Look at the Sunflower

Posted 05/12/2008 at 04:20 AM by Dirk

After my brief discussion last week of "Biodynamic wine-writing," it seems like a good time to look into the vineyards. We are attacking weeds, (organically).

You remember from your childhood that a weed is defined as anything that is growing in the wrong place. (For instance, I love redwood trees...I just think that they are best near the coast, well away from Oakville Cabernet vines...where I would classify them as "weeds.")  If we are attacking weeds, it means that we have weeds. Everyone has weeds. Unlike the famous line from "Caddyshack," to get a weed we don't have to think like a weed...but understanding them may help.

Maybe we should first think about "why" we want to eliminate the weeds. If it is like your garden at home, it may be purely a matter of aesthetics. We may want to eliminate weeds out of peer pressure. It's almost like being back in high school. Who wants to look at morning glory blooming (quite pretty) when your neighbor thinks you are providing a safe haven for the horticultural equivalent of agro-terrorists? Common sense and peer pressure says, "off with the morning glory's head!"

The real reason to eliminate weeds is for the health of the vines, and the wine. This year, with its very dry spring, makes this even more important than ever. Weeds use up valuable water. They may "out compete" our cover crops or even vines. The reduced availability of water can lead to short shoots, reduced crop, and a lack of uniformity in ripening. That is a long way of saying it can hurt the wine.

Since we don't use herbicides, (they aren't organic) we have to find other ways of eliminating weeds. We also don't use the "propane flame thrower" method even though my kids would think of it as "fun." (I always worried that a poorly adjusted torch could flame the entire vineyard, and as such, would be viewed as the ultimate viticultural doomsday weapon.)

While we like to encourage a strong organic cover crop to help the soil and out compete the weeds, we rely on a "sunflower" to put the weeds in their place.  It comes from a French company whose name is impossible to properly pronounce in English. (I am sure this is done on purpose.) Pellenc (do the two l's sound like "l" or do they follow the rule to sound like a "y"? The other syllables present equal dangers to the non-French speaker) makes the sunflower. The sunflower mounts on a tractor, and its head, which looks like a sunflower, spins in a way that rips the weed out of the ground or at least whacks it off at the base. So far, Darwinian evolution in weeds has not come up with a good adaptation to the full frontal assault by the sunflower.

We are going through the vineyards now in an effort to conserve soil moisture as we watch for critical shoot development. The shoots in the middle of the canes or cordons are the ones that seem most affected by early water stress, so the solution has been to give small irrigations this year; far earlier than in many growing seasons.

As you can see here, "complex organic" farming is not the elimination of chemicals, but in our case, is the use of many systems and tools to create strong and balanced vines, vineyards and wines.

One of the best chapters I have read on organic farming was actually fun to read. It didn't come from a text book or from a trade journal but was in Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire. Try the chapter on potatoes. It made me want to try growing them organically.

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