There has been a lot going on in my vineyard the last week or two. I haven't had time to write anything, but I have taken photos. The first thing to blog about is damage to my plants. I discovered one morning, as I was taking my morning stroll and inspection through all my plants, that I had 6-7 plants that were half defoliated! I almost freeked out! So I started inspecting everthing again real close because I thought it was armyworms that have been in the area lately. There was damage on 6 plants in one row, the top of my bean plants had leaves eaten off in my 2 foot fenced in garden, and 1 Marquette grape plant on the other side of the yard. But I couldn't figure it out because only the middle leaves were gone. The tops were still there, the bottom leaves were still there, and the middle ones were nearly all gone.
So I decided to spray insecticide (Pyrethrin) on all my grapes and garden to combat the caterpillars. So I started spraying everything, and when I was on my last 2 plants, I noticed a deer track in the mud next to my grapes that were eaten. NOW, I know what happened. My gate to the woods through our chain link fence had been left open overnight, and a deer had come into the yard and decided to have a midnight snack of my grape leaves! It was a young doe because there were 2 tracks overlapping each other, and the tips were sharply pointed. I know this because I am a deer hunter. I followed the tracks through my garden, through the woods where it came into my yard, and where it left the yard. I got about 15 pictures of the tracks and damage to my leaves.
After a couple days, I decided to prune back the damaged stems. After a couple more days of ugly looking plants, I pruned off all the growing points except at the top of the plants so they would grow longer and not have so many suckers on them. Now it looks real nice and is starting to look like a real vineyard.
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