Remembering these two weeks really feels like a dream. They would not have happened without help from Katie, my family and so many friends, old and new. We had planters come from California, Arizona, Florida, Oregon, Kansas, Wisconsin, Colorado and of course Texas. I want to give special thanks to the Fraziers from Colorado, and Gabe and Joanna from California who were new friends who heard about Alta Marfa from the internet and were awesome enough to come out sight unseen and help us plant.

Joanna, who writes about wine on her own blog and for other publications, wrote a wonderful article for TheVintnerProject.com that you can read here: Joanna's article Joanna also took a ton of great pictures. (she took most of the pictures in this post) Thanks Joanna!

The night before most people arrived my mom made a wonderful dinner for the early arrivals.

We planned to work all day Friday and Saturday, finish planting by Saturday evening, then have a nice dinner in Marfa to celebrate. After 2 years of preparation, we now had just a few days to get all the vines in the ground before all the planters had to go back to their real lives.

Katie, George and Paulina waiting for the coffee to be ready.

Holes for the vines were dug beforehand with the excavator so planting was pretty simple. Grab a vine, hold it in the hole and use hands or a trowel to push the soil back into the hole. Sounds easy, but it becomes a lot more difficult when the pile of "soil" next to the hole is just a pile of rocks.

My dad, Chris and Tim working hard. Thanks guys!

The volcanic soil was so abrasive and rocky that it cut up your fingers, even through gloves. George solved this problem by wrapping his fingertips in duct tape inside his gloves so that he could dig more comfortably.

After spending more than a week outdoors, Pepe and Lulu must have thought, "I guess we will never see our couch again..."

Halfway through Saturday, which was supposed to be the last day of planting, I realized that we weren't going to finish. Luckily, some of the California friends and my parents weren't flying out till Monday morning and agreed to come back Sunday to finish planting.

Even though we weren't done, I think everyone felt pretty great when we rolled into Marfa to get cleaned up and celebrate our hard work.

Even though we weren't done planting yet, this dinner at Stellina was a wonderful break in what for me was a nonstop two weeks of scrambling.

Mike, Kevin, RJ, Garreth and Teresa, thanks guys!

After lots of celebrating Saturday night, our remaining workers were a little worse for wear when we returned to finish planting on Sunday.

Here I am putting the last vine in the ground. Everyone was completely exhausted at this point.

This was the final crew that finished planting all the vines on Sunday after everyone else had left. I have so much gratitude for these guys that stuck around and made sure everything was done.

Five minutes after we finished the clouds rolled in and it started hailing!

Everyone was definitely happy to be finished!

Here you can see all the pieces of the irrigation system except the well. Water flows from the silver storage tank through the solar powered irrigation pump, through the valve manifold, which is controlled by the irrigation controller, then is sent … — Here you can see all the pieces of the irrigation system except the well. Water flows from the silver storage tank through the solar powered irrigation pump, through the valve manifold, which is controlled by the irrigation controller, then is sent to any of 7 irrigation zones through the PVC pipes and into the drip tubing,

The relief of getting the last of the vines in the ground was short lived. I realized that the irrigation controller wasn't working. I was supposed to return to Houston Sunday night and go back to work Monday morning. I informed my boss I couldn't come back yet.

I didn't have a small enough screwdriver to open and close the electrical terminals and it would have taken over an hour to drive to buy one so I made one by grinding down this nail file. Worked great!

I ended up spending all of Monday and Tuesday talking to tech support on the phone, re-wiring the controller and just generally sweating, mentally and physically. Finally, late Tuesday, I got everything working, piled my self into the car, too exhausted to clean anything up and drove the 9 hours back to Houston.

While i was struggling to fix the irrigation controller, a huge wild fire started just over the mountain and was filling the air with smoke. Fires can be extremely dangerous in the area because of the strong winds and the extreme dryness.

30. The Vines are in the Ground!