 Okay. Hello everybody. Welcome to the North Dakota State University 2018 Spring Fever Garden Forums. My name is Tom Colb. I'm an Extension Horticulturist based in Bismarck and tonight I'm joined by Bob Birch, a Web Technology Specialist in the Department of Ed Communications and Bob's Inter-Recording Studios on campus. Tonight is forum one and it's on the last day of winter and as you all know winter has delivered a snowy blast to us. That winter does not want to go away it looks like but tonight we are gonna think spring we got the fever and our focus tonight is gonna be on fruits and vegetables. Tonight we will have three brief presentations about 20 minutes each and then after each presentation we'll take your questions. And we invite your full participation and we're so glad you're here with us tonight. Let's get started. Now I have to say one of the most fascinating research projects in North Dakota is the Northern Hardy Fruits Evaluation Project that's based in Carrington and our first speaker Kathy Widerhold is the manager of this project. Kathy tends to an amazing variety of fruits many of which are underutilized in North Dakota. Tonight Kathy is going to share with us her thoughts on black currents. So Kathy welcome to the forum. Hi Tom let's see there we go everyone can probably see me I'll try to back up a little I can't do just my camera. Hi everyone yep I'm the fruit project manager we've been doing this fruit project since 2006 seems hard to believe it's been about 12 years now all of our plants are getting pretty mature and it's just really not hearing Kathy let's see somebody else's in hearing Kathy. Anyway our plants should be getting quite mature now and we we actually are removing some and putting in some other ones and then just kind of just going with the ones we have just just just to see how they're doing long term with our weather here and that's really the whole purpose for the project is to see how they'll do in the long term because who wants to plant a fruit plant and then have it only live a couple years so we can say everything here is quite quite hearty so let's talk about the currents they are one of my favorite fruits a plant you have to get used to a little bit oh there's my presentation excellent some black currents let's see we'll get into the next slide there we go this is basically what the currents look like on the left hand side of black currents and then there's red currents and white currents red and white currents they're actually the same species they're just just a weird color variant to get the white or excuse me sometimes there's champagne color they call it or slightly pink but really they're all variations from the red current which is just interesting the white aren't as tart as the red the red are a little more tart those are mostly used for jellies maybe some wines for the red currents but really a lot of jellies they have quite a lot of seeds and they're pretty tart but in other parts of the world they're used for a snack on the table you know the northern the northern countries like Finland and Sweden and Norway and up in Russia they might not be used to as much sugar as we are and so these are actually set out as fresh snacks on the table so the left hand side the black currents that one is it's more unusual than the other two fruits it has kind of a more stronger flavor it's very intense you probably won't forget it once you taste it so well let's go on and then we'll talk about this some more I do want to mention the goose berries just because they're in the same genus they're a whole different species and you can see they come in a lot of different shapes and sizes really there's red ones there's these blackish red colored ones more purple and these on the bottom left hand side they're more um I don't know what teardrop shape I guess you'd call them a little little smaller on the top and bigger on the bottom in the middle this is a reason that it's a little bit hard to grow goose berries whoops because of the thorns there's a very sharp sharp thorns on each each branch and a little hard to pick those alright another reason we do not grow many currents is probably because of these leaf diseases and then so there's things like anthracnose and other kinds of diseases and on the bottom left hand side is powdery or excuse me right hand side powdery mildew a lot of the current or excuse me the gooseberry plants are susceptible to powdery mildew and we lose a lot of leaves because of that by the end of the year they have almost no leaves so anyway the fruit project has kind of removed the gooseberries now we will not kind of we actually have we had cut them down from 52 plants down to eight plants at one time and now we've actually got rid of all of them because I needed more room for Haskep study they kind of ripen at the same time currents do but they're not as valuable so we just decided to remove all of them all right well currents are important they are popular all around the world except in the United States but they are popular mainly because of their high vitamin C content black currants they say like it's some of the highest vitamin C three to four times higher than oranges when you go on a pound-for-pound basis but I don't think you'll eat that many black currants at once 73 to 444% of the amount of vitamin C that a that a orange has so that is a lot so they also have different vitamins you can see vitamin A and there's some