This is the forth installment in my Tale of Two Properties serial.

The last “episode” in this serial was our spring planting on property 1. This post is a condensed update on progress on property 2 in the past 8 months since property 1 was planted. In the past year we have planned and prepared property 2 for a fall 2013 planting of the wine vines we purchased in the fall of 2012.

Fall is a much better time to plant vines than spring as a fall plating allows the vines roots to settle into the soil over winter and take advantage of winter stored soil moisture without disturbance for spring budding.

When we bought property 2 it was an empty field (the prior owner had ripped out the wine on the property).

We had the property tilled in the fall of 2012, disked in the spring of 2013 and I then ran a harrow over the property to level the soil in the summer of 2013.

As with property 1, we had a micro excavator come and drill the holes into which the new vines would be planted.

Property 2 is long (250 meters / 820 feet) and narrow (13 meters / 43 feet). We planted about 1600 vines on the property this fall in eight rows. The property was registered as Italian Riesling, but we requested, and received, approval to replant with Pinot Gris (in Hungarian Szürkebarát) and Tramini. Each vine was planted by hand in the traditional manner. Given the number of vines to plant if you think this took quite a bit of time to plant all the vines you would be right. This is how the property looked after our fall planting:

The plants you see in the left of the last photo above are now not vine plants but Iris. We are also raising hundreds of different types of Iris plants as part of our farming operations. We will be selling Iris bulbs and flowers beginning in the summer of 2014. In the modern business world one must stay diversified.