Young Oak Vineyards: Volume 37: Summer Doldrums!

Hi all:

Hope you are all having an enjoyable summer!  The grapes keep basking in the sun and only require a little water about once a week.  Which is good, because I am recovering from my hip surgery, I am only able to do a little around the house.  I actually can do the dishes & clean the kitchen, but I have to be careful!  I have advanced from a walker to crutches to the cane in record time!  Now my therapist is now having me walk without the aid of anything.  After I have re-mastered walking, I hope to be able to do some serious projects around the house, but unfortunately, I can't rush things.  It typically takes about three months to recover from this type of hip surgery.

Thanks to my Number One Son, Scott, his good friend Frank Gage and two wonderful young ladies visiting from Finland, the vineyard is looking really well groomed!  Scott & crew hand pulled, roots & all of most of the insidious weeds from the vineyard!  Scott has headed back to his current digs in Helsinki, Finland to work away in the Nordic sunshine.  We look forward to his next visit very soon!

If you are wondering what's with all the girls with goats pictures, in the quiet of the late morning this past July 29th, with everyone out and about on errands & such, Ellie started her delivery.  We lost one little one, but two little guys survived.  Still un-named, I went for the obvious like "Salt & Pepper", "Blackie & Whitie", however, I have been vetoed as to just being lame!  I have really enjoyed having the goats as part of the vineyard management.  However, we need to curtail our growing numbers (i.e.:  Big Mac gets fixed!)!

On the bee front:  Hey, we just received our first installment of honey, about 20+ pounds!  This represents the work our bees have done this Spring.  Our beeman, Alan, has placed another "super" on top of our hive, sort of a top box condo with frames for the bees to store even more honey.  We should see another 20 pounds or so from the summer months as well.  Since bees range about 2 mile in radius, the type of honey is considered to be a "mixed flower", but that would include pollen from my cabernet grape flowers, my bottlebrush, the star thistle & other weeds about, my pepper tree, not to mention my neighbor's eucalyptus and many others.  So this is a great mix of all the local pollens that would really get your allergies going, especially if you live near us!  If you are interested in trying our honey, drop me a line!

With delicious sticky fingers on my keys,
John