The Ruminant: Audio Candy for Farmers, Gardeners and Food Lovers - e.61 Extra: Jim Riddle on the crops he grows at Blue Fruit Farm

Episode Date: November 14, 2015

A brief summary of this episode

So before we now, I just want to kind of segue into talking about how to set one of these, a farm like this up and some of the production considerations. But I think we should start. We've been talking about Blue Fruit Farm. Can you give me a list of the crops you're growing on the farm? Yeah, well, we have quite a few different varieties of blueberries. And, you know, something about blueberries is you'd need, they produce better with several varieties. I mean, they're pretty much self-pollinating so long as you have bumblebees to do the work.

But the production and quality really improves with multiple varieties. And then you want to think through whether they're early season, mid-season, or late season, because there are distinct differences there. And then, you know, plant height, because some of those are very low in spreading. And so we've avoided those as well. And, you know, really focus on the ones that get up at least four feet in height and then have good berry size and good flavor. But we still have quite a few. Some of the varieties we're growing, Northland, Polaris, Patriots, those are all early to mid-season.

And then we have some late varieties, Nelson, Elliott, Elizabeth, with the Nelson in our particular situation doing the best of the late varieties. And then we have a number of different varieties of elderberries, and some of those come from the northeast, varieties like Nova, Johns, Adams, and York. And then some come out of Missouri, and those are Ranger, Wildwood, and Bob Gordon, and not Ranger, but Ranch, I'm sorry. And for us, in our situation, by far, the Ranch out of Missouri have been the most dependable, most productive, and least trouble. We have a couple different, well, three different issues with elderberries.

An elderberry rust, and that can affect any of the varieties, and that we can control quite successfully with scouting and removal. But then we also have some issues with a curling of the leaves caused by an elderberry mite, and then also fruit being affected by powdery mildew. And that is much more pronounced problems, whereas the Ranch and Bob Gordon and Nova are the ones that don't suffer from those. So those are working best in our situation, but every situation is different. Then we also, I'm very pleased with the way that black currants have performed for us. Our primary variety is Titania, and it has been disease-free, very productive, very vigorous. In fact, the biggest problem it causes is it produces way too many shoots and stems that the pruning,

way too many shoots and stems that the pruning, you had to just be ruthless and remove at least half to two-thirds of the plant every year. So in March, we come through and try and get it down to about 12 stems, 12 to 15 stems per bush. And you want a mix of one, two, and three-year-old wood. So you need to identify the different ages of the wood and then be pretty rigorous, ruthless in pruning. And we did have one variety consort that we planted originally with the titania and it was totally susceptible to powdery mildew and so we pulled out 115 plants and replaced them with more titania but now we're also into several new varieties that we put in this year crusader uh minaj Miru, and Black Down, as well as a native that I collected in the woods, a Ribes Americanum that I'm very excited about having added to our collection now. It has milder, sweeter fruit a little bit later, and so I think it has a lot of potential,

so I'm expanding on those. But then I mentioned our plum trees. So we have five different varieties, Mount Royal, Ewing Blue, Todd, which is a prune plum type kind of oblong shape variety, the Northern Blue, which is not blue. and maybe that was a mistake at the nursery but the ones we have have a yellow reddish fruit and then black ice which is a kind of gourmet type plum bred out of UW University Wisconsin River Falls program, but they've been more problematic for us. The best ones have been those northern blue, even though they're not blue, and then the Todd and Mount Royal so far.

And those are all full-size trees, and the black ice is a dwarf or a semi-dwarf. And then we have a few trees of a very interesting fruit called a cherry plum. We only have about a dozen trees, but that's actually a cross between a sand cherry and different plum varieties. And so the fruit itself is about the size of a plum, but with a smaller pit like a cherry, deep purple flesh, and quite delicious. But the growth habits of some of the trees, they want to sprawl because they have that sand cherry genetics in them. And so they're a little challenging to get them to prune and shape up into a tree form. But they're kind of fun to play around with. And then another really dependable fruit for us is the aronia berry. Aronia melancarpa is the species. Common name is black chokeberry, not choke cherry, but chokeberry. It's a shrub. They get up about four to six feet tall, yeah, at least six feet, and about four feet wide, multi-stemmed. They're a native to North America, but

all the development and breeding has gone on in Scandinavia, Russia, and Eastern Europe. And so the variety we grow is called Viking, and it's actually out of Sweden, even though the plant itself is native to North America. And people in those countries are very familiar with the aronia berry. It has like four to ten times the antioxidant of blueberries four to ten times the antioxidant of blueberries and is the highest on the antioxidant scale of anything that we can grow here. They're about the size of a blueberry. They're actually in the rose family or apple family,

