Spray, Pray and Love

The vines are all pruned, most of the trunks tied, the main area is mowed, but there's still a nagging problem. It's always something.


The weeds (ours are No. 1 remember?) along the length of the vines is still going strong. Big, beautiful, spring green weeds full of life......ready to choke out the life of our still not awake vines. Geez.


We asked our neighbor, our normalcy gage, what we could do to get rid of these weeds. Especially the alfalfa. Now alfalfa is a very good crop for the fields in Illinois. What else is there in Illinois, sans Chicago? Oh yeah and corn, but I diverse. Alfalfa is full of nitrogen which helps fertilize the soil. But it's not very good when it grows right where the vine trunk is coming out of the ground with roots so deep it competes with the vine for water. Sorry buddy, no can do.


I first think "What about precision weedwhacking?" But the vines are in such a sensitive state that accidentally nicking the base of the vine would be very stressful and possibly kill the vine. I'm out of ideas.


So our wise neighbor says "You can spray weed killer." To that I retort "Spray! Spray? Are you crazy, spray?" He begins to calmly explain how there's this weed killer that absorbs through the leaves and then oozes down to the roots from the leaves. There are no leaves on the grapes so it shouldn't hurt it, right?



Hmmm........so off to Murdoch's (the friendly redneck hardware store) to get some of this killer stuff. We come out with an expensive 5 gallon container of MadDog Plus. As if just MadDog wasn't enough. It smells sweet and flows like molasses. It looks deadly. When I look at the ingredients, after getting past the glyphosate and N-glycine, it really is .......salt. Oo-ooh.



I don my rubber gloves and paper face mask and begin the mixing in our portable backpack sprayer. This truly is the farmer's friend. You can carry up to 6 gallons of .....whatever right on your back. I carry mostly deadly stuff.



I hoist the sucker on my back and walk to the far row. That's the one that gets all the water so it's the lushest (is that a word?). And I pump and spray. You pump with your left hand to pressurize the tank and you spray with your right. Pump and spray, pump and spray. All the while thinking "Aha, there you go you little green leafed plants sucking the life from my precious grapes, so there! Take that!'


Meanwhile, to get the weeds I have to spray the base of the vines most times. Hmmm....... As I finish up my tank, only getting to the end of the second row, I wonder "Will this work? Will it kill the vine by accident?" I enter slumber that evening a little guilty and extremely hesitant.


The next morning I jump out of bed and cast open the curtain facing the vineyard so I can see my dastardly deed from yesterday's work. Nothing. Not a drooping leaf in the field. They all look as beautiful as before I came in with the dead squad. Hmmm....... I tell Kenny of this and he says "Oh yeah, they didn't die for me until like the next week."


So here I go out in the field again to spray more rows with stuff that looks like clear molasses and sprays like water to not see dead weeds until next week.

Now that, my friend, is faith. Amen.

Time for a rose wine, Vega Sindoa 2007 will do nicely. Yum.

Remember...

Enjoy and imbibe.