Another Crop

by Gary Mount

Why I like growing grapes, and what an unusual crop grapes are.

One of the things that I’ve noticed is that young women graduate from college and almost always head towards California. That was true of our daughter Tannwen, and so we visited her out there. She lived in San Francisco and worked in Berkeley, and we went to the Napa Valley visiting the vineyards. Really, you know, the California vineyards are sort of boring. You go to a vineyard that has two varieties, maybe 3. It’s not like at

the Eastern wineries, in New Jersey for example, where they have 14 or 16 varieties –– they have something for everyone. But we did have an opportunity to encourage Tannwen to come back to the farm, and when we finally did, it was up to me to go to California, and drive back with her

in her Honda Civic with two cats. It was a challenge to drive cross country with all of her treasures in the car, but we chose the southern route which was a tremendous awakening for us, especially coming from a place like New Jersey. We ended up visiting the Hoover Dam, met Navajo friends of Tannwen in Arizona, and visited Graceland in Memphis, TN, the home of the King — Elvis Presley. It was eye opening.

But not to forget, the whole purpose of this trip was to get “Tanni” to New Jersey and establish a vineyard. When establishing a vineyard you want to find the best location, soil, climate — everything you can do to have success. Here in Lawrence Township, there wasn’t that much choice of available land. We chose the best spot that we had on the farm that we had purchased back in 2003. When planting grapes, we found that they were fast growing, but not so suitable for winemaking in the early years. We had to buy some more mature grapes for our first wine sales in 2010. We started with three acres — now we have 9 acres, and growing grapes is a pretty unusual crop. Actually, I like growing grapes, they’re very exacting. I wondered when I first started growing grapes, why they were so exacting.

Our grapes are planted 6 foot by 9 foot, and that is exact. It’s not 6 foot and a few inches and 9 foot minus a few inches, it is 6 foot by 9 foot. And I often wondered when I looked at grapes in the past. Why? Such attention to spacing detail. I couldn’t figure it out until I started growing grapes and I learned that actually uniformity in growing leads to uniformity in harvest and uniformity in quality of the grapes.

When we started to grow grapes, we tested the soils and sure enough, we found there were nematodes. Nematodes are tiny, worm-like, almost microscopic organisms that can spread viruses in the grapes. A common way to control them is by fumigation. That’s by intensive chemical use. And sterilizing the soil. I wanted to try out a little bit better way, so this would be my first attempt at bio remediation in 2005. What we did was plant a mustard type of crop, and after it grew, we mowed it off and plowed it under. As it degraded in the soil, the nematodes were killed. It worked pretty well. So much for nematodes. But then, there was the issue of Lake Terhune — what we named the wet spot in the middle of the 15 acres that we had set aside to plant grapes. Wet spot might be an understatement. It was an area that was maybe one to two feet lower than all the surrounding area and rainfall would gather there making a huge puddle in the middle of the field. We worked with the US Department of Agriculture NRCS program to address this and engaged Patriot Excavating to work with us. Tom Posh, the owner, brought in a lot of really large equipment. Pushed the top soil back, re-graded the subsoil and replaced the topsoil. We now have a very successful area for growing crops.

But wait a minute, there was another problem. Birds. BIRDS. Yes, birds. And it turns out that near our vineyard there are great numbers of birds that love our grapes. This was not a totally new problem to us because we have problems with birds in our blueberries and cherries. They like to eat what we grow, but it wasn’t going to work at all with wine grapes, because the birds eat them and if they do not eat everything, parts of the grapes left behind start to decay and there goes the grape quality. We now use netting all around our grapes. We are surrounded by nets, we’re able to drive around inside, mow and spray and harvest inside. And the birds are 100% excluded. So great. It’s very expensive but works for us.

Right now on the farm is the time that we’re taking down the bird nets for the winter. There’s one problem that might occur if we’re not careful. This year is pretty warm, but in the past, there were two years when we had snow on Halloween. The first time we were completely unprepared and I think we had about four- or five-acres worth of net end up in the dumpster. The weight of the snow destroyed all the net. Just terrible.

But there you have it — grapes. What I really like to grow. They’re complicated. They’re difficult. They’re hard for us because we grow so many different kinds. You know, we’re Eastern growers of wine grapes and that means that we have 16 to 18 types of wine for our customers. We try to have something for everybody. We have red wine, white wine, sweet wine, dry wine, fruit wine. We have blends and single variety wines. In the east, we normally have lots of rainfall. And naturally enough, it makes problems with disease in the grapes. This year, the weather has been very, very dry and the grape quality is great. I can hardly wait. We have harvested and processed all the grapes. The white wines will be ready in May or June. and the red wines will be a year and a half. And like I said, I can hardly wait. While I’m talking about challenges, am I supposed to talk about harvest challenge? At the time that we were planting grapes I did not think that about the conflicts of harvesting them at the same time everything else was getting harvested (around here that is mainly apples).

So, we not only have to harvest our grapes in September and October, but everything else! Oh boy. Meanwhile, we need to think about marketing. The way we do things at Terhune is that we try to sell everything that we grow right to the consumer, and we’re doing that with wine as well. We grow the grapes; we make the wine and sell it right to the customer. No shipping. In 2010 were our first sales. We made a tasting room at the end of our old barn. And was it small? It was really small. What were we thinking? In order to make any money at selling something, you have to sell a good quantity of it. In that little tasting room? Fortunately, now we’ve expanded our area to sell wine. We call that our wine premises. So, we can accommodate more customers and they can buy more wine. There’s room for lots of tables and chairs and tents. This all comes under the category of live and learn.

Right now, in the fall of 2024, we’re moving forward. 2024 was such a great year. The quality of grapes was good and as I said, we can’t wait.