 tree. We have plants that are more like trees. They were where I lived in Wisconsin. They're kind of an understory tree about 20 feet tall and all the other trees their buds would just be breaking and there would be this beautiful cloud of little white flowers in the forest. You know they're not really dense but even sometimes even today as we travel back through Wisconsin and get through that central part of the state and if we go in the spring like this Easter time I can see juneberries blooming in the forest there so it's always it's kind of nice and I have picked wild juneberries there in the forest off of these trees. It wasn't a huge amount like the nice juneberries we have here but it is still pretty good. So I kind of want to say that the home range the home of where all the species or all the the what is it the center of genetic diversity where it comes from in North America I have to feel like it's in Saskatoon and Alberta. I've talked to people from Canada and they talk about all these shrubs just growing wild everywhere on the edge of the forest and most of our cultivars that we use for growing for commercial commercial or homeowners come from Canada. These are some of the best cultivars we have so probably the center of diversity is more north of North Dakota but juneberry native all across North Dakota so not as common as it used to be. Here's a picture of what it looks like if you've never seen it. A lot of older people in our community will tell me that I used to go and pick juneberries but now the plants aren't there anymore so I'm not sure why the plants aren't there either. It could be different climates you know more more warm weather in the spring perhaps maybe last rainfall but it might also do be due to herbicide drifting you know there's the herbicides that kill the broadleaf plants can kind of drift in the wind and I have heard that juneberries are susceptible to these although you know I have not seen specific symptoms of damage on our plants but you know it can just be the little bit of exposure over time and kind of weaken them and weaken them that can kind of do it but anyway there there are your juneberries in this slide I just kind of want to show you what we get out of our juneberries in there so when we planted them we planted them in 2007 and they were just like one to one and a half foot little shoots and they came in little pots those little two inch pots that are about three and a half inches deep so they came as these little shoots and we plant them kind of deeper than than they came because they can do a lot of buds a lot of roots going out when you plant them and so we just kind of watched them for a few years I mulch them with wood chips and we still keep wood chips on them they are a forest plant you know in in in some species so the wood chips are not bad for them they keep the moisture in keep the roots cool that's kind of nice so in our fourth year we got almost two pounds of fruit per plant that was pretty good our seventh year in 2013 we got almost four pounds per plant I was pretty excited about that I thought that was pretty good and then last year in 2016 I pruned them I really I really did a good job pruning them I removed a lot of older wood it's good to get some of that older wood out after it gets to be about four years old you'll reduce the height that way and you'll have more vigorous shoots coming from the ground and so I really pruned them I feel like I removed at least a quarter and maybe one-third of the buds and by the time I was getting towards the end of pruning I could see the buds were swelling and every time I made a cut I went oh there goes fruit oh there goes fruit and I felt kind of bad about it but look at the bumper crop we had seven and a half pounds of fruit per plant in this in our tenth year that was a lot we harvested about about 750 760 pounds of fruit last year and it was amazing we actually had to ask for storage at our local grocery store thank you very much to store it because we ran out of space but at the research center so anyway just wanted to comment on our production and this is few notes and we're gonna cover these in the next slides that there are a lot of native diseases for June berries it's really something you just can't get around I thought we wouldn't have a problem in Carygian because there aren't any native June berries around us but sure enough we have all these problems over the years we hand harvest our June berries I'm not sure how well they would work to do some kind of mechanical harvesting that we know of up in Saskatoon big plantings there's like maybe 2,400 acres up there and they do use over-the-roll harvesters to harvest their plants and just just the recommended varieties before I would forget we really like Martin we really like Teeson and say Teeson like Thomas right Teeson and then JB 30 we really like these three varieties out of the five that we have so here's the first thing about June berries you will need netting the birds love these things we have 100 plants 100 plants is not enough to satisfy the birds it's just not if you get them netted early enough then the birds won't know that they can be harvesting these berries but once they start and then you net them they're gonna try for about three or four days and you'll find some birds under the net in the net and so we kind of run a rescue operation for a couple days to make sure the birds get out of that net but definitely some kind of netting this netting is woven netting it's very soft it has about half inch holes in it and then you can see how I hold it up I use a soil probe and make a hole in the ground my foot and then put in a piece of bamboo and then on the right hand side these are our plants in later years actually it's last year and I had to tape two pieces of bamboo together to get it up high enough and then we still we put a pop can on top you can choose something else but a pop can is cheap and available and that will keep the net from sliding down over the pole so we'll just talk about the diseases right away the one thing I think it's in a handout one thing I've heard from researchers in Canada is you really can't grow June berries organically like I said I thought we could because there's not a lot of other plants to transmit disease but after about three or four