home, we saw the effects of the eruption. We sat in the car at the top of a hill and watched in awe as the mountain sent up a huge, roiling cloud of ash. The actual explosion surprised everyone, although the possibility of an eruption had been in the news for weeks. We had watched endless television interviews with people forced to evacuate their homes. Those who refused to leave vanished without a trace. Ash drifted far beyond the area desolated by the eruption. In Portland, the gray dust clung to grass and shrubs for months. A thin layer of ash even landed on our vineyard, but it barely covered our hillside and didn’t cause any harm. We drove to Hillsboro, northwest of us, where the ash was almost an inch deep, and Nik and Alex gathered it in buckets to keep as souvenirs. Then they got the bright idea of putting it in little bags to sell to tasting-room visitors. They sold out so I never had to deal with buckets of leftover volcanic ash. Local farmers plowed in the ash, the crops suffered no harm, and the 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens took its place in local lore next to the Columbus Day Storm of 1962.
We did many experiments in the vineyard and the one for which I had the highest hopes turned out to be our biggest failure. We got the idea of using geese in the vineyard when we heard they were used to weed the fields at mint farms—they ate the weeds and left the mint. I envisioned a pastoral scene with fat, happy geese wandering around the vineyard, feasting on weeds and leaving the vines to grow healthy and lush. Here was an idea that had everything going for it. It was more environmentally friendly than spraying herbicide or running equipment to mow or till, and it would save time and money. We chose a block of vines that we could fence relatively easily—three acres of Riesling adjacent to our house. We could watch the geese from our deck.
There were some immediate obstacles. We needed to fence, but we also needed to get a tractor up and down the rows to spray for mildew and botrytis (rot). We met this challenge with a makeshift chicken wire fence that had to be removed when we needed to spray, which was every ten to fourteen days all summer. But we figured all this extra time and energy was a small price to pay for such a great idea.
Two dozen white Chinese goslings arrived at our house in March. I had never had any farm animals and couldn’t wait. When we opened the box, forty-eight tiny bright eyes looked up and gave us little goose smiles, accompanied by considerable twittering. We bonded immediately. They were so little that we put them in a small pen until they got bigger and we got the fencing in place. They came waddling, honking eagerly, whenever they saw or heard us. We chuckled at their antics.
In April, when the vines had not fully leafed out but the grass and weeds were growing fast and at their tender and tasty best, we embarked on our great experiment. As far as we knew, no other vineyard in Oregon had even thought of trying this. We put the geese in among the vines, in a section that has been known since as the Goosepen Block. The young geese loved their new freedom and wandered around giving all the various plants the taste test. I expected they would develop a taste for the leafy weeds. The vines would be too high for them to reach, anyway.
Our plan started to fall apart right away. The geese just wanted to be near us. When we went out onto the deck to see how they were doing, they’d come running over and line up along the fence, honking at us. When we weren’t outside, they would sit quietly at the fence and wait for us to reappear. I tried going into the vineyard and showing them the far reaches of the block. They dutifully allowed me to herd them, and then they went back to their positions along the fence line facing our house. We thought maybe the geese would cover more of the block after they had eaten all the weeds in the section near the house. It never happened. They spent the rest of their lives trying to be near us, while the weeds grew freely. We knew it was time to act when the young geese got big enough to reach the grapes hanging on the vines.
In the end, we chose one pair to keep, and the rest of the geese ended up in our freezer. I cooked one, but we couldn’t bear to eat it. They stayed in the freezer for years. I was simply unable to bring myself to deal with them. It wasn’t until we moved, and I had to empty the freezer, that I finally closed the chapter on the geese—except, that is, for the two goose-down pillows that Bill had given me for Christmas. For many years we laid our heads on the fluffy remains of our unwilling weed eaters.
The pair that we kept, dubbed Papa Goose and Gertie, grew large and elegant. At first, they hung out in the front yard and liked to camp on the front doormat. The whole front porch was soon awash in goose poop. Not good. We fenced an area off our deck that became their pasture, then built a little pond and a house for them. I even bought a series of exotic ducks to keep Papa and Gertie company.
Our most successful vineyard experiment was far less glamorous: testing various grasses as potential cover crops between the grape rows to prevent erosion. Ours was one of a handful of vineyards that worked with the US Soil Conservation Service and Oregon State University to test a variety of perennial and annual grasses. We later learned that the level of cooperation between these two groups for this project was unprecedented. Apparently, it was uncommon even to have two different departments at the university working together.
My goal was to find a grass that would prevent erosion, would not compete with the vines for water since we didn’t irrigate, and would be stalwart enough to withstand equipment driving over it. From among the eight different perennial grasses we tried, we identified a sheep fescue called Covar that did all those things and, in addition, never grew more than four inches high. I sowed that wonderful little grass as a cover crop on our whole vineyard, as did many other farmers.
The US Soil Conservation Service recognized my work in 1984 by honoring Sokol Blosser as Cooperator of the Year for the Yamhill Soil and Water Conservation District. We were to be recognized and presented a plaque at the annual awards dinner. Bill and I both went to the dinner, but I might as well have been invisible. People looked right past me and came over to congratulate Bill and ask him about Sokol Blosser’s project. They assumed the farmer and decision maker was the man, as of course it usually was among the local farmers.
Before and during harvest, it was always a challenge to keep the wild birds away. Cedar waxwings and robins especially loved the ripening grapes. Cedar waxwings move in large flocks, flying like a squadron of small planes. Their elegant descent on the vineyard, in perfect formation, belied the damage they were about to do. I admired their grace and they were easy to scare, so it was hard to dislike them. Robins were a different story. Plump and wily, robins acted alone rather than in flocks, but there were many of them in the vineyard, and they were voracious grape eaters. They would hide in the leafy canopy when they saw us, and then go back to eating when we had gone. When I walked the vineyard with our dogs, Bagel and Muffin, they always took it as a personal affront when they saw birds in the vines and took off after them, barking ferociously. But even their most energetic efforts did not solve the problem.
We had tried everything else to warn off the birds: driving the pickup around honking the horn, riding bikes down the rows and yelling, tying a helium balloon with a picture of a hawk to a trellis wire, turning on an electronic device that emitted bird distress calls, even shooting an air cannon.
Air cannons now operate off propane canisters, but they were more elaborate and difficult in the early days of our vineyard. Water dripping on carbide rocks in a sealed chamber created acetylene gas. When enough pressure was built up, a lever would cause a wheel to strike a flint to ignite the gas and create a giant “kaboom.” They were not reliable and had to be checked often. Maintaining those cannons meant working on hands and knees in the mud during Oregon’s rainy fall season. Bill would light them in the mornings before he left for work and I would keep them going during the day.
I had just finished pounding posts for our new plantings and as I returned to the equipment shed, little Alison ran out to greet me. This remains one of my favorite mother-daughter photos.
I hated and feared guns, but finally I learned to shoot a shotgun to scare the birds; it was the only thing
