What a lot of twigs!

There always seems to be too much work to do and not enough time to write the blog, but that's a blogger's life, so I hear. Well, it took about six weeks to complete the pruning, and Jules started to cut all the "sarments" into lengths small enough for the fireplaces next winter. She got up to about three hundred bundles when we realised that would be enough to start fires from December to March. That was the product of the first twenty rows of vines. Now what to do with the product of the other 130 rows?


My brilliant idea was simply to burn them.
Obviously we can't just set fire to the massive piles of them, so we borrowed a metal wheelbarrow from our neighbour and I set about burning them a bunch at a time. Seemed like a good idea, but there's about 600 of them, so it's taken me till now to finish them off! There's also a slight design flaw, as the twigs are a lot longer than the wheelbarrow, so they burn nicely in the middle and then the ends fall off in a pile of flames. That's why the piece of metal is now underneath the wheelbarrow, but that didn't prevent some flames burning through the wheelbarrow tyre (see flat tyre in picture....) , so I can't move it around the vineyard - I have to carry the twigs to the wheelbarrow!

Of course the weeds have started growing in earnest already, so next (parallel) task is to get rid of them. Oh, and make repairs to the posts and wires we've lost by using that monster machine for the harvest!