years we started seeing this disease this endymosporium leaf and berry spot some years it's just on the leaves this picture is an extreme example of I mean we have never seen it this bad at Carrington but it does get on the leaves and I thought well not too much of a problem but then one year we probably had more rain that year and actually the little spots got on the berries too and it doesn't really affect the berries unless it were a really bad case we must not have had it too bad but it does just it does show the spots on the berries and if you were to sell these for pies or something maybe someone could tell and you wouldn't want to do that so we keep the plants thin by pruning kind of remove those little shoots that are in there you just want hearty shoots if you water your plants do not water them on the leaves make sure you water the soil and then keep your weeds down because those hold moisture and they could hold spores and then probably that you are going to have to spray with some kind of a fungicide and I know a fungicide that is available for homeowners is Propoconazole it's it's very available you don't want to use the same fungicide all the time and I have to say I would did not have time to go through and look at another homeowner from kind of fungicide but if you need help on that I you just contact me at the Carrington Research Center and then I will help you find that information here's our next disease that we also get these two are kind of tied for pests here in North Dakota woolly elm aphids you may have heard me talk about this before but when your elm tree peas on you when you get little drops on your picnic table on your car that is not your elm tree doing that that is your aphids on the elm tree is doing that they are sucking the moisture out of the elm leaves and then they are exuding it from their bodies so they are peeing sap on you or sweets nectar on you but these aphids are on the elm elm leaves for a couple generations and then in kind of mid-June early July they leave the elm trees and they go to the Juneberry plants and they find them and what they do is they kind of suck on the root hairs and they can cause these spongy kind of roots and you can see this in this picture is a picture I took last year there's like these knobs and the root is kind of enlarged but nothing's really happening it's got these billion little shoots so if your Juneberry plants have a lot of little shoots it's actually not a good sign that's a sign of this aphid on there it's hard to get around away from this they say that ladybugs and surfeit flies will eat the aphids and we do have those around here it's possible to net a new planting if you just have some plants in your yard you could keep them netted for like a month's time or so in that late June to July thin netting and there there is a systemic insecticide you can apply I would only apply it when your plants are not blooming anymore or what before they start blooming you know when they're quite young that's when you really need it when the plants are being established once they're established and get kind of old they can actually handle the woolly elm feeding on there and then I've been thinking what about diatomaceous earth could you not sprinkle that around the top of the plant because that's where they get in they get in that they land on the stems and then they walk down and they get they go into the root system right through the top of the plant so I kind of wonder if you could just sprinkle a handful of diatomaceous earth right around the top of that plant it I think it might work if it's a kind of soft so something to think about something to try and if you try it you can let me know and then rust some years we like two years ago we saw quite a bit of rust prior to that we've not seen very much every year we find a little but usually not too much and this rust is also fungus it's juniper apple rust and you may hear it as cedar apple rust but really it's it is a disease that travels between the juniper species and then rosacea species and some parts of the country like Michigan or maybe out east where there's more moist you're going to see a lot more problems with this because there's juniper trees and there's apple trees and some people have juniper plants so a lot of hosts for them to go between so like I said we don't get too bad I've actually never seen the spores in the juniper plants but obviously they're around maybe I need to look harder so the gauze on the junipers are kind of a grayish ball and then when it rains these like alien orange gooey tendrils come out of the gall so I have never seen that in person but I've seen some great pictures of it and a man sent me a picture of his juniper up near Grand Forks area and the tree was covered with them and I said this is so cool and this is so terrible I said but yeah I've never actually seen it in person anyway so this disease goes between them you want to avoid planting your junberries near a juniper tree if you can not always possible in North Dakota you can prune the gauze out of the junipers and you can spray with different fungicides again propaganda is all and then really I've looked at Cornell in the past and a paraffinic oil is like a very light oil kind of like a horticulture oil it is really the only compound that's recommended by Cornell University so there's just not many compounds or many chemicals licensed for use in in the US for for junberries and then this is a problem that may be unique to North Dakota flower thrips and the way to find out if you have thrips in your flowers is to take the flowers and you kind of cover it up and then you breathe on it just a nice soft nice warm breath on it and then you take your flower and then you shake it like over a piece of white paper and then see you'll see these tiny tiny tiny little tan insects there they're so tiny but then they'll start to walk on your paper and that's how you see if you have thrips and then the other symptom is what you see on this flower here there's these little brown markings on the flower and that's where the thrips have been sucking and chewing on the flowers it doesn't look too bad here but these flowers won't open up properly and then when you get to the fruit it's going on the top so here you have your fruit and this is the