Removing the Vineyard

What it really took to clear the land and start fresh

When we bought the property, it was still set up as a vineyard—rows and rows of old vines, dripper lines, wires, and thousands of timber posts. At first glance, the infrastructure looked solid, but most of it had seen better days. We knew from the start we weren’t going to keep it. We had different plans for this land.

What we didn’t know was just how long it would take to clear it all. Two and a half years, in the end.

Being a farmer, I already had the tractor and gear needed to take it on ourselves—something that made the whole job possible. We chipped away at it between cropping seasons, project by project, until eventually, it was all gone.

We started with the wire. Kilometres of it, all needing to be rolled up and hauled out. We took load after load to the scrap yard and ended up dropping off around 20 tonnes. The dripper lines came next. Some of it was too worn out to reuse, so we recycled what we could. We held on to the better stuff and sold the rest to other growers looking for a quality, budget-friendly setup.

Then came the posts—about 40,000 timber ones in total. We kept a good amount of them for ourselves, using them to build new fences for our livestock and simple timber shelters around the farm. The rest we gave away. Over a few months, trailers, utes, and trucks came rolling in. Most of them were fellow hobby farmers or folks working on their own projects, so the conversations were always good. In fact, giving away those posts led to the start of our beekeeping journey—but that’s another story.

The vines themselves were the last to go. We pulled them out and stacked them up for burning. They sat in piles through the year until winter, when it was finally cool and safe enough to light them up.

Clearing the vineyard wasn’t glamorous work. It was dusty, repetitive, and sometimes felt never-ending. But it gave us a clean slate—a proper blank canvas to start building Rustic Harvest the way we wanted.