Soil & Vineyard Floor Management
On this page, we review the annual tasks (except fertilizing) for maintaining the soil and vineyard floor:
Cover Crops are plants, primarily grasses, and legumes, that cover the vineyard floor
Ripping & Tilling is about removing weeds from the vineyard floor and aerating the soil
Mowing is about keeping the cover crop dense and short to notice rodent activity
Weeding is about removing vegetation that competes for nutrition and sunlight
Cover Crop
During winter, we grow a cover crop on the vineyard floor, mostly perennial clover. This prevents erosion during the winter rains and replenishes the soil with nutrients (primarily nitrogen). The selection of cover crops and the practices to manage them are complicated, and I don’t yet understand them adequately. The resources section refers to a good book on the subject: “Cover Cropping in Vineyards.” We introduced cover crops around 2005 when we decided to stop spraying the vineyard floor with herbicides to control weeds (not a healthy practice).
Tilling & Ripping
Every two to three years in early April, we till in the cover crop and weeds under each row of vines with a rotary tiller that moves around the vine trunks and trellis posts (Weedbadger Model 4000-SST attached to a John Deere 3720 ). Before 2004, we used pre-emergents and weedkillers (Roundup) to prevent the growth of cover-crop under the wines. While this was efficient in labor, we realized it was harmful to the vines and vegetation around, so we switched to mechanical tilling.
In May, we re-till under the vines with a small hand-held tiller, or we use a weed-whacker to remove the remaining grasses and regrowth (we use a Stihl MM55C tiller or a Dewalt DCST970 weed whacker). Tilling helps to contain the gopher pest as it destroys their tunnels, but it also eliminates the roots of the perennial clover.
We rip the ground between the vines every 5-10 years to reduce compaction from the tractor, to aerate the soil, which helps to keep it healthy and to destroy gopher burrows. We can only rip in late spring when the ground is still moist – in summer, the soil is too hard to get the ripper to a depth of 2 feet; in winter, the soil is too soft for the heavy tractor.
Mowing
From January through April, we mow the cover crop every 1-2 weeks between the vine rows to promote growth and detect gopher mounds (we use a John Deere X749). There are two benefits of regular mowing: a) the cover crop grows more densely and b) we can quickly identify the new gopher mounds (see Wild Life Control)
Weeding
We remove weeds under the vines. In the lower field, we do that by mechanical tilling or weed-whacking, as described above. In the upper field, we weed by hand because of the terracing. A dense cover of clover helps to suppress weeds. The picture shows the upper vineyard after the rows have been tilled between the vines and the weeds have been removed under the vines (only the cover crop, clover remains).
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Last updated: April 26, 2021