B vitamins niacin in there to be vitamins so one of the one of the fruits that kind of holds a lot of minerals and good nutrition for you they're very high in slate plate what is it antioxidants in fruit would be the easiest way to see it to say it all the purple compounds in your fruits black currants are very high in those so so one consequence of having the high vitamin C is the tartness that the fruit has but black currants are sweet tart they are both sweet and tart but perhaps a little stronger than some fruits that you know I can tell you that the first time my husband tried them he spit them out so so much for that but now he loves them you just got to get used to them a little bit well the center of current biodiversity like where do they really come from it's really the northern areas of the Asian continent you know Russia northern Russia and then more to the launch of the West into Finland and Sweden and Norway and they there's many there's there's different species there and they're actually breeding some plants but from the they're kind of oh what would I say they're intercrossing different species into the into the black current gene genetic pool just so they can get different resistances to diseases but this is where they're hardy so they're hardy there for sure they're hardy in Carrington, North Dakota or many places in North Dakota all right so I said that the United States does not really know about black currents all almost all production in the in the world comes from Europe and Russia a lot of it from Poland Poland is a huge food food producer and so here in the US I read this in one paper from Cornell and I actually can't find it anymore but I have it copied in 1899 there were over 12,000 acres of black currents here in the US they were produced commercially so by 1910 though I mean in 10 years commercial cultivation was banned in the US and the reason for this was when they cut down all the white pine trees for timber in the eastern part of the US they needed to replant those trees with little seedlings but the United States didn't have nurseries for growing little seedlings seedlings but Germany did so they imported plants from Germany and probably other places in Europe and brought them to the US well those plants had white pine blister rust spores on them and so it was actually the white pines that brought the blister rust into the United States but it was the currents that suffered the currents were not valuable compared to timber and so something had to give right and so it was the currents they they were removed a big push by agricultural the Department of Ag and stuff for the United States extension agents helped in this conservation the like CCC type groups they were in on this going around digging up current plants even trying to eliminate them from the wild but no one can eliminate all the plants none of the some of the other currents we have here in the US we have wild gooseberries in the US and things like that so we could never get rid of it all but they did reduce the amount of of the disease in the US and then the pines were able to get older kind of have a multi generational population of pines older ones and younger ones so then the disease was not as bad as it was back then so but currents were banned until I think 1966 you couldn't plant any in the US and then now it has been turned over to the states and it is the state's job to regulate the currents in there in their state and there's still I think maybe six states that don't allow you to grow currents but there are white pine blister rust resistant varieties of currents and so they can be planted but you just have to look at your own state regulations no regulations against currents here in North Dakota we don't really have almost any populations of white pines there are a few here and there but they have to be pretty close the disease travels from currents to white pines about about a thousand feet you have to keep them separated but from the pines they come to the current plants like a couple hundred miles and our plants actually get white pine blister rust even though there are no white pines to bring it to them in the area so they're coming it's coming through the air it's traveling in the wind and then we get the we get that in our our plants here in Carrington so kind of funny alright let's look at the US production right the the world and US current production is pretty different world production 551 metric tons of currents that's a lot of fruit that's a lot of currents you can see the top producers Germany and Poland again they produce a lot of our fruit Germany does too but Poland Poland's a really a top producer of fruit and where's the US in this if you look way at the bottom and in the black type the United States 50 metric tons and you know I have to say I don't know what year this was from this this data and I wasn't able to find a good source just to check and see a recent claims but I know it is growing in the US it's still not a lot there's someone in Connecticut that has quite a few acres and he picks them and processes them for juice and they're sold in in grocery stores on the east coast there are production sites in British Columbia in Oregon I know there's some production in Saskatchewan but not really huge but still several acres you know needs to be mechanically harvested so still the poor United States where we're behind on currents I think alright here at the