...suck the juice out of the stone...

 

Click HERE to skip the first minute of "artsy" introduction

A crazy Swiss dude going through his mid-life crisis decided to grow grapes in a hostile, inhospitable environment. 70% of the vines that he laboriously plants dies in the first year*.

He spends his winter dry-fitting stone walls and backfilling with "soil" that has so much stone in it that cannot be used for gravel roads.

Nearly all progress can be laid at the feet of crazy or desperate people. "Normal" people accept that there are a thousand inter-locking reasons for why things are exactly the way they are. Only a fool or a crazy person would fight that. 

Nearly all the interesting stories are at the margins and corners of society. Men heroically (perhaps Quixotically) striving to bend austere, stony  wilderness to the plow are such men-of-the-margin.

I am proud to call several such men and women my friends. 

*If it were me, I would place empty five gallon buckets with their bottoms cut out where I wanted grape-vines. Then I would backfill around them. When it came time to plant the vines, I would put four inches of screened "soil" in the bottom, position the vine and then fill the bucket the rest of the way with the screened soil. Then I would pull the bucket up leaving the vine and cylinder of slightly better soil.

It broke my heart to see him trimming the roots to stubs because he couldn't make the holes wide enough. Those vines NEED those roots.

I would screen with 3/4" or 1" screen...not very radical, just enough to enrich the soil/stone ratio around the roots. 

Another work-around would be to plant ungrafted rootstock and let them grow a year. Then field graft or bud them the second year.