Saturday, October 17, 2009

Harvesting the grapevine



Today was the day to begin harvesting the grapvines. Several nights of frost had left the vines with most of the leaves off. They were now ready for me to cut them down to make more hoops for rib baskets.





Today I had enough time to cut down one of the grapevines. The remains of the plant are shown here.







The leaves and the discarded branches here were composted. The leaves went to my composters and the branches to the City's composters.






These are the branches I felt were usable to create the hoops: thick enough and long enough.







This photo shows the next stage in preparing the vines: stripping off the loose outer bark, a laborious process.








Once the vine has had its outer bark removed, it can be formed into a hoop. This is easily done at this stage before the vine branch has dried out.





After an hours work in the sunshine at 9 degreees celcius I had stripped and prepared a total of seven vines. There are many more to come. Two of these hoops are needed to form the core for a rib basket.





1 comment:

  1. Those grapevines look awesome on your newest basket...I'm sure the following ones will look fantastic too. Art is a lot of work eh but it pays off!

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