Snowden Family Orchard & Vineyard

Everyone is ready to plant cover crops as long as there’s payment in rootbeer!

We always try to find a use for everything in the vineyard but this is a first. The wine making process throws off a bunch of grape skins and seeds. We compost the skins to fertilize the fruit trees and this year we’ve ground the seeds and pressed them for oil. The oil will be blended with bees wax from our hives to make hand balm, which will be nice to have each day after the spring work next season. The leftover pressings will make perfect fire starters as we get into cooler weather.

The birds forced us to harvest the early ripening Lomanto today instead of next week like we had planned. This variety is only a few rows so we were able to quickly get them in, net wrap a few rows on soon to ripen varieties and crush/destem before going in the fermentation tank.

Beat it, birds!!! Today we netted up a few vines, measured the sugar and checked the ph. We’re getting close to harvest!

Early ripening varieties starting to turn red!

A bunch of bunches!

Getting some excellent clusters of lomanto. They are our earliest ripening variety and act as a bit of a sentry for the later varieties in the vineyard. We have a little Japanese beatle action but we also have not trimmed the canopy so for now, we’ll just keep an eye on it. We have some ants and wasps doing a bang up job hunting other pests. We’ll start monitoring sugar levels as soon as the grapes turn red. Soon after, we’ll put on the nets to keep the birds out.

Taking barrel samples is tough work!

We got grapes and a kudzu destroying dog!