The soil management techniques that were undertaken was it uses integrated grazing. This is where sheep would be introduced into the vineyard and used to clean the land of weeds and unwanted vegetation. They would also provide nutrients to the vines through their faeces thus fertilizing the soil. Fertilizers are added before bud birth to reduce leeching of nutrient by rain. Inline drippers are used for irrigation. Drippers present encourage wider area root growth to ensure that more chances of nutrient uptake and to produce less water logging in soils. Natural fertilizers are used where bat faeces are added to the soil instead of using chemical fertilizers. This is because superphosphate fertilizers produce sulphuric acid while bad faeces have good amounts of calcium and phosphorus. All vineyards were built on slope to allow better water drainage. Another soil management technique is the undervine areas are covered using organic matter that comes from the vines of the plant. The site also has moisture proves that goes 80cm belowground. This is to monitor the moisture content of soil, electrical conductivity and temperature of the soil. Another management technique is to maintain the bottom moisture, the top soil would be watered to prevent uptake of groundwater which would cause the soil to be very dry. Lastly, the site had 3 dams on site to help with irrigation of soil during the dry seasons. The soil present at the location was made up of decomposed granite sand soil. The good property of this soil is that it is able to hold heat in the soils. Furthermore, the soils are generally well drained. The bad properties of the soil are that it lacks organic matter which affects the yield, reduces the chances of root penetration due to granite being a hard rock, poor water holding capacity causing it to dry out very easily, has erratic bedrock depth that makes it hard to find a suitable ground to plant, low in nutrients Stan HuangBenson ZhengRoger Xu
Posted on: Sat, 07 Sep 2013 08:51:47 +0000
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