Spanish Secrets: Lessons In Grape Vine Grooming
When one of his Galician neighbours comes a-calling Craig Briggs discovers that there's more to grooming grape vines than you might think.
On Sunday totally out of the blue Jesus arrived at the house, along with his two sons Brice 12 and Jesus jnr 3.
Jesus is the son of our closest neighbour Melie who had kindly agreed to send him to the house when it was time to prune the grape vines so that he could show me how to proceed.
Jesus’ first language is Gallego, not Spanish as you might presume. Here in Galicia in the North West of Spain even the children are schooled in Gallego.
So with both mine and his second language being Spanish, verbal communication was kept to a minimum.
He began with the first vine inside the gate and after studying it for several seconds began to clip away with his yellow handled secateurs, of which I had an identical pair, no doubt purchased at Tomas’ ferreteria (hardware store) in our parish council village of Sober.
It was obvious that despite the apparent randomness of the clipping, he knew exactly what he was doing.
This stem will grow this way so prune it at about six buds along and just in case it breaks leave another small one trimmed to two buds, he explained.
Before I had time to clearly understand what was going on the first corner of the garden was complete.
As Jesus clipped away, having earlier asked where they should go, Brice picked up the clippings without so much as a murmur and piled them neatly at the edge of the garden.
Having now stood watching for quarter of an hour and feeling somewhat surplus to requirements I put my best foot forward, and released the safety catch on my secateurs.
Jesus could see that I was keen to make my first cut and having trimmed one stem to about six buds pointed out the backup stem which needed trimming to two buds.
With a sharp intake of breath and grasping the stem firmly in my left hand I moved in for the cut.
Snip!
A perfect cut, or so I thought. But no. Jesus pointed out that my cut was an inch and a half, that’s 3cm to us Europeans, short but as with most things here in Spain, “no pasa nada” (it doesn’t matter).
Whilst we continued with the vines, my wife Melanie had the unenviable task of preventing Jesus jnr from drowning in the pool, or poking the dog’s eyes out. And to think, I was once a lovely little boy!
This task she undertook with gusto, keeping his hands occupied with sticky buns and home made bread and stopping him throwing himself in the pool by letting him throw anything else in he could get his sticky hands on.
All in all a jolly good way to spend a Sunday afternoon
Adios Amigos
