Pruning season closes

Last Sunday 5 April was the last day of pruning, as the vines have started weeping! (how do you say "lloro" in English?). This is when the vines wake up from their winter dormancy and the sap starts to circulate, and leaks out of the pruning cuts.



Well, we didn't manage to finish in time. On the one hand, it's no big deal as the vine will survive perfectly without our 'help'. Vines have been around for about 200 million years, which is a lot longer than homo sapiens! On the other hand, though it'll be even harder to prune them next year, as they'll be even longer and more firmly rooted. Also, the harvest will be less than what it could have been.

Basically, the results were:

- 3 ha well-pruned
- 3 ha recovering unpruned (there was nothing there to prune)
- 3 ha unpruned, which should have been pruned

So, 6 ha done according to plan, and 3 unpruned.

¿Why did we not manage to do the last 3 ha?

1. Bad planning. There was much more work than we thought. We didn't calculate the man-hours required accurately.

2. We didn't call for help! We should have sent an SOS to our consumers and organised an emergency pruning campaign!

Oh well - lessons learned. It won't happen again!