Kintarla - Spring has Sprung

Desuckering and Fruiting Wires

We spent all of yesterday fertigating (adding fertiliser via the irrigation system through the dripper lines), dropping the fruiting wires (which you lift about halfway through the season to allow more air in the canopy and to maximise rays), and desuckering.

Desuckering is tough on the back. You have to run you hand up down the trunk of each vine to remove the shoots you don't want. It aint hard work exactly but after the first kilometre it starts to get old. If you walk along all our rows the total length is 7km's. Needless to say we didn't finish - We had to get back to watch the kiwis kick our arse again in the rugby.

We are trialling a new organic spray which doesn't kill anything or prevent disease but instead works on improving the health of the vine, thereby making it strong enough to fight off the various things that want to eat it. Lisa is keen on us ultimately getting certified organic.

Google Forms - the easy way to do surveys and mailing lists!

So check it out.

I had read a bit about Google forms and needed a way for people to sign up to the Kintarla Mailing List (so folks can reserve their bottles of our limited release first vintage).

The process couldn't be simpler. You rock over to Google Docs, design your form and then embed it in your website or send people the link. When people fill out the form and press submit, the results are automatically collated in a spreadsheet. Brilliant!!

You can see the final product here.

Create a Forum for your Web Site

The iWeb software on my Mac is nice and shiny but a bit lacking in the feature department.

In addition, if you dont want to pay for a "MobileMe" account you can't get comments working on the blog.

So how to get feedback? You can of course stick an email link but that is a bit one on one for these days of cloud computing and multicast communication.

I stumbled across a crowd called Ning (http://www.ning.com/) who make it very easy to set up a forum / chat site for free. It is simple to set up particularly if you are familiar with blogger as it uses a similar template based approach.

You can check out my efforts at http://reefwing.ning.com/

Now all I need is some comments!