What is Green String Farming?
Green String Farming is about practicing “natural process agriculture.” It's about keeping the soil and plants healthy and free from pesticides and artificial chemicals. Overall, it's about producing the highest quality grapes with the healthiest vines.
Attention to soil health is essential to producing quality grape vines. Use of cover crops, compost, compost tea, and crushed volcanic rock and oyster shell mineral supplements help ensure that the earth is able to grow sustainable vines.
The goal is to create a self-nourishing system where less human intervention yields better quality crops.
We grow by the motto “50% for humans, 50% for nature,” maintaining an important balance between the vines grown for humans and crops grown for soil improvement. Below are some of the ways we achieve this natural process.
Attention to soil health is essential to producing quality grape vines. Use of cover crops, compost, compost tea, and crushed volcanic rock and oyster shell mineral supplements help ensure that the earth is able to grow sustainable vines.
The goal is to create a self-nourishing system where less human intervention yields better quality crops.
We grow by the motto “50% for humans, 50% for nature,” maintaining an important balance between the vines grown for humans and crops grown for soil improvement. Below are some of the ways we achieve this natural process.
Pest Management
We rely on nature to control our pests with no use of harmful pesticides. Pests come in all forms- but none are really truly pests, they are all indicators of the health of an ecosystem. The night owl and the day hawk are the predator of the gopher and mice and these predators maintain ecological control.
Compost
We compost and renew all of the the digestible organic waste and materials from our winery: 3000 tons of grape pomace, the prunings from our trees and vines. We turn this "waste stream" into biological stimulant and food for our soils.
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Cover Crops
Cover crop is grown to feed the soil. We use a wide mix of different plants, some grow quickly while others take more time to produce organic material that is then folded back into the soil or is fed to our sheep. These systems are designed to stimulate the soil life, the life in which our vines are rooted in.
Native Roots
All plants are grown from seeds or cuttings, including new plantings of grape vines.
Bobby and Fred are testing native root stocks which are then dry-farmed. The result is slower growth, but deeper roots and long term plant health. |
Wooly Weeders
We use over 1500 sheep and 500 goats to remove harmful weeds from our vineyards. Our sheep and goats are brought out in February to March to clean the vine rows. Sheep alone are used in the summer months (July-September) to help leaf our vines so sunlight can ripen the fruit and to clean up the summer weeds on the land's surface. The animals are put out together once more in November to clean up any residues after harvest.
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Minerals
We utilize new crushed volcanic cinder with its wide spectrum of varied mineralogy on our vines, providing our vineyard soils with all the possible nutrients known to nature.
Currently we grind our own cinder, this rock is high in all the trace minerals which are necessary components to build fullness of character in our vines. |