research center we have as I said we have the black red and white currents and we actually have eliminated the white currents because we don't really have a use for them if it's if we don't want to if we don't really have a great use for them it's not really worth our time to pick them and we've had them for a long time and we have really good data on them but so now we're just looking at the black and the red currents and you can see on this slide that black currents don't produce quite a quite a bit they produce about three to nine pounds of fruit per plant that's kind of that's our dry land production we don't irrigate too much we do have a small section that does get irrigated but for the most part it's dry land and then the red currents 10 to 20 pounds per plant I mean this is a lot of fruit 20 pounds of currents is the whole plant is just red and green it's really gorgeous when it's nice and ripe so it's not unusual we get 10 pounds almost every year and then the 20 pounds we just got this last year some years we've gotten 15 so a lot of fruit alright what are our problems here and I think I'm going to elaborate on this in a couple more slides possible spring frost they start to bloom and grow quite early and so that's one concern for them and then and then hand harvesting and I'll show you a picture of us doing that too oh there it is there's me I took this from a video that we made that in my hand is a piece of black plastic pipe it's a water pipe it's about three feet long it extends behind my hand there and if you lay some sheets down and you hold the end of the branch in one hand and then you take your stick or your tubing and you start beating the plant you just start hitting the branch and the berries start flopping around and the branch starts flopping around and pretty soon everything's moving and the berries just pop off the stems really quite easily and it's a really nice quick method to harvest these berries we have picked a lot of currents by hand before learning this a couple years ago and it took about 45 to 60 minutes to pick one shrub but I bet you could pick one shrub in about 10 to 15 minutes now depending on how cleanly you harvested the berries so a nice easy method to use all right here's going back to our concerns in North Dakota the early warmth in in 2012 on the left-hand side picture in 2012 it was in the 50s and it was in the 60s almost the whole month of March and then in April it cooled down just a little bit and then around the 20th of April maybe slightly before we had I think I want to say like 17 18 and 19 degrees for three nights in a row that really hurt a lot of the current not a lot but certain varieties of the current plants we still got a crop on some but you can see in that picture there's dead branches and then there's some that are trying to leaf out but this variety was called hilltop Baldwin and it was very susceptible to the to that freeze it was like that the cambium that inner layer of the of the plant was injured and so it just couldn't live after that on the right-hand side in 2015 our weather was just cool and wet it was probably in the upper for mid 40s to 50 I would say and it missed it or rain almost every day the bees couldn't fly and I have read that the plants are susceptible to cool weather when they're in blossom when it gets below 45 or 46 degrees so that is what happened this is after blossom period I just touched all those you know kind of rock them with my thumb touch those blossoms and they all fell off in my hand so we got no crop in 2015 kind of a bummer but it happens all right and the other problem we have is current bore you can see on the left-hand corner there's the black pith in the stem and then there's a little white right in here I don't know if you can see my cursor but I'll circle it there is a white grub in there and he has survived over the winter and then what would happen is in the early early kind of early early summer late spring early summer it finishes pupating and it turns into an adult and then it it gnaws its way out and the the lower left-hand corner there's a little D shaped hole kind of the similar hole to our emerald ash borer but this is the current for and this is where the adult came out and what happens is later they will lay their eggs in the petiole where the petiole meets the stem they'll lay an egg in there and then the the little tiny borer will bore in and then go down all summer he'll spend his summer going down the pith eating away so on the right-hand side is how a branch kind of looks when it has bore damage I say it looks like it has more flour than leaf you do see a lot you see the flowers it's still it still wants to have fruit it puts out a lot of blossoms but the the leaves stay very very small so they just look kind of puny and really the only hole for current borer that homeowners and really commercial there are some sprays but it's just terrible to have to use them they just prune out these very poor stems and then that removes it you prune them out and you burn it and then that little white grub he kind of sizzles up in there I suppose so and I don't feel sorry for him one bit so too bad for him last problem we see is the white pine blister rust on the left hand side is how the rust looks on the back side of the leaf on susceptible varieties but remember there are varieties and we can grow that are not susceptible and then on the right hand side is what happens to the