It's not only the grapevines that are growing. Since the sheep left the vineyard at the end of August, the grass has grown quickly thanks to the abundant rain.
I sprayed under the vines with a herbicide and the last couple of weeks I've slashed the mid-rows and the surrounding area. It's taken longer than it should because I try to avoid driving the tractor through the vineyard when the ground is soft. This can compact the soil and make root penetration difficult. Still it looks good when its done and certainly makes it easier walking throught the rows for the ongoing vine training and maintenance.
With warmer weather already upon us and more forecast, it was also time to flush out the irrigation lines. The micro-drippers can get blocked with fine particles of dirt and scum, so at the start of the season I open up the ends of each dripper line and flush the lines out by running water through them for 20 minutes.
Of course that means the pump has to start and the automatic valves have to work. It's a time when you discover that hares have eaten the wires to the solenoids controlling the valves and the power outages have thoroughly confused the control box and its programs. (I should have expected it really as recently I received a cheque for $100 from Powercor. This happened because they had breached their service standards and we had had more than 10 significant unplanned power outages for the year.)
So before I could flush the lines, I had to fix the wiring and reset and reprogram the controller. Still, better to find out before I really needed to use the pump for irrigation. I'll have to get the spade out next weekend and do some digging to see how the moisture is in the subsoil.