and they are in a cluster of about 20 berries in a cluster that all ripen at once. And they would lend themselves to mechanical harvest, but we only have about 150 plants, and it really doesn't warrant mechanical harvest for our scale. But they would, and I know people planting acres of aronia berries now. people planting acres of aronia berries now. And they aren't the kind of thing that you just pick off the bush and eat fresh like you do a blueberry. They're very astringent. So when you eat on them, they're juicy, but at the same time, make your mouth feel dry and pucker up. I mean, I can eat them, but they aren't just something that you have on your cereal like you would a blueberry, but they're great thrown into smoothies with other fruits, and they make

incredible juices, jellies, and wine. And I think they have tremendous potential and have been very trouble-free as far as any disease or pest issues. Minimal pruning, there's some pruning, but nothing like with the blackcurrants. And then we have about 40 service berries, which are also known as saskatoons or June berries. They're also native originally to North America and historically been part of the indigenous diet mixed with buffalo meat and fat to make pemmican. The serviceberry is a crucial ingredient in that. They're a high-protein fruit, which is unusual. They have a little more prominent seed than some of the other things I talked about, but it's still quite edible.

And they are edible right off the bush, and you can mix them with your cereal. They're not at all inoffensive. They make great pies or tarts, things like that. And we just have one variety called Regent. But I've been told that a couple other varieties are even higher quality fruit, Smoky and Thiesen. If I was going to do it again, I would probably go to the extra effort to try and source some other varieties.

But they're a fruit that the birds are just crazy about. When I finish talking about the fruit, I'll talk about what we've done about the birds. And they're quite early in the season. So the name Juneberry, they're towards the end of June is when they ripen. And then in the last few years, we've added honeyberry to our collection. And I am very excited about honeyberry they're called honeyberry because they're in the same genus as the honeysuckle another name is called the blue honeysuckle

they're uh very cold hardy they're a zone three fruit they're typically grown in Siberia and Hokkaido, the northern island of Japan. They're an oblong fruit. Oh, the biggest one's about an inch long, purple, and ripened before strawberries, so very early in the season. And they are a fresh-eating fruit, so you can pick them and just munch on them. And they're a little delicate. And that's another thing that why we don't grow blackberries and raspberries is because they're so delicate after harvest. We like things that hold up better. These are kind of in between. They're, you know, pretty stable, but you do want to use them a little quicker.

They don't have as long a shelf life as the Aronia or the Black Currents. But they make probably the best jam I've ever had in my life. And a guy bought some from us this past summer, made jam, and entered it in the local county fair. And not just got a blue ribbon, but it was a grand champion of the fair with his honey berry jam. And their flavor is similar to a blueberry, a little sharper, a little, you know, kind of get your attention type taste, but not unpleasant, not bitter, not astringent at all. And you definitely want at least two varieties because they do depend on cross-pollination. So you want two varieties that bloom at the same time. So you want to match that up.

And we have some varieties that came from a nursery in Oregon, and then some that came, University of Saskatchewan is leading the breeding work on this fruit, and they came out of that program. And by far, the ones out of that program are the most successful for us in Minnesota, and those are Borealis, and then its pollinator is called Aurora, so that makes sense, the Aurora Borealis, and then there's also Tundra and Cinderella that are nice-sized fruit and performing well. Some of the others we got from Oregon, Nightmist, Midnight Blue, Bluebird, Oregon, night mist, midnight blue, bluebird, bluebell, they broke dormancy a little early last winter, early, early spring,

and got some damage. So the others did not at all. So that's something to look out for. And then we have one other fruit in the mix called yastaberry, which is a cross between a blackcurrant and a gooseberry, but it doesn't have the thorns of a gooseberry. It has purple fruit, a nice size fruit, but it's not really very productive, so it doesn't have much potential as a commercial. And they also have kind of a weird growth habit. And when you harvest them, the stem tends to pull away from the fruit and leave an open, bleeding scar, which is no good,

because then they get juice over other fruits and they don't hold up and make a mess. And so you want to kind of pinch them so it leaves a little bit of the stem on. So they're problematic in a number of regards, and that's why they probably haven't gone commercial. I just don't see products with yastaberry at all. But it was something to try. It sounded good in theory, but I'm likely to pull some of those up

and keep replacing them with the honeyberry, which I'm much more excited and pleased with their performance.