Expansion

We just ordered 50 vines (Solaris SO4) @2.60 ea from Derek Pritchard of Winegrowers Supplies in Somerset England.  They will be shipped in early April. We wanted to buy some chardonnay vines to test but he wouldn't sell us any saying they were too late ripening for our area. Curious that someone would refuse to sell us something we wanted to try. We'll get them from another grower.

Now that we've had 4 vines to experiment with, hopefully we'll make fewer mistakes with the next batch. This is exciting.

Finally managed to prune and train

Last week, we had a spell of beautiful weather after several days of strong frost.  As it's already February and things are starting to bud, I thought it was time to take the plunge ad prune. I documented my work by taking one photo of each vine so I can compare this year's growth to Next year's. Here we are.

Red grape vines (Rondo) 

The red grape vines were variable in their take. Two did well, two did poorly and one is mediocre.