Shoot thinning and wire lifting
After a short break in Nelson and later Blenheim, we found ourselves another wwoofing gig (previously we spent a week milking goats) at an estate vineyard and winery in the Marlborough region, well-known for its Sauvignon Blanc. The vineyard is composed of 3 separate tracts of land, totaling 163 hectares, producing around 25-30 thousand cases of wine a year (a case is twelve 750ml bottles). They also have olive trees on the estate for olive oil (did you know the oil comes from the pit and not the flesh? me neither…), some livestock (3 cows, 2 horses, sheep, and a dozen chickens), and vegetable gardens.
A week ago Friday (Nov 26) the estate manager picked us up at our backpacker in Blenheim and brought us to the house on one of their properties where we’d be staying. One of the full time employees lives there and looks after the wwoofers, which included one other person during our first week, an 18 year old from Canada. Afterwards he took us on a tour of the vineyard where we’d be working.
What are our days like? Every morning we set the alarm for 6:15 in order to have time to make breakfast and tea and get lunch together for the day. We leave the house around 7:10 on bikes they’ve provided, cycling 5km up the road to the main vineyard property. We find out what we’re going to be doing and usually start around 7:30. Most activities are done in groups, so we’re rarely alone—usually chatting with the people who work there full time. At 10:00 we break for morning tea—which amounts to a “second breakfast” given the substantial amount of food consumed for the day ahead. We resume working until 1:00 when everyone breaks for lunch—usually leftovers supplemented by eggs and olive oil from the vineyard. Then we take off after lunch and ride the bikes back to the house, to shower, relax, and eventually prepare for dinner, which we cook ourselves with food supplied by the hosts.
The primary vineyard activity we’ve been involved in is “shoot thinning”. Essentially we’re pruning the just-beginning-to-flower vines to concentrate the flavors and sugars in fewer bunches of future grapes. The more you thin, the better the grapes, the more expensive the wine. Of course very few people buy expensive wine, and cheaper bottles of wine sell in greater volumes with higher margins, so there’s a balancing act when pruning between maximizing quality and maximizing revenue. At least that was my understanding as we were taught to thin each bay (the area in a row of vines between two wood posts, about 7-8 meters apart, containing 3-4 vines) from 200 shoots to 100. Based on how much a bay had been thinned, and the variety of the grape, they could tell you how much a bottle of wine would be priced. In fact they’d often refer to certain rows as $25 Sauvignon Blanc or $45 Pinot Noir.
The other vineyard activity we’ve been involved in is “wire lifting”. The grape vines are grown on a trellise system known as “vertical shoot positioning” or VSP in which the vine grows vertically (like a tree) about 80cm off the ground, and then splits in two, running along a wire fixed to the posts about 80cm in each direction. Up from these horizontal “branches” (called cordons in French) the fruiting canes (or “spurs”) are spaced out every 20cm or so, and each branches out into six or more vertical shoots. Without any assistance, the shoots would grow in every direction and eventually be weighed down by the fruit. So once the shoots have been thinned, we walk along the entire length of each row (200-300 meters) and lift two sets of movable wires up to variously spaced clips on both sides of each post, in effect sandwiching the vines vertically.
Idyllic view from our bedroom
Taking a break from shoveling compost
Nice view between the vines on a hill
Stephanie shoot thinning
Justin shoot thinning
How a row looks after shoot thinning
How a post looks after wire lifting
A week of milking goats
Immediately after our Abel Tasman Tramp, we spent a week in Upper Moutere wwoofing—volunteering on an organic farm for 5-6 hours a day in exchange for room and board.
A curious goat
Every morning around 8:30 and every evening at 6:30 we were responsible for milking 8 to 10 goats. To make things more efficient, Stephanie handled the mechanics of milking, while I was the self-appointed goat runner, bringing goats back to the paddock (pasture) when they were done. If you’d like to vicariously milk a goat with Stephanie, check out the video we made of the process on her post, How to milk a goat.
Testing the milk
After the morning milking and before breaking for lunch at 1, we’d help with various chores in the gardens, including staking peas, digging up thistle in the pastures, cleaning out animal stalls, pulling up kale roots, weeding carrots and parsnips, and harvesting fava beans and peas for the market. Then we’d take the afternoon off before the evening milking and dinner.
Long shadows on a dirt road
The food was hearty, filling, and largely homemade. Breakfast was toasted slices of dense whole wheat bread, butter, jam, and tea. Lunch was a combination of leftovers from dinner with bread and cheeses made from the goat milk (chevre and feta). Dinner ran the gamut: spinach quiche, roasted vegetables, lamb chops (hoggit raised on their farm), pasta with vegetables. Potatoes were a frequent side dish, often simply boiled, as were stir-fried leafy-greens. Most nights there was a dessert: fresh fruit crumble, “pudding” with ice cream, chocolate cake. The farm supplied the bulk of the food (fruits, vegetables, meat, cheese), and the rest was supplemented with things from the store (flour, pasta, sugar, butter, peanut butter, oil, tea) and things they got from other farmers/food-producers in trade.
Vegetables for the farmer’s market
Federated Memories
Friday was my last day at Federated Media. How can I sum up four years of memories? I’m not sure I really have the words right now. So I decided to dig back into the photo archive, primarily Flickr, and post a few of my favs. If I’m leaving out any obvious winners, please post a link in the comments. Enjoy.
Grillin’ dogs in Sausalito (source)
Tech Lunch at Gaylords (source, see also: Town Hall, Gott’s/Taylors)
Crowdfire!!! (source)
Box of onions :( (source)
San Francisco Ferry Building and The Embarcadero
Day
Night
Taken from the rooftop of the Hotel Vitale, during Federated Media’s 5th anniversary party last Friday.
Holding baby goats
Two weekends ago, Stephanie and I drove up to visit Terrie who’s living in a yurt at the Bodega Goat Ranch.
A few words about me and Terrie. We first met in San Diego in 2005 at ETech. My friend Patrick saw a job posting about something to do with Blogging and RSS and thought of me. It turns out Terrie was looking for a new web producer at O’Reilly. I had a brief interview with her there, and then flew up to San Francisco to interview with the rest of the team. Not only did Terrie take me on a tour of Sebastopol, Petaluma, and Santa Rosa, but she also let me crash at her place. O’Reilly offered me the job, I moved to California, and the course of my life was forever altered.
A year later I left O’Reilly for Federated Media, and the story should have ended there. But for some reason it didn’t. Terrie started doing these interesting things. She got chickens. She left O’Reilly, but not for another job. She moved into a yurt. On a goat farm. Where they make cheese. So even though our professional paths diverged, our non-work interests only seemed to converge.
Which goes part of the way towards explaining how, two Sundays ago, we found ourselves visiting Terrie and holding baby goats.
Justin with kid
Stephanie with kid
Terrie with kid
What is “test-driven development for web applications”?
One day I would like to write a post called “test-driven development for web applications”. So apologies to anyone who came here looking for that. Because I have no idea what that is. But maybe you do? Please feel free to leave a comment.
I would also like to write a tutorial called “how to write unit tests for web applications” because almost every example I’ve come across (and I admit, I have not looked hard) of how to write unit tests tends to involve obvious classes like BankAccount or abstract classes like ObjectFactory. Sheesh.
At work I help lead the development of a web application written in PHP on top of a MySQL database. More than a year ago we decided: “we need unit tests”. So we took the typical approach and used PHPUnit to generate a stub for each of our core “model” classes. Starting with the shortest and easiest classes I began writing tests. What a pain in the ass. The one good thing that came out of it is that I made it possible to do a single command install of our codebase.
FM at the intersection of Creative and Monetization
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