Our Journey Begins

How to Tame Your Vineyard: Starting Lakeside Valley Vineyards' Journey

We are coming into our second season with three varieties. I'm not going to say it's been easy. There is a lot that goes into growing grapes, and we have a little over five hundred plants in the ground across two acres and almost thirty rows. And we will be adding another two hundred plants to the mix in May.

We have three varieties at Lakeside Valley Vineyards. Two are variations of Muscadine that we ordered from Greg Ison at Ison's Nursery & Vineyard. (You can check them out at isons.com.) We have Carlos Muscadine and Pineapple Muscadine in our lakeside vineyard. And our main crop is Crimson Cabernet stock that we bought, under contract, from the fine folks at Davis Viticulture. Crim Cab is a hybrid of a robust American vine called Norton and a European vine called Cabernet Sauvignon.

Truth? We had no first-hand experience with any of this until last spring when the proverbial rubber met the road. Or in this case, I bought a tractor and a 16x8 trailer that I pull behind my 2013 Mercedes ML350, as needed. (I can't make myself trade it for a pickup.) Hey! It's paid for...

But I digress. After clearing the land for the vineyard... and much plowing and tilling and plowing and spreading lime and plowing... you get the picture. We were ready to lay out the vineyard and start planting. The pressure was on because we already had over 500 plants sitting on the wrap-around porches of our B&B, and now that we were ready to start planting, the sky opened up and poured spring rains in one great deluge after another, turning our vineyard into soup.

It was great to have the moisture in the ground, but our clay-heavy soil that I'd just loosened up with the plow was now drying into what might as well have been concrete. And our inaugural planting party turned into a two-acre torture chamber. Family and friends still love me, though they do have every reason to flinch should I ask for volunteers again in the future.

We had two days of planting and, unfortunately, did not get it all done. But it was an impressive push. With 200 more plants still to go, Sue reached out to the Ag teacher at our daughter's school and, brilliant as she is, arranged to have the remaining Crim Cab get the attention of the local Jr. High students until the next planting season, which now rapidly approaches.

I had the brilliant idea of setting the t-posts using a combo of post driver and tractor bucket. The idea was to get it started with the post driver and then hop on the tractor, put the bucket on the top, and gently apply hydraulic pressure to push the post into the ground... NOPE!

Then I went to Home Depot and rented a gas-powered post driver, which was great and reliable. BUT, the t-posts were 8' tall. I'm not. So, I put the old-school post-driver AND the gas-powered version into the bucket of my tractor and drove the tractor up to each post location, put the tractor brake on, lifted the bucket up about two and a half feet, got outta the driver's seat, and hopped up into the bucket. I got the post started with the manual driver. Then I pulled the starter crank on the gas-powered driver and picked the beast up over my head (It was heavy--I'm NOT a beast). I lined up the pounder on top of the post and pulled the throttle. V v v v v v v v v v very effective tool!

With few exceptions, I got a couple hundred t-posts in the ground. And I'll tell ya--in the heat of North Georgia, I lost some weight, y'all!

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There is more to come on how this thing got going. So, stay tuned and get some friends to check in too.