Well it looks like Winter is actually upon us. Friday was the Winter solstice and Saturday we finally had a good amount of snow on the ground. So we may yet enjoy a white Christmas this year.
On our side, the tradition is a family feast on Christmas eve (what in France we refer to as the "reveillon"). Over the years, we have adopted a traditional meal from the Normand side of the family: roasted goose with chestnuts. And for the first time in many years, the farm has allowed us to have the entire family together along with some very special friends....so we certainly have a lot to be thankful for.
We have prepared this quick little Christmas card for all of you. It was produced from a photograph by local artist Divino Mucciante. It is our new home in snow (obviously taken during a previous winter).
The Holiday Season has not stopped Tristan and I from our work on the farm this week. Although the weather was wet (culminating in snow), we were determined to finish our Kiwi trellises.
For a couple of novices, this week was really difficult and I was almost ready to entitle this post "trellis cable hell".
As indicated last week, we planted one row of T-bar shaped trellises extending over 175 feet (or almost 44 meters). The next step was to string 5 rows of 12.5 gauge steel wire through the horizontal portion of these posts. The first line went fine.
What we thought would take less than an hour now took the better part of an entire day!
The next step were the end post anchors. We fared no better at this task. First by mistake, I had ordered anchor augers which were much too short (18 inches). In our sandy soil these proved unstable and we really needed at least 3 feet (or 1 meter) in length. This required a quick run to our local co-op Vineland Growers.
Next came the tensioning concept which we had seen on a Youtube video for Kiwi trellises. This called for inserting piece of rebar (or "reinforcing bar") between at least two runs of wire extending from the anchor auger to the anchor bolt on the post. This rebar is then used to twist the cables together to the proper tension and finally it is tied to the resulting twisted cable.
DO NOT DO THIS if your cable has any "shape memory". Once you attempt to tie the rebar to the twisted wire you face a very dangerous situation where the rebar could rapidly whip itself out of your grasp with a significant amount of torsion (a great way to lose a few teeth).
In the end, after a very long and very hard day of work, neither Tristan nor I were really pleased with the results. The process was too difficult, some aspects proved dangerous (even the coiling cable when let go could spring wildly) and the result did not look like something we could keep under reasonable tension (things would likely get worse in the heat of the summer - meaning we would have to install "in line" or "on line" tensioning mechanisms).
Defeated we slept on this and looked for other solutions....and the next day we had it!
We decided to completely change the steel cabling and use a 12.5 gauge Polyamide cable. I had discovered this cable doing some searches on trellising. Marketed as Dura-Line in North America, this material has been used in Italian vineyards for a while with some success. I had bought a spool of this material with the intention of testing it to "string" raspberry canes.
It turns out that not only this material has very high tensile strength, but it also has a low coefficient of thermal expansion (so it will not "relax" in the summer heat). It is light weight and can be installed with ease.
Re-doing our cabling turned out to be a "breeze". We were done in less than an hour and the cabling which was tensioned with our cable vices seemed perfect. Although more expensive than steel, the Polyamide cable was worth every penny.
The next issue to tackle were the post anchoring cables. For this we turned to the vineyards of Niagara for a solution and adopted a standard Gripple anchor kit. Although it did require a special tool, the result was a clean and safe installation where we had full control of the final tension.
We were so pleased with the final result we decided to start a second row. This one will prove more difficult as we are attempting to install the trellises around Kiwi vines which have not been pruned (hoping to prune them later when we are ready to install the healthiest vines on the trellises).
This step now requires us to build a row of over 230 feet (some 59 meters). Based on the odd spacing of the vines we cannot have equidistant spacing to the posts, so we have decided to standardize on a minimum of 15 feet and a maximum of 25 feet between posts (leading to some 13 or 14 trellis posts in total).
I should also note that some of these vines will also have to be disentangled from each other, as well as wild plum trees (not an easy process).
We're now half way through and on hold because of the snow. Hopefully it may melt and give us an opportunity to finish before Spring.
On the renovation front, the country market is taking shape. This week the framing was started and we can begin to imagine how our new space will be used.
We always enjoy sighting wildlife on the farm. Although I've not yet been able to capture them on film, the deer are often in the back (in fact getting closer to the house with Winter now upon us). Of course, the packs of coyotes follow close behind and are often heard close to the house in the evenings.
We still notice quite a few species of birds and this week, it seems a pair of Mallards have made their home in our back pond. Based on the frolicking and mating rituals going on, we'd love to see if they adopt this pond as a nesting site.
More importantly though we also managed to capture this little fellow on film.
This is one of the rarest woodpeckers in Ontario: a male Red-Bellied Woodpecker. Southern Ontario is the northern limit of its natural habitat and it prefers old deciduous tree lots (like our piece of Carolinian forest).
With these kinds of sightings, we are now keen to take our wildlife photography more seriously. Although we've been using a small Olympus to take all of our photos in this blog, I think it is now time to deploy our Canon SLR with its telephoto lens.
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