Winter projects and work

Well its finally cold, infact we are sitting at 2degrees outside today, and tonight it will be -1, its the time of year when the days are short and the nights cold and long. The project list is shorter. this year, but there are still many to get through.

Keeping our kitchen garden running in the winter

Yesterday, we spent some time making sure the greenhouse was nice and secure, and closed up a few gaps to stop the cold wind getting in, we also replanted some aubergine and Chili plants into the greenhouse alongside the tomatoes that have been doing well in there all year, and we can confirm, its toasty warm in there, we don’t need it super warm at night but the heater will come on automatically to keep the frost off.

Pruning and more pruning

Of all the projects we need to get stasted on this year, I guess the largest ones are pruning olive trees and pruning the grape vines, these will take some weeks of work with just us working on them, but at least we can work to our own rhythm and slowly but surely get the job done. We don’t like to prune when its wet, this can lead to added chance of infection, I am hoping for some dryer weather to kick off the pruning, in the meantime we will fill time with getting supplies ready for other projects and completing inside projects.

Our white road

The road to the house needs recovering with some new gravel, the recent heavy rains cut a few gouges in the surface, although I think I will wait until the worst of winter is over to deal with the road, if I put time into it now, there is a chance it will happen again.

The plan is to get several truckloads of road ready gravel, it is a mixed gravel of several sizes that will compact together to create an excellent road over time. Before that I need to trim some trees back from the road so that truck can get down to us!

Irrigation system for the grapevines

This project is a big one, I plan on starting in in March, each line of vines will need 200m of 16mm tube, and to connect them together I need to create distribution manifolds with electronic valves, controlled by our rainbird irrigation computer. All in all, it will be just over 5600m of tubing, and 3700 dripper nozzles, various fittings and large bore pipe and much time.

I think it will be a 3 week job to complete myself, but is required due to the losses we had last year from no rain. I estimate we lost 30% of our grapes, which for a small operation is not something that I wish to have happen again, so will be trying to do everything I can to keep rain water in the soil, by stopping run off.