Ohio Wine and More» Spring time things to do

Wordless Wednesday: Equipment work

FunTSAR — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 14:10:36 +0000

Prepping equipment for spring work

Shop work on the farm, Come Monday it’ll B alright! :-)

FunTSAR — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 21:05:00 +0000

1952 Ford F5 Farmers' Market Truck in the shop for winter repairs

At Maize Valley We Make Great Wine…FUN, that is just “how we roll”! And these trucks are a big part of how we do actually “roll”. I found this truck in warehouse about eight years ago with 3,343 original miles on it. We used it here or there around the farm and parades etc. for a while till we really “put it back to work”. You see this truck travel thousands of miles a year again now in the summer attending area farmers’ markets and wine festivals.

Last summer when coming back down I-77 from the Cleveland Garlic Festival I just heard something “not-right”. More just a feeling I had in my gut. I couldn’t find anything but a few weeks later it gave my brother some starting trouble then one day on the back from a market in Akron it just about quit. He limped it home and there it sat.

Old School simple

We were only running on five out of six cylinders, and figured we broke a valve. It was near the end of the season so we got by but were not looking forward to the work or expense of fixing this. So today I got after it in the shop to try and start to get a idea of what we needed to do.

Well this was a Monday and I pulled the valve cover off to find that only a push rod had come out of adjustment and slipped out of its seat….SWeeeeTt! I popped it back in, tightened it down and she ran great! Even a blind nut can find a Squirl some daz!

Got Pipe? Farm drainage and other stuff

FunTSAR — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 15:58:20 +0000

Fixing a wet spot in the "Triangle field"

Got Pipe? Sometimes You Need IT!

Every few years we try and keep up with that “overhead” work that pays in the long run and this is one of those jobs. It isn’t cheap to put in drain tile but it pays you back in the long haul. Sometimes in better yields sometimes just making a field usable in the first place. Plus it helps for just overall better plant health in both wet and dry years by helping to balance the air/water ratios in the soil.

One reason for Ohio Wine and More to post this is that before you plant a vineyard especially in Ohio you really need to be sure your soil is well drained. With the exception of very few locations especially with the advent of so many new wineries going in across the state most locations are going to need to have a machine such as this one come in and do the prep work. In most cases for vineyard establishment you need to put the drain tile in every 8 to 10 feet to achieve maximum benefit and return on investment. It costs about $1.00 per installed foot so when you are talking ten’s of thousands of feet it can get a bit expensive!

Round Bales and Haunted Corn Mazes go together??

FunTSAR — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 18:30:07 +0000

Baler kicking out Round Bale

New Holland Tractor and Baler

Round Bale just after being made

Getting ready for our fall Agri-Tourism and overwintering the animals starts now. My father-in-law Kay made over 48,000 small square bales last year and we do a few big round bales for the kritters in the winter and also for our fall harvest festival activities.

We have a small piece of land in the back of the property I have been stuggleing to make use of over the years. Last fall we planted winter rye to just sort of get something growing instead of weeds. Next will be sorghum, then we will carve a haunted maze into the crop.

All that starts now with getting the ground ready by killing the weeds and getting ready to plant the sorghum. So instead of just mowing the rye and grasses that grew up, I decided to bale them and get some use out of the light crop. Keep in touch as we show how we follow up with this piece of land to turn it from a weed patch into our haunted attraction.

We are bringing back our haunted maze by popular request. When we opened the winery there was just too much work to do and something had to give. Thousands of folks visit us in the fall from Mom and Dad families to corporate groups to church gatherings. So many of them asked us to BRING BACK YOUR HAUNTED MAZE we have found a way in 2009.

We do a truly scary and fun haunt, not a gross and gorey event. The Haunted maze is a seperate maze from the larger Trivia based adventure. People come out laughing and crying we never know which one starts first? I have sweated my butt off in so many hay lofts over they years I finally figured out a way to make baleing Fun!

At Maize Valley We Build Memories to last…….A Lifetime!! At Maize Valley We Make Great Wine…FUN!!

Here is how we get started. First I show Ben Sherman using his mower to mow our ditch banks, it is the same machine we used to mow the field be baled.

Pumpkins, Peppers and a whole lot more.

FunTSAR — Wed, 27 May 2009 17:07:02 +0000

70,000 Peppers waiting for a home

Pumpkin seeds in planter box

Yea, we are much more than just a winery, or a vineyard. We (Actually mostly Kay) still farms about 700 acres +/- a few, that is down from 3,000 acres a few years ago. But now we have crops that are much more intensive to produce and take more time and attention. Peppers and pumpkins are just a few, they planted watermelons last saturday too! They fly really good out of my pumpkin cannon, maybe that is why one variety is called “cannonball”??

