A VITICULTURIST 'S DIARY
It’s a hard graft In the second of his series of a ‘A Day in the life of a Viticulturist' series, Sam Doncaster at Rebschule Freytag, in the Pfalz region discusses graſting and handling. Cane lengths of budwood get cut to short, pre-grafting, lengths The quantity is calculated, and they are bagged in onion bags, briefly soaked in water and then get dipped in fungicide, bagged in an outer robust plastic bag, and stacked in pallet size boxes up to the ceiling in one of the cool houses. They are all labelled on the inside, the outside, and the pallet box, additionally records are kept. This is all a similar process for the rootstock. The planning for a grafting season is difficult in itself, and that is without late orders coming in. This being the simple 'phase 1' of the nursery season.
There are many reasons why the grafting process can fail First and foremost it has to be remembered that the activity that we will attempt, is to cut off the head of one species of plant, and to then replace
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that with another species. Granted, they come from the same genus of plants, Vitis, but it is still a far from natural thing for the vine to ordinarily contend with. As such there is some 'rejection rate'. Then come the little handling accidents. Perhaps the graft process mis-matches material size, as people work very fast, (up to 10,000 grafts a day). Next the handling while waxing the upper vine. Later packing vines in boxes in layers of peat, (for a period of warming, thus starting a repairing callous between the two parts) ... unpacking of the boxes later, and another waxing. Transfer to field, and planting into plastic sheet covered, ploughed and ridged soil, (with an irrigation pipe as well,) Any little bit of rough handling will break the vine in these stages. Overall, some nurseries are happy if they graft a million vines, but later only get to harvest 650,000 strong plants, as there are losses all the way through the process. If we have orders for 1.3 million vines, for the
following year, we therefore know that by now we need to have at least two million buds, cut up and prepared for grafting.
This intensive time in our season starts very soon
The time frame of vine nurseries is quite extensive in its variation, but also there is an intensity that runs for a long time. A lot of this is driven by aspects of the weather, as indeed do most harvesting situations, but nurseries need to cycle their way through activity after activity to ensure that one action can follow another. With more than 80 miles of plastic sheeting with an under irrigation dripper line put in as well, the soil has to be just right in moisture content, and then the connections to the main frame need aligning. Further to this the high stem vines need supporting trellis work put in... but only for one season’s use prior to it being up lifted.
