In the vineyard-October 2009
With the help of Chris, a local engineer, we’ve built our very own, somewhat Heath-Robinson, under-vine mower. It’s noisy, slow and a bit tedious, but it works. A counter-balanced set of springs, arms, bells and whistles enables the cutting head to dodge in-and-out between the vines as it’s driven along the row, mowing growth virtually right up to the vine trunk.
The conventional solution to managing under-vine growth is to eliminate it with herbicide. Brook Eden is now being run using only organic and biological methods, so herbicide use is banned. So we needed another solution to managing growth beneath the vine row.
Being an old vineyard, we’ve thousands of bent, gnarly vine trunks that can easily be damaged or chopped off by the mower as it rolls around the trunk, so at the moment the process is a bit slow. We’ve a simple solution using stakes which should speed up the process.
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