We spent yesterday with Cornell University Professor Justine Vanden Heuvel touring our under trellis cover projects. She has similar projects going on in the Finger Lakes but is focusing her research on annual cover crops as opposed to perennial ones like we have in our trials. She brought her two grad students that are working on these projects. Here is a photo of the whole group over at Old Field.

We also stopped at Martha Clara, Mattebella and One Woman to see how the various trials are progressing. It is always nice to get different perspectives and share ideas on topics that are new and constantly evolving. One of the things we discussed was even though they are seeing differences in nitrogen levels from petiole samples there are not significant difference in vine growth between treatments or fruit parameters at harvest. This may be because they are not using a permanent cover crop year round like we are. They need to hill up their vines to protect the graft union in the event of an extremely cold winter. They are tilling in their cover crop each fall which may be providing a boost of nitrogen. Will be interesting to see how their trials progress compared to ours. We'll keep you posted!