I don’t know if you have ever noticed the ties used to fix the vines to the supporting posts when walking through a vineyard. If you have never noticed them I can tell you that normally people use hollowed PVC string that is undoubtedly easy to use and fairly elastic , but most unattractive, at least in my opinion. Especially in winter, when the vine is bare, this bright green binding is really an eye-sore.
DTo be honest, I was not very keen on it from the start for aesthetic reasons, but when I looked at the figures and I realised that each year roughly 10 kg are used per hectare, I started my personal battle against it. Our vineyard, which is certainly not one of the largest, would have to have buy 150 kg of plastic string tubing for an overall length of roughly 16 km.
The point is: where does all this stuff end up every year? Simply, it is left on the ground!
This means that if we went on like this, a few decades from now our vineyard would have an amazing plastic cover over the ground with no extra effort. Wonderful!
Hence, I decided to look for an alternative and I found a product called Ecolink which is a paper string produced by CentroPlast, a firm from Cortona. This string, which is made from cellulose fibres, can simply be left on the ground once removed from the plants because it is biodegradable, just like any other vegetable matter.
My proposal was not very well received at first by all the farm-workers, but in the end they came round and, after the initial difficulties, they have become extremely fast at using this binding.
The photo below shows our plants with the cellulose string. In my opinion they are much more attractive than before.
If you are interested in finding out more you can visit the site of CentroPlast in the section on products for irrigation.
Francesca