The peppers you see above number just under 70,000 plants Kay told me. They are ready to be planted and go in the ground much like the tomatoes I showed in previous posts. We sell wholesale to vendors, to restaurants via Fresh Fork Markets. We also attend farmers’ markets in Cleveland, Akron, Canton, Alliance, and Greentown. Links can be found on the lower right corner of the page for these locations, look under “Farmers’ Markets”.

You can also find them at our own farm Market, and in and on some of our entrees’ in our winery cafe’. New this year will be a line of canned peppers called “Pappy’s Peppers” named after my father-in-law, Kay Vaughan. That way we keep those green pepper flavors in the right glass container.

The videos will show the path a pumpkin seed takes to go from Bag to Jack-o-lantern. Much like the corn maze video I will try and follow this crop from start to finish.

Vineyard vine update, buds, suckers and more

FunTSAR — Thu, 14 May 2009 00:33:53 +0000

View down the row of our front vineyard

From the vines to the wines, we are getting busy! This time of year lots of things are starting to happen outside. We don’t have a real long growing season so the plants that live here need to get busy and get a lot done in a short period of time. Right now these plants just want to grow, sometimes too much.

A vineyard needs to be “Trained” into what you see it just doesn’t happen. We go over our vines as many as 6 times a year or more when they are young. The older they get in some respects the less work they become. Sort of like kids, well I guess that isn’t true either. Anyhow the work is just different when they are young and you are trying to get them on the right track in life….. gee maybe they are like my kids???

Here are a Couple short vids about what we are doing out in the vineyard right now.

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Work in new vineyard

FunTSAR — Thu, 07 May 2009 13:32:42 +0000

It was a LONG and COLD winter in Marlboro Twp. aka “Hartville” Ohio. We hit 18 below zero for more than a couple of days in a row and got hurt in the vineyard. Being new to this we took our time doing our summer work of unhilling our grafted root stock vines and are still finishing up some of that now.

A grafted root stock is a fruit plant that has a different root stock than upper part or “Scion”. The reason for doing this is a desired fruit plant (or in our case grape variety) might have a root system that is not well suited for the location or has vigor issues dealing with dieases or the like. So you put a root stock on that helps to avoid the disavantages and allows you to grow a plant that you have a market for. This is also done in apple trees and a lot of ornamental plants as well. Learn more about grafting by following this link

The disavantage is that in colder climates like Ohio’s you have to protect that graft “Union” between the stock and the scion from extreme weather conditions. We do that by hilling the soil up onto the union thereby mitigating some of the effects of that winter weather has on the grafted plant. There are other methods such as wood bark and staw mulch undergoing research and are being used in limited fashion as well. They are much easier to use but the jury is still out on how well they protect and there is some concern about pathogens growing in an organic medium around the base of the plant.

In the video we show Thad Metzger a High School Science teacher at Louisville High School helping us out by removing the soil from the union and seeing how we can through the winter. The variety he is working on is called Traminette. It is a French American Hybrid white grape well suited for Ohio. It is similar to a Gewurztraminer in many ways and makes a nice light, clean slightly sweet wine.

Buds are breaking! Weeds a shaking! & A View from the Tractor Seat.

FunTSAR — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 18:51:45 +0000

Sea of Yellow

LaCrescent wine grape buds are breaking

They said it was supposed to rain today so I got out early and started mowing in the vineyards. I needed to chop up some of the wood they cut off during pruning and get a head start on the grass too. The front vineyard photo has a good view of the buds on the LaCrescent breaking and starting to show some color. This is good and bad, its good they survived the winter so well, its bad if they all get out here too early and we have a late killing frost. This variety is a hearty variety so it usually does well we just always worry about any fruit with too many emerged buds too early.

Our older vines are in the back. We never seeded grass in this block and it shows.

More than wine and grapes are getting planted at Maize Valley!

FunTSAR — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 20:28:29 +0000

Kay Planting Sweet Corn

Here comes the sun!! WOW what a couple of days of awesome weather eh!! Looks like rain on and off this week so now is the time we are getting a lot of different things done on the farm. Purning grapes, pruning apple trees, plowing working ground and planting all at the same time.

This early sweet corn is a bit of a gamble because it is prone to frost if we get hit in mid to late May like we often do. But we have to roll the dice because if we miss it this High organic black muck soil produces some awesome sweet corn. Plus it can really accumulate heat units rapidly compared to our high ground soils and really move the crop along to early maturity and have great flavor and high quality.

See how much rain we get but we hope to get out and finish up “unhilling” and uncovering the graft unions on some on our last vineyard field block later this week.