More Land Clearing

Mike emailed us a couple more pictures of the land clearing.  They cleared the area covered in younger douglas fir trees.  This area is on the north side of the house site and the dirt road.  It looks pretty big now that it is cleared!

A-1 has done all that they can for now.  We must wait for the land to try out before finishing the clearing.

Chris and I hope to go up again in the next few weeks to see the progress.  We will definitely be up there in May for a week with Chris' parents.  By then, the clearing might be done.

House Removal

As part of the land clearing work, A-1 has agreed to remove the existing modular home that is on the property. To simplify the process, the burnable material was stripped out of the house and burnt on-site.  The remaining pieces were hauled away.  Here are some pictures from the cleanup...

Land Clearing -Phase 1

The vineyard creation has started!  

We have contracted A-1 Logging to do the land clearing.  With the string of dryer weather, they have already been able to start.  Mike has been keeping us up-to-date with some photos.

There are two primary areas to clear.  First, the home site.  This is just under 3 acres on the top of a hill.  The area was covered in trees that were left during the last clearing.  We need to have them removed because we plan to use solar power for the house...trees are not good if we want plenty of sun.

Before pictures of the home site:

After:

The second area we are clearing is north of the home site on the hill along the property edge.  This area will be planted in spring 2013.  It was logged a few years ago and had many stumps left behind.  The clearing will remove the stumps and any remaining trees.  When the ground dries out, A-1 will use a ripper to remove the roots, as well.

Before:

 After (looking from the home site)

Winter in the Willamette Valley

We were not sure what to expect during our visit to Oregon at the end of January.  We had heard winter was wet and cooler.  As it turns out, both statements are true.  Lucky for us, it was at least dry while were were in town.

We visited the area Jan 26-29 to make some progress on our "lot to-do list".  We are getting closer to summer and we needed to nail down the plans for land clearing and order our vines.  Coincidentally, the class Chris is taking had a field trip planned to visit several vineyards which we joined.

Our first stop was Countryside Nursery.  Chris had been working with them to order the vines that we will plant in Feb/Mar 2013.  Vines have to be ordered about a year in advance because the rootstocks must be grafted to cuttings from existing plants.  Linda, the nursery's expert, spent some time with us to show us the plants they had on site and explain the process.  She said that the yearly orders range drastically from 50,000 to hundreds of thousands; her team can graft around 6,000 per day.  Our small order of 2,600 will not even take them a day to complete.

After stopping at the nursery, we drove out to the lot to meet with Larry and Mike from A-1 Logging (check out their facebook page!).  Larry was familiar with the lot already because A-1 did the logging a few years back.  As it turns out, his prior experience on the lot was very valuable to us.  He was able to show us another wet spot on the lot.  Not only was there a small stream, there was also a little pond!  We didn't check this area in summer, so we are not sure if this water is present all year round.  We will definitely check back later in the year.

That was not the only place we had water on the lot.  The area near the well, where we had planned to build a shed, had several small streams on it.  This area was try in summer.  We may need to re-think our plan to put a shed there.

We wrapped up our meeting with Larry and Mike and planned to meet up with them again on Friday to see some of the work that A-1 Logging has done.


We made our way to the hotel and then headed out to dinner in McMinnville.  We ended up at Orchid Bistro which is one of our favorites in the area.  We were a bit disappointed by their wine options on this trip.

Friday morning, after breakfast, we went back out to the lot to do some exploring.  We did not have much time because we planned to meet the A-1 guys at 1p at their office in Yamhill.  We walked around for a bit and talked about the next steps.  Todd, the guy from next store, showed up and chatting with us for a while, as well.

We left the lot and headed to Yamhill for a quick lunch.  We ran into Mike and Larry at the restaurant - good thing because we would have been late for our appointment with them.  We ate and then headed out to see some of the work Larry has done.  He lives pretty close to the lot and introduced us to several other locals.  It was great getting to see some of the area.

On Saturday we went with Chris' class to see 3 vineyards.

• Airlie - http://www.airliewinery.com/

• Firesteed (we saw one of their new vineyards) - http://www.firesteed.com/

• Bethel Heights - http://www.bethelheights.com/

The field trip was great.  We learned a lot from the speakers.  There is another field trip in February, but we are not sure if we will make it up for that one.