trees and this disease can really get into the under the bark of the of the tree and kind of girdle it and it would kill it it is very damaging for the white pine trees so if you live where there's white pine trees your neighbor has one you should try to grow a resistant variety of current all right planting the currents you know full sunlight as always heard most things that want to flower or fruit full sunlight I believe is eight hours a day ours get whatever they get the whole day whatever North Dakota gets they're in the sunlight and then they you know kind of average good soils they like they they say they're heavy feeders so if you have a soil with good or organic matter that would be great you don't want the soil too wet but they do like moisture and then they would prefer to not have too high of a pH of soil here at Carrington ours is about seven four or seven five and we don't see too much chlorosis on them once in a while a stem here and there but really I think it could be fixed with an iron chelate spray or a drench or something like that maybe working a little sulfur around the plants that would be okay so anyway when you get your plants you will plant them about three to four inches deeper than they came like like where they were originally potted up you will see a see a little root ball and the stem and you want that stem planted three to four inches deeper than where the root ball was and so you put the soil back over it and then you will prune whatever is sticking up out of the ground you will prune it to about two to three buds and this encourages the the dormant buds down below to come out and you're going to get a nice thick bushy plant and they won't be spindly it'll grow nicely and if it didn't grow well the first year the next year cut it back down and you're just you're just asking those lower buds to grow you know over the winter most of the energy in a hardy plant in a woody plant is in the roots not so much in the stems so when you prune in early early early spring late winter late winter is the best time to prune you just get rid of the things you don't want and then the energy can go to the things you do want so it works out pretty nicely so we mulch our plants we use just a wood chip mulch and then we remove weeds by both hand weeding and then we'll do some spot spraying of herbicides to just kind of help us out there and keep the weeds down and this is just a quick picture here pruning currents this is a picture I use in my pruning talk and what you're doing is renewal pruning you are removing older branches things you don't want you're going to be removing those at the ground level and then you'll have a plant that is thinner you'll have more light going through it more air going through it that will help prevent diseases in currents and let's see oh this is just a picture of currents the one on the left has not been pruned yet and the one on the right has been pruned so you can see that it's much more open after pruning you know it's kind of hard exactly see because you're looking one-dimensionally at a three-dimensional object so but it is definitely thinner than the one on the left and let's see if this works I don't know oh it won't work those those colors on there I had them come and go on the slide but one thing I want to show you is that here these green lines are very small and spindly and if you remember you know they're never going to do well they're always going to be in the shade so you would remove the green line the little stems that are under the green lines just nip those off right at the ground and then on the left hand side there's a yellow line that's going upward well that is really growing kind of backwards into the plant you know like it's growing the plant should be opening upward and outward but this is going to kind of cross over so that's one I removed and on the right hand side I've got a circle and I've circled that I've just removed it so you can remove things at the ground you can remove things inside you just want to open up the plant and get many get several year classes of plants the light colored uh the light colored stems are last year's plants last year's growth and then the dark colored ones are maybe two-year-old wood and then you can see some glowing red on some of those stems on the right hand side and that's the bark kind of peeling a little and that indicates an older stem so you want to keep younger middle aged and a little bit older not too old the oldest ones won't produce so you can prune them every year is the most helpful thing you can do for them all right and the last thing I have for you so I don't expect you to write this down but you can well they're recording this and I don't know if the power points will be available one by one but this is my recipe for black currant jam is actually from England how it would be made by a person in England and it's very easy the fruits there you soften it up by simmering it with some water and then when it seems soft after 20 or 30 minutes you add sugar and you let the sugar dissolve in the warm liquid and then you bring it to a boil and turn it into jam so my very favorite jam stands up the peanut butter it's actually quite thick because currants have so much pectin and you can add other fruits to it you could add strawberries you could add raspberries I add house gaps because I have house gaps and that makes it really really good so so there you are a good recipe for