It turns out that the first thing you have to do after you decide where you are putting your vineyard is to prepare the soil. Now, I have prepared lots of vegetable garden plots, and planted numerous flower and herb gardens, but nothing prepared me for the process of planting a vineyard.
See, the first thing you do is hire a backhoe and a backhoe operator. You do this during the fall or winter before you want to plant any grapes. (We chose winter, for some reason. I think it had to do with available cash.) The guy comes on a day when it isn’t too wet (you hope), and proceeds to dig long trenches along the length of every row.
Our property is infested with crab grass, and we didn’t want that grass mixed in with the dirt our grapes would be growing in. So first, we had him scrape the turf and topsoil off each row and set it aside. Then he dug all the dirt out of a trench three feet wide and three feet deep and piled it next to the trench. After that, he was to push the dirt he just dug out of the trench back into it. This mixes the soil up and breaks up the hard pan and gives the grapes a deep place to send their roots.
This also makes the back hoe operator look at you like you have gone certifiably insane. Fortunately, these guys are used to dealing with crazy people and just doing what they want regardless of how ridiculous and pointless it seems to them. “It’s your money,” is their attitude. “You want me to dig a hole and then fill it right back up? Fine by me. That’s $60.00 per hour, your money.”
Our backhoe operator was exceedingly talented. The way he produced perfectly straight trenches was a joy to see. Of course, the job took a lot longer than we had initially thought it would, but that wasn’t the backhoe guy’s fault. He put his bucket into the dirt for the first bite out of the trench after he had removed the turf, and found an old water line nobody knew was there.
Fortunately, he did not break it. Well, at least not right then. He got off his machine and walked over to the house, and politely knocked on the door. “I need to know what you want me to do about this water line,” he said very calmly.
“Water line? What water line?” was our equally calm response. We all walked out and stood around looking at the nascent trench. Hmm. Definitely a water line, properly buried two feet deep. The Dig-rite guy hadn’t found it with his metal detector, and no one knew whether it actually had water in it, or if it was connected to our house water system. It was running out towards the center of the field, parallel to the trench that was being dug.
By some fortuituos chance, we had chosen the site of the first trench so that this water line was just inside the trench about two inches. If we had chosen to place our first flag in the ground six inches farther north, we would never have known of the existence of the water line. We figured it probably had served the barn and workshops that had once existed on the acre designated for the vineyard. We knew there had been buildings there because we could see the outlines of their old foundations etched into the grass of the field.
After a certain amount of discussion, we decided that the backhoe guy should try to cut the trench for the vineyard in without breaking the water line, and then if it had water in it we would be able to tap it halfway out into the field and it would provide a convenient spigot for irrigating the grapes. We felt quite lucky that it existed at all, and that we had found it.
As it turned out, the water line ran halfway out into the field and then made a right angle turn north. As water lines are wont to do, it gave no warning that it was planning on making this turn. So, when the backhoe operator took the crucial bite of soil and rock that contained the turn, the water line broke and we immediately had conclusive proof that it was connected to our water meter and did have water in it. He came running into the house to give us the good news.
Jim immediately turned the water off at the meter, and made an unscheduled trip to the hardware store so the broken line could be capped. This required a period of waiting while the water that had spewed from the broken pipe into the trench drained away. After the first trench had been completely dug and then refilled, we placed a survey flag at the place where the pipe was, planning to come back later and install the faucet after all the earth moving was done.
Well, all the excitement about the water line, and the painstaking backhoe work to cut the trench parallel to it and not break it, had taken a long time. Then, it turned out that the soil at the far eastern end of the trenches was very wet, and the backhoe guy didn’t quite get stuck there. Also, there was the problem of the large pieces of old concrete foundation that had to be removed from the second trench. Anyway, the fourth and last trench did not get finished until the next day.
Then it was Jim’s turn to operate equipment. We went down to our local equipment and tool rental place, and rented a little bobcat front loader for a day. In addition to scraping off the turf that was in between the vineyard rows and moving it, Jim moved all the piles of turf left behind by the backhoe work up to the “work area” on the northeast side of the property. This is the spot where we pile prunings that need to be ground up for compost, stash the 16 yards of manure we purchased, pile up the rock collection that is to be used for a dry stack stone wall sometime, and also pile the extra dirt from the vineyard project.
After all that dirt got moved, it made a grand pile, and the vineyard was a muddy mess with four raw windrows of red dirt studded with rocks of every size from as big as a dog to pea sized. We let it sit all winter.
In the spring, before the vines came, Jim spent an intense week going along the rows and pitching the rocks out of the dirt piles into the spaces between them. He found the end of the water line, which wasn’t as easy as we thought it was going to be due to the fact that the flag marking it disappeared during the winter. After Jim dug a couple of fruitless holes, I did some impromptu dowsing and successfully located the end of the pipe. The faucet was installed, the rows of dirt got smoothed out, and we were ready for the young grape plants to arrive.
Not a moment too soon, either. The UPS driver delivered them the very next day.
the havens 
very interesting post! I wish I could write like you…
mike