Sunday, September 02, 2018

Abandoned

Every year I take a photo or two of the grapes in the abandoned vineyard parcel out toward the end of the road. The parcel is slowly being overtaken by shrubs and small trees. Another nearby parcel is already overgrown with acacia trees to the point where it's hard to see that it was once a grape producing vineyard. But this one is still recognizable.

A sad looking bunch, but pretty in its own way.

Nobody tends the parcel and nobody, except the wildlife, picks the grapes. Not that they'd be good for much. An untended, unpruned vineyard makes many small bunches of small grapes. I wonder if the parcel could be rescued, but I imagine it would be too much work. It would probably be easier to raze all to the ground and start over, but I doubt anyone around here is interested in doing that.

5 comments:

  1. The texture you captured on the grappe of grapes, is great.

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  2. The colors and textures! I didn't appreciate how quickly vineyards can be lost without tending.

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  3. I'm rereading Michael Pollan's "Second Nature: A Gardener's Education." One of his themes is how quickly untended cultivated spaces succumb to opportunistic interlopers.

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  4. Does anyone your way leave grapes on the vine for frozen harvests to make eiswein?

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  5. re agricultural interlopers: In New England, the rule of thumb was that it took about a generation for a fertile field to return to forest. First the scrub and grasses move in, then the volunteer seedlings grow bigger, then more and more, and twenty years on the only way you recognize a former field is by its tumbled stone wall.

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