currents and my last slide is just my contact information and a beautiful apple blossom there for you to to pine for it's still snowing here in Carrington right now so and I think it's probably snowing in Fargo so all right I am ready for questions okay thank you Kathy and now it's time for your questions we've got a few already for you Kathy how about black currants do they resist deer or rabbits you know they do resist deer and I'm not sure about rabbits but I would think so the stems of black currants have oil glands on them and it's the polite thing to say is a heady herbaceous aroma I think that's in a handout but it really smells like cat pee that is about the only way to describe it and the most descriptive way to describe it I guess anyway I was just talking to people who have different kinds of plants and they have current plants and they without a fence you know and we have a fence but they said yeah the deer don't care for the current plants because of those I guess pungent oils on the stems okay here we'll try anything though they will try anything at least once if they're starving huh yeah so do the flowers have a pungent that cat pee smell no the well you probably can't distinguish them from the leaves and the and the branch smell but I don't think the flowers really have much of a scent there are some currents that are called clove currents and they're a different species and they actually do have a wonderful scent that smells just like cloves in the air you know Kathy there's a a lot of questions I think are those the golden currents you're talking about it would be golden currents rebies or ribies odor atom um so there's a lot of people who are interested in our audience with those golden currents because they're so widely available from the soil conservation district do you recommend the golden currents you know we've we have had them here and they ripen kind of not so much at once they kind of ripen over some time they're kind of a steely blue black color it's kind of neat and they're they're actually pretty good to eat fresh because they don't have this strong acidic flavor that black currents have so I would recommend them as something to snack on in the yard you could use them in some kind of like a fruit salad or something but the one thing is I try to make current jam with them the same way I make this other current jam and the berries just turned out like raisins like really hard raisins in the jam they didn't soften like I expected them to so that's that's all I can tell you they also um they have little stolons on the ground and they will kind of spread a little so uh if you don't want them to spread you you know if you've got it if you've got grass you can mow them off but they will spread somewhat so they're a little bit more aggressive are they are they taller too is that a little bit taller um five feet maybe just slightly taller kind of just depends okay I would say similar sized okay the questions are coming in with the flurry now so here we go okay this person purchased black currents from all seasons nursery a few years ago and they got the boar probably that girdler huh and so she she doubled bagged the plants pots and put them in the trash how can she prevent getting these boars in her plantings in the future but she just no I would say I would say you cannot prevent the boars uh you can just prune them out and uh like I said they spray for them commercially but the problem is at the time the it's a clear winged moth is what the name of the adult is at the time the moth is in there laying the eggs there is so much um there's so much new growth they're putting up new growth from uh from the base and so it's really such a tight area you really can hardly spray for them and and for homeowners and for commercial they just recommend pruning out the area that has the boar and then just disposing of that in the trash burning it but getting it out of the landscape and then the plant will regrow from the it'll regrow yeah so that leads that leads a question that somebody has uh oh an old black current from Montana and uh the plants are old and scraggly so can she just whack them off it what would you do whack them off a little foot or three inches or something and I would advise whacking them off to like three inches tall and so she won't shoot when could she expect some fruits then um it would take two years then to get fruit they fruit on like one year old wood they fruit the next year after it grows okay um when's the best time to do the pruning in general before the buds start to push out so March and April is really a good time to do the pruning okay so right now perfect now yeah when the snow melts how about have you seen much rust on any of the cultivars that you grow there at Carrington yes we get rust uh in the old trial there was only two varieties that that were resistant to the rust and they did not get it but the other ones got rust almost every year one year they didn't and uh I found that you know nice I guess but the rust usually happens after we pick the fruit and so it really doesn't bother the current plans their life cycle is pretty much complete once you've harvested the fruit because they start so early in the year and the leaves look terrible they they will even fall off it like sometime at the end of August so the leaves could fall off but the plant comes back the next year like it hasn't even had a problem so and the rust cannot