Growing the grapes.....Northumberland (UK) style!

So far this year, Summer has been good!  Here's the latest on my vines and happenings in the vin-garden!

The above right and left photos show the first planted up row of vines.  I have spaced the first row of vines fairly wide apart (6'8"/1 Matt) as once I have planted up the further rows, there will not be much air flow around in this area.  This area is sheltered by the wall and as I progress with the rows of vines, these will help shelter this area from the Easterly winds.  Although shelter is good, some air flow is required for a healthy crop.  I.e. It helps reduce mildew and other issues.

I didn't plant this row up at the most ideal time, more upon a whim with some cheap vines.  I was eager to get the 'vin' in the garden...

All the vines I have added this year, including the ones along the wall are showing good promise.  The top centre photo is the only cloned vine from the vine in my garden at home.  This cutting was produced completely organically and has never experienced any fertilizers.  I have noticed this vine has put on nearly no where near as much growth compared to the 15 or so various different vines I have purchased (which all had fertilizer in the pots at point of purchase).  The leaf on the cloned planet however is far more healthy than the bought vines, as shown below.

Bought

Clone

Despite the clone being smaller, I do think it will catch up as I believe it will naturally adjust to the soils quicker than the plants that have been relying on fertilizers. 

In between the vines, I have been planting up geraniums and lavender.  These are complimentary plants for grapevines among others such as roses and nasturtium.  Combine this with the chickens roaming about the place, scratching and shitting where they please, this makes the vineyard extremely close to being a bio-dynamic vineyard.

Bio-dynamic farming is the next step up from organic farming.  It is something that I believe could work very well for this particular project.  I don't want to bang my hippy drum about it or go on like some sort of bare footed eco warrior but I do believe that there's a lot of good in this and it's not all just hocus pocus.  Do your own research and make up your own mind, it may not save the world but what will?!

This method also allows me to grow perennial plants and positively welcomes things like wildlife, ponds and habitats within the growing area.  

There's the pond in the photo, there's been an absolute buzz of wildlife.  Frogs, Pond skaters, Water boatmen, Dragonflies and many different birds have been visiting the pond recently.  The spring water is used to top up the pond as I use the pond for irrigation and I do believe that the lack of chlorine in the water is why the pond has been so successful in becoming established in less than a year.  At this point I can connect the pipe which comes over the wall from the spring to another pipe which goes under ground to the centre of the garden and resurfaces to fill a large tank (as shown below).  This tank is about 6'4" in height and is dug in to the ground, it can hold about 2000 gallons.  

This system is not fault free, I am currently suffering an issue with air lock.  I feel like this will be a project in its self and is a one for over the winter so it it will be ready for next years growing season.  

A couple of pictures of my herbaceous plants above which have helped invite many pollinating insects in to the garden.

About two weeks ago in this area of the garden I saw three little owls (parent and young I think).  I quite often see an owl sitting on the wall too but it's very camera shy.  

The above are my veg plots!

I've had success and failure growing veg this year, it wasn't something I was particularly planning.  The success is all down to very positive soil.  The failure is down to hot weather and irrigation issues.  

No more progression on the poly-tunnel (see below) however I am thinking about making a land mass log burning heater...again another project to follow!

 Here are a few more pictures of what's going down in the yard....

Caterpillar party - Bank Holiday Monday

Noisy

You haven't got a good garden if you haven't got a compost heap...

Holey Moley!

Forbidden fruit....eat this and I'll throw you out!

Pink shelter belta!

Favela Party!

Shanty Town Shindig!

Now go away and do something interesting...but read my next post!

Cheers!

Wine and Vin-garden up date!

Hello!!!  Sorry I haven't added to the blog for a while, I've been too busy gardening and working on the vineyard as and when I can.  I must stress that this project is just at the minute my hobby and anything I do in there happens on a weekend and an occasional evening.  Being busy at work has however allowed me to keep away from the clearing wine from the home vine a lot longer than previous years!

So, the wine has been crushed then fermented followed by the must (skin, stalks and pips) being removed from the vessels.  This happened around three weeks after Christmas.  After this I allowed the wine to sit for a few weeks to naturally settle.  Below shows a photo of a glass demijohn of the wine.  At the bottom you can see the sediment.

You can see the difference between the clear wine on the left and the spent yeast from the bottom of the demijohn on the glass on the right.  The yeast was separated from the wine using a siphoning tube.  

After this, I added wine finings to drag the smaller particles out of the wine.  At the moment (June), the wine is ready to be bottled, it's much clearer and I've sampled it - it tastes great!  This years brew has been darker in colour than previous years which I'm happy with, it has been very colourless in the past.

In other news, I've taken some clones of my vine so I can carry this strain on up to the vin-garden.  I'm fairly confident they'll have a happy, productive life there!  If each of these vines produce the same amount of wine as their mother plant has this year, I could literally swim in wine!

I made a film in the Spring of the garden, it shows a lot of change.  I'll get a new film sorted soon where you'll see the growth and progression of nature (things are growing quick up there).

I've lost count of the amount of the amount of times someone has said to me "you can't grow grapes in Newcastle".  Well, I grew the grapes, made fine wine, made more grapevines and I'm now drinking the wine so kiss my home brew drunken ass!

Winter in the Vineyard...

8 months in...

I've made a film to show you the progression of the Vin-garden!  

Don't forget to subscribe to my blog and have a very Merry Christmas!!

THE GRAPE BIG HARVEST

The grapes get it...

The first film below is from the end of September when I decided to pick the grapes from the vine in my garden.  

What the film doesn't show is the EPIC amount of time it took to harvest the grapes.  I was up the ladder until it got dark.

 

Ladders, secateurs and pink bag - all essential equipment for the job!

Here's a film showing the final harvest.

The picture below shows 2 five gallon fermenting buckets each containing equal amounts of crushed grapes (all of the grape - skins, stalk, seeds).  This is what people refer to as Must.  I've also added 5 campden tablets in to each preventing bacteria growth.  The next stage is to transfer the Must in to the barrels behind the buckets in the photo.  Shout out to Sally Pearl, the dog in the photo!

The next photo shows the Must in the barrels, at this stage I have added 5 lemons and 5 apples to each barrel.  Citric acid from the lemons, and tannin from the apples help with the brewing process.  At this point I also made a syrup of 2 kg of sugar per barrel, last year I used 4 kg of sugar which still tasted great but was a little heavy on the alcohol side!  Finally I added the magic ingredient, yeast nutrients.

Here are the vessels with their lids on with the water bubblers on top.  They allow the gas which occurs during fermentation to escape whilst forming an air tight seal stopping contamination and/or oxidization. 

Within ten minutes of the lids being placed on the bottles, the water level in the bubblers began to climb.  This shows an increase of pressure in the tank, the fermentation has begun.  After two to three weeks, the bubblers were bubbling about every four seconds.  Today is November 4th and the bubbling occurs approximately every three to four minutes.

Once the bubbling stops completely and the pressure turns stable, all of the liquid will have an alcohol content.  This will be approximately 12%.  This will not be the finished product although it is the end of the fermentation process and will probably occur around Christmas time.  At this point I will be removing the must from the wine, I will show you this when it happens.  

I've tried to keep this really simple to show that making wine is not quite the wizardry that people think. People have been doing this for centuries!  The wine I will produce from this specific batch and for the reason of this blog, will be as it is, in it's most pure form.  In past years the outcome has been a very nice home-brew which I've been told would stand its ground against commercially produced wines from around the world. 

That's the end of the 'producing wine' part of my blog until Christmas-ish!  Still working hard on the land, will update you on the vin-garden soon!

The Grape Inspiration, Northern England Grapevine

The Grape Inspiration....

Here is my German vine, as you can see it's a bit of a monster.  This is grown upon the South facing wall of my home.  This vine was purchased about seven or eight years ago as a one year old cutting from the Black Forest, Germany.  After planted it stayed in the ground fairly dormant, it did have leaves on but did not put on much new growth.  In following years it put on metres and metres of growth to the present day where now it is at its full size for this situation.  I do believe it could potentially grow much bigger.

Here you can see I am giving the vine the first prune of this years growing season.  It's hard to see in this photo but the grapes are at the early stages of forming.  I only want to bunches of grapes maximum per arm of growth so this is the point I prune to.  I do this because if you allow the growth to continue, the grapes will not develop and the plant will put its energy in to growth over fruiting.  I will try to explain this in better detail at a later date.

Check out this film that I've put on YouTube to promote the blog, it was taken about six to eight weeks after the above pictures were taken.  I had to give it its second pruning of the growing season because unfortunately, two long limbs have fell from the wall over night.  Hungover this morning from Corbridge Festival I pinned it back up to the wall and pruned it to allow the air to pass through better cutting out any unnecessary growth.  This also achieves a good leaf to grape ratio.  

Lots of grapes!!!!  Last year's harvest was 16 kilograms, the best so far.  This gave me 10 gallons of wine, around 50 bottles of our very own organic, homegrown and homebrewed TOONSHINE! 

Much needed update on England's Most Northern Vineyard To Be...

Here are a few photo's showing how things are progressing.  We've had a JCB in the garden pushing up spoil from the repair of the collapsed wall a few years back.  The caravan in the background is not where I live, it's home to 13 chickens.

 

I've done some hard pruning to the fruit trees along the wall line.  This is to try and train them back to being fan fruit trees.  This is a technique carried out for centuries maximising yield and minimising shade within the garden.  (Also producing a very impressive looking tree.)  This process is harsh at this time of year, it should of been done before fruiting.  It's unlikely to produce much fruit if any this year but this is conservation for the tree and will keep it growing for a longer period of time.  Before, the branches were too heavy and likely to snap.

Below shows a picture of the West side of the garden.  I've started rotovating in rows for the vines to be planted in.  This will not happen until next year, it's not suitable to plant this far in to summer, especially without irrigation.  Rotovating now will help strip the soil of organic matter which is not too favourable for vines.

   

After doing a lot of research on spacing of rows, I found it fluctuates massively and there is no great given rule as such.  There are a lot good reasons for widening or narrowing distances but one of the main ones is to do with size of machinery used within the yard.  As this is not a big scale yard with masses of machinery I have designed it to fit around me, therefore my rows are a freakish 6'8" apart (1 Matt).

Here's me and the chicken's putting up and digging in a rabbit proof fence, Nina helped too.  

JOB DONE!

 I've created that area for an allotment, may as well grow some veg!

Here's a picture of a standing frame of a polytunnel which i'm going to reinstate.  On the floor inside is another metal frame for a much bigger polytunnel which could become another exciting project but that's on the back burner for now!

I've been going up a lot without the camera recently so there's a lot to show in my next blog post.  Sadly this week, a fox got in to the garden and 13 chickens became 3.  I've learnt a few things, fox's eat the heads off chickens and leave the carcass.  You can also smell the distinct scent of fox on a chicken's carcass. 

R.I.P Chickens

Beyond the wall we find a spring!

Here's a film of something I've found just outside the West side of the garden.  

As you can see, the stone circle in the garden looks very much like a well.  I wonder if this combined with the spring source I've found were used to irrigate the garden?

P.s If you think I sound a bit stupid on this film, go out and film yourself doing something, whilst narrating what you're doing, it was so awful I didn't want to do a re-run!  Thinking and talking out loud doesn't come naturally to me.