were super kind enough to arrange delivery. It’s basswood – a bit stringy, but smells great! We haven’t found anything online that says basswood is bad for grapes, so we hope it will be okay. Jake seems to like it.