I like spring wild flowers. I even like dandelions. I like the yellow flowers of dandelions, and the little puffballs of seeds you can blow off with a wish later in the month. And dandelion leaves make a great salad green, and the flowers can be used to make a nice little wine.

We only till the soil around each vine during the growing season in our vineyards, and leave the rest of the soil intact with a green cover which we mow. This year round cover crop protects the soil from erosion, and preserve the soil structure with its fauna (i.e. such as earthworms). Just because we are heavily manipulating the environment to grow grapes to make wine does not mean we should decimate the entire local ecology. We try to find as much of a balance as we can.

Of course, not just dandelions are blooming, and all the different little flowers make a colorful carpet in the vineyard. I do the mowing, and I delay mowing in the spring until after this spring bloom has passed to allow the bees to access these first spring flowers after a long winter.