Larry Satek continues his three part series, celebrating twenty years of grape-growing in the northeast corner of Indiana. 

IT HAS BEEN 20 YEARS: PART 2.

Last month, I wrote about how we prepped the vineyard in the fall of 1992, and got the vineyard ready for planting in early 1993. Here is the middle piece, detailing the creation of the Kreibaum Bay vineyard.

Starting in late April, 1993 we started calling the vine supplier to arrange for a delivery date. Vines should be planted after the last danger of a hard frost, but before the weather turns warm (always a tough call in Indiana). Finally, we selected a date, early in May, so that we could plant the vines on this early May weekend. But because no one was at the lake that week, we had to ship the vines to our house in Illinois. All the vines arrived in four large boxes that needed to be kept cool until we got to the vineyard to plant them.

We loaded up the car Friday night (Arbor Day, ironically) and drove to the lake, like usual, fighting heavy traffic around Chicago, listening to the talk about the Chicago Bulls playoff run with Michael Jordan, and arrived at the Lake James Vineyard after dusk. We set the vines, and all of the rest of our planting gear, out for an early morning start so we could get done before it got too hot that day. Little did we understand planting......

The roots of the vines need to be soaked at least 30 minutes before they are planted, or you run the risk of them not taking hold. But they should not be soaked more than about 2 hours, lest they be damaged. So we had about 100 vines in 5 gallon buckets early in the morning with another 100 ready to get put in as we started. We rapidly found out how hard it is to plant grapevines. After two hours, we took 50 of the vines out of the water because we were not going to get to them in time. We worked in the vineyard until dark, and planted less than 150 vines, total. Clearly, I had misjudged the work needed.

That night, while a sundrenched Pam and I were eating dinner, we concluded that we would try to get another 125 vines done the next day, and then we would have to come back the following weekend and work on Mother's Day weekend. One of us was not very happy at the situation.

On Sunday, we trudged up the vineyard again, and started planting, again. Our muscles and the knees were now REALLY sore and stiff. Although we did get about 100 more vines planted, we obviously were way behind our plan of having them in by Saturday afternoon, or perhaps finishing up on Sunday afternoon.

Fortunately, grape vines are fairly hardy, and the weather the next week was forecast to be fairly cool, so I was able shelter the roots and keep the vines in cool storage for the coming week while we went back to Chicago wondering if we had made a serious mistake. We had only about 240 vines planted out of the 600 we had to plant.

 And next weekend was Mother's Day.

(Next month, the conclusion).