blossom and this is the stem and on this blossom and it's going to be kind of open and a gray woody scar on there like if you were to you could eat it but it would be kind of chewy and you would be kind of eating part of the stem is what it would feel like in your mouth so it's really kind of a nasty little thing not it's not in the Canadian literature so I think we just see it here in North Dakota we use three things they're both they're all three are organic products we use azeguard and we use spinocent and pycanic and I kind of rotate through those things and I have to say I'll spray and then a couple days later I will check for thrips they're still there but I think they must just stop feeding and I did read something after noticing that I read something that the azeguard actually does stop feeding by the by the thrips so it works it's pretty nice not too hazardous to us and then we have fire blight you know we do see fire blight we don't see it in our apple trees we one year we had an apple trees at the research center but in the in the June berries we see a little bit every year and you get this dead branch like in this picture it can the shepherd's cork is that it kind of falls over the branch die so quickly that is very soft and then it the tip tips over and in that time it's starting to dry out already so it kind of holds that shape so it is very sudden the shoes just wilts very suddenly it's a bacterial problem so the it is actually spread by like rain and your pruning tools and then bees when bees are polluting your apples or your June berries the bacteria can get on the bees and the bees can carry it from flower to flower and that's how it infects your plants so again no products label for fire blight in June berries so we just we would just prune that out and you know there I don't know if Esther will talk about this or someone else but you can read about it the ugly stub method the ugly stub method of pruning out fire blight this is something we're using now in apple trees you cut it back and just leave it and then later you cut it back even further when the tree is gone dormant as far as I know in June berries and it's probably the same method we just cut set like a foot or so below in June berries a shrub you can easily remove that whole branch and not have to worry like an apple tree if you move the whole branch might look kind of funny but find to do it you know in June berry okay we're almost to the end I wanted to put our resources up here this is growing saskatoons a manual for orchidists this is the kind of Bible of saskatoon production this was maybe it's about 10 years old maybe it was from 99 but there wasn't anything except for this man doing this and then I recently bought the saskatoon berry production manual the number two picture there and I just found out today that it is available for free for a download from open open publications from Alberta so you can just download it you can buy it also for $15 probably more shipping to the US anyway and then the third resource is the Midwest fruit pest management guide it has like when and what to spray for almost any crop you can think of June berry is actually in there I believe but you know June berry is very much in the apple family so it shares a lot of diseases so but that's a very good guide for you alright and then this is my list of plant sources where can we buy these plants in the US it's not that easy they don't propagate very easily you might think oh I could just take a shoot that comes out of the ground but there's no roots on that shoot and the normal methods that we use for propagating woody shoots just don't work really well on June berry so they're kind of kind of hard to propagate but there are some sources here in the US saskatoon michigan st. Lawrence nursery honeyberry USA and then there are some Canadian sources if you want larger quantities of plants you might go directly to a Canadian source for a little cheaper price but shipping is about $60 box so there's that so anyway there's our sources and then here's our picture June berry pie this is what it's all about I think June berries were made for pie they're just scrumptious if you haven't had a chance to try it you should if you ever find your very pie give it a try if you need my recipe let me know I'll put it on our Facebook page I guess and then just thank you a nice friend picture for you and have a great spring and joy growing a lot of different fruits and try something new this year it'll be fun thank you thank you Kathy oh that's some questions yeah don't go away we want you here first question you mentioned about netting and did you see like a half inch mesh something like that about a half inch or five-eighths inch mesh so since that is so indispensable where is a good source for netting well I ordered my netting from MDT and associates and we're supposed to give names but you know that is where I get it from MDT and associates it's about 21 cents a foot but it is like 1600 feet of it is quite a bit but if you can share it with a neighbor actually for June berries I sew two pieces together I decide the length I want lay a second piece over that overlapping and then I just take a dowel with holes drilled in it and some nylon thread and I actually sew those together so I actually have a 32 inch piece of netting that goes over my my plants to keep to keep to keep it down the ground so the birds can't get anywhere but MDT and associates are out of the cities very nice people to deal with prices are not on the internet but you call them and they're very helpful so that's where we get ours and what when do you put up the net you can you should put up the net when the berries have turned pink but not really swelled yet so harvest you can count on harvest around July 10th to the 15th so about two weeks prior to that okay you were heard of the variety called regent was that discovered in North Dakota have heard of region yes I have never tasted region but I hear it's not that good and it is a North Dakota variety I've just heard it's very bland and dry kind of mealy so I've not tried regent do you have to plant more than one cultivar to get fruit no Juneberry you can go with one plant they actually hardly need to be fertilized so the kind of it's easy sometimes we look at the Juneberry they got these