The Four-Mile hedge

A bit of rain makes quite a difference to these vines. We had a few thunderstorms a couple of weeks ago which made it difficult to do any spraying, as the stuff just gets washed off. But of course rain brings lots of potential infections too, so I've been playing catch-up. Now I'm almost up-to-date with the spraying (just waiting for the notice from the winery to tell me when to do the third "obligatory" treatment) and didn't think to look up while I was singing to my walkman and lugging the back-pack of spray up and down. The vines are about eight feet high, and drooping down over the wires so that they touch the floor! Some are actually entwining themselves around the vines in the next row, so I'm spraying in a weird kind of Jack-in-the-beanstalk tunnel. So now it's out with the garden shears. They do, of course, make a special machine with blades which hack the vines into three perfect sides, but Renee the tractor has died again (head-gasket?) so I couldn't pull it even if I had the machine. So same as last year, it's walking up and down chopping the vines to about six inches above the top wire. After I've done a row it looks like a battlefield behind me, but the trimmings will just rot down in a week or two.