reinfect the plant from those leaves it actually has to go to the white pine tree and then back to the current plant and like I said from the from the plant from the current to the tree is is like a thousand feet but from the tree to the current is several hundred miles so it's not going to matter like where that tree is it's it'll find your your current plant so even if there's so few white pines in North Dakota yeah we get it every year and if it was a moist year I think a moisture and if you get a lot of east winds or wherever you can get the I mean mostly Minnesota would have the white pines if there's a few here and there in North Dakota um but they would be planted by someone they wouldn't be wild but yeah we we get it every single year and one year was bad that we got the rust before we harvested but that was probably about eight years ago okay how about uh currents attract moles do they attract moles I don't think so the animals I don't think so because they like where's a good place to buy black current stock you know um of course not recommending a place but we do use a the place we really like to use is called Whitman Farms a lady named Lucille Whitman and she's in Oregon and she has wonderful little rooted cuttings I mean they're not little they're about 10 inches 12 inches tall have a nice root mass on them and she'll package them up and send them to you and uh very reasonable okay and a good selection okay how can you tell which stems to prune during the dormant season that especially that may have the bore you look for the boreholes or yeah you know you you you won't be able to tell what they are um when they're dormant you can see the slow spindly kind of piddly growth after a while like in early May you'll see you'll see that some of those are slow and then you just keep pruning until you don't see the black anymore but um older stems will have more chance of getting a current getting the bore um and the ages the other question was the ages what what are how to tell the ages uh the first year's growth is straight it's probably hopefully about at least two feet long it looks nice and sturdy bigger than a pencil and it is straight and it is kind of a silvery gray color and then the next year it gets a little darker uh when it's two years old and it has a little bit of side branching and by the third year the the the bark is darker and there's even more branching it's a fuller plant and really you want to remove the four-year old shoots for sure so whatever looks really old it'll have a nice thick mass to the cane um a diameter a thick diameter remove those old things and then you just kind of want a selection of new and old to kind of mix it up what causes the leaves to pucker or have blisters yeah the puckering and blistering it's from aphids it's from some current aphids and uh really you can control that in a home situation you could spray off the leaves spray under the leaves with water you could use um safer soap that would be something really great against aphids uh probably pyrethrin sprays that i am not sure on that um but for sure a safer soap works really well on that it doesn't really hurt the plant it just kind of distorts it uh although i had someone tell me that they had aphids so bad that they removed their plants so that's the only time i've ever heard that happen but it's not a fair to the plant but generally it's not damaging for fruit production correct correct okay um how about can you do you want to talk about your field day you always have a field day oh yeah well our field day let me quick peek here um july 17th is the day i believe field day is the third tuesday in july and we are going to focus on aronia this year we'll have uh either myself or we'll have someone come and talk about aronia okay another question okay that that's always a great thing by the way um that's it's so cool to see all this yeah we'll have a tour of the plants and then um and probably the person the featured speaker about aronia will speak first and they'll talk for about an hour or so and then the other hour and a half we can just wander around and look at things and if it's ripe you can taste the fruits and have a good time so another person has a question about pine trees and the pine trees are uh within a thousand feet so it well it's got to be a white yeah it's not damaging to the current plant but it's damaging to the pine so you should look at your pine and see if the if the needles are in bundles of five so the letter white has five letters and the white pine bundles are in bundles of five so five there five and uh that's when you can have that passing back and forth i think uh i think the handout tells you in our website the carrington recent the uh carrington research extension center on the northern hearty fruit part of that uh has some recommendations for plants and two plants that we know that do not get white pine blister rust are titania and one called you're gonna hate this menage smiru and you better look for that name i don't want to smell it yeah but they're resisting and then they won't transmit the disease okay any last questions for kathy last call for questions okay see none kathy thank you for getting this off to such a great start and yeah forums thank you very much thanks everybody have a great spring okay all right everybody we're gonna take a short five minute break and then we're going to talk about how to start seeds indoors so a five minute break