Hampshire vineyard New Forest Vineyard Hampshire vineyard New Forest Vineyard Hampshire vineyard New Forest Vineyard 

Back at Beaulieu Vineyard, Hampshire and armed with a camera. We are really cracking on with the pruning now and have only about a dozen more rows to go!!!

Below is a picture of the Bacchus vines, having been pruned and looking fairly tidy, although the wires do need tightening.

We are way past the Bacchus now and into the last varieties of Reichensteiner and Huxelrebe. These are both more challenging as they are much older vines and have got enormous in some cases. We have decided to try to prune them hard back this year, which will lead to a lower crop in 2009 but should benefit the plants and the ease of managing the vineyard in the following years.

As we are working our way through the vineyard we are taking note of any posts and wires that need replacing. Having just replaced ALL of the posts at our own vineyard in the New Forest, I know what an enormous job it can be. So far, luckily we have come across few posts that need replacing. We have one end post, and a handful of intermediate posts that are broken. However as the photo shows the end posts are not your usual 100 mm treated posts but massive tree trunks that have been dug and backfilled into the ground an amazing 1.5m! Now replacing these could be a challenge to say the least. So far we have two estimates. The first suggested approx £150 per day, which sounds reasonable at first until we heard that we could expect only 2 posts to be put in per day. ( There are over 120 end posts alone) The other suggested 1 post per 20 minutes, with a specialized machine, but would cost around £30 per post. Neither solution is particularly palatable, so we are continuing to explore our options.

You can also see the piles of prunings building up along the path. these are waiting to be burnt. We managed to burn one pile today with the aid of a flame thrower and about £2.55's worth of diesel! In total there will be more than 4 tonnes of prunings to be taken off the vineyard, so yes, it is quite hard work.