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"Shrink-Wrapping" Grapes Boosts Production
Wrapping grapes in shrink-wrap plastic lets Tom Miller grow grapes where he otherwise couldn’t. The plastic envelope extends the season and adds growing degree days on Washington’s cool and windy Olympic Peninsula.
  “In a good year, some winemaking varieties may ripen, but others will not,” says Miller. “Enveloping the vines for 6 weeks in the spring and until after fruit set, provides about a 25 percent increase in growing degree days during the season. It’s like moving my vineyard 300 miles south for 6 weeks.”
  Miller has experimented with wrapping his grapes in plastic since 2007. However, he feels he finally perfected the process in 2011. He uses rolls of shrink-wrap plastic film that are 30 in. wide by 6,000 ft. long. The film is doubled over and attached to 32-in. long 1 by 2 stakes, which have been nailed to trellis posts. One $120 roll covers both sides of 3,000 ft. of trellis. The two sides are then pinned together at the top with clothespins.
  The plastic is installed around the first of May and removed around the first of July. When shoots reach the trellis midwire, the clothespins are removed and the top left open. He also tops shoots to encourage healthy fruit clusters.
  Miller devised a simple dispenser for the plastic. He fabricated it from scrap lumber, plywood, rotating casters, iron pipe and plastic plumbing caps.
  “I used a standard pallet carrier for a 3-pt. hitch and bolted a plywood platform to it,” he says. “I attached four caster wheels (upside down) to the platform around a 1/2-in. pipe. A circular drum made out of scrap lumber slips over the pipe, as does the roll of plastic.”
  The drum rides on the casters like a Lazy Susan. It does triple duty, also serving to dispense trellis wire and drip irrigation tubing. The pipe is threaded at the end with pvc spacers and a 3/4-in. cap. Miller reports that a group of three people can wrap the one-acre vineyard in a day. Removing the plastic takes about the same time.
  “The plastic isn’t re-useable as the sun decays it and the wind rips it apart,” says Miller. “We roll the plastic up into balls that fill two plastic garbage bags.”
  Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Tom Miller, Sequim, Wash. (vrc@olypen.com).


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2013 - Volume #37, Issue #3