When I was growing up in a working class city North of Boston I never imagined that I would one day (happily) find myself up to my elbows in cow poop. But that is how I’ve found myself the past few years, inserting the biodynamic preps into my compost piles. Given the timing of harvest, when we can apply last year’s compost to the vineyards, and when we can get the new cow manure based compost in, this exercise occurs sometime in late November. Perhaps because the timing coincides with the start of my holiday season and because most of our wine is in barrel, I find myself in a generally positive and grateful spirit as I create deep holes in the compost in a specific pattern, and then insert the preps; yarrow, chamomile, nettle, oak bark, dandelion, and half the valerian into the compost (spraying the rest over the pile). Over the next year the preps will interact with the compost and we will have a rich humus to spread on the vineyards after harvest 2020, and the cycle will begin anew.- Bill Sweat, Proprietor