July 5th

A wide shot of the vineyard with the first hang wire up and the grow tubes off the lowest row.

Another wide shot. The grass looks better from far away. Up close it is mostly crab grass.

We decided to leave the grow tubes off one row to see what happens. It may be time to let them breathe. Now we will find out if we have small or large animals that have been waiting patiently with baited breath.

A shot of the new wires. We put them 3.5 feet off the ground. Almost every vine can touch this first wire.

Here is a Gripple! A Gripple is a fencing tool that makes hanging wires and fencing a piece of cake. In this case, the wire can be pulled through the Gripple one way, but not the other. This makes tightening the wires simple and keeps the appropriate tension. You tighten the wires with a Gripple Fastening Tool (AKA Grippleator), which is as awesome as it sounds.

We drilled a small hole in each midpost to run the wire through. Some use staples because they want to be able to remove the wires during certain parts of the year. We are going for a more simple system.

This is the tallest vine. As you can see it is almost 6 feet tall.

Rain barrel number two. This area was home to a 3.5 foot black snake that we caught and released into the woods to the protest of one of Mother Nature's biggest detractors.

The PVC pipe coming out of the barrel is our intepretation of an overflow drain. In this case, excess water will be directed back into the original drain spout and into the french drain in the yard.

Water coming off the roof and into the gutters will now go into the rain barrel. There is a screen on the opening to keep out bugs and debris.

On Friday the rain barrel on the left side of the house filled up in 10 minutes. Now that filling them up is not a problem, we need to address the issue of storing all of this water somewhere to be delivered to the vines.