Starting to Plant

We started planting on our farm today. Planted a 1000 raspberry canes, not easy work with another thousand to go tomorrow. Planting two varieties; Royalties and Novas.

Next will be and acre and a half of Honeycrisp apples, after that it will be a bit under an acre of blueberries.

Feeling good about my new fruit growing venture and the learning curve is very steep. It’s all good though…

Roto Tilling ’till the cows come home…

I have almost four acres of land to get ready asap in order to plant hopefully by the end of the week.

Planting raspberries, apples, blueberries and cherry trees this Spring. A project that is more work than I originally thought but immensly satisfying. So lately, all I’ve been up to is spraying herbicides on this land that has never been cultivated before, plowing, correcting soil ph with limeor sulphur, adding fertilizers, boron, etc and now rototilling, and rotolilling again in order to tame this land. I’m getting there and things are starting to look good.

Looking forward to planting and seeing neat rows of fruit starting to take shape.

The wine will be ready in 4-5 years! 😉

Visiting the Vineyards of Jian County, Jilin, China

Grape Pruner, Jian, China

Originally uploaded by Rivard

An interesting and beautiful day in the Vineyards of Jian County on the border of North Korea.

The vines are starting to shoot quite vigorously and are now being tied by the grape growers and peasants.

What is interesting is that a lot of these vines are Vidal hybrids which were either bought and often smuggled from Canada in order to grow Vida grapes to make icewine with them. This region is re-inventing itself to become the next “icewine” producing region.

It does have the right climate and are starting to catch on to the technology and certainly have the market. I’ll have to come back in a couple years to see how these young vines have made out…