Wine Diary
It Stays Cool Over Whitsun - Manual Labour
The weather will be cool and unstable for another week at least! In the vineyards, where a lot of green work is keeping all hands busy, it is obvious that vegetation is about 3 weeks behind. Actually, for now, this has proven beneficial. There has been no frost damage, and we have had enough time to get the repairs done and to plant many hundreds of young vines. We talked already about the new little vineyard on Loiserberg. Well, there is another one on Lamm. Moreover, in most of our Erste Lagen vineyards we filled the gaps with young Grüner or Riesling plants to get the stock density back to normal.
A lot of manual labour is now dedicated to maintenance under the vines, i.e. hand weeding and cleaning the stems of unwanted shoots (picture).
Too soon, we ran out of our honey! So far, our bees have not been able to collect a lot of food: the flying weather during our flowering season of fruit trees has been rather unfavourable. However, after this period of blessed rainfalls our seedings will flourish and give a nice ‘bee pasture’. Then again bees will enjoy the blossom nectar of soft pink-white buckwheat, dark red, white and lilac inflorescences of all sorts of clover, as well as “gold of pleasure” with its delicate yellow hue. We also can’t forget the almost shaggy appearance of the bee friend Phacelia.
