Trellis Set-up

Our vineyard was designed to have rows running up and down the hills to keep our equipment from tipping or slipping sideways. In order to have straight rows we first identified starting and stopping points and then used a transit to make sure each post placement was in a straight line. We wanted to pound posts ourselves, so we purchased a hydraulic hammer for that purpose. We constructed a tower to fit on the back of our tractor to help with this as the hammer weighs 75 pounds. We mounted it with a counter-balanced weight on a cable to make it easier to operate. We also built a cage that was mounted on our John-Deere Gator to get the hammer operator up high enough to operate it. It took four people to operate the system enabling us to pound 70 posts per hour. We had a tractor driver, Gator driver, hammer operator and a person on the ground keeping the posts level. 

When it came time to install trellis wire we used the Gator and wire jenny to spin out the wire. We made a frame to hold three rolls so we could spin three at a time. We drilled steel anchors in for each end post and fastened them with a cable to the top of the post. Each row has six trellis wires, a fruiting wire and a wire to hold the drip irrigation tubing. Each plant has a stake that is clipped to the fruiting wire. 

For irrigation we placed a 3,000 gallon tank above the vineyard allowing gravity to move the water through the system to the emitters. We pump water 1,000 feet up the hill to the storage tank. We buried the PVC pipe across the top of the vineyard that supplies water from the tank to each dripline. We set it up in blocks of 3,000 plants, that way each plant gets one gallon of water when the tank is emptied. Plants will only need water for 3-4 years based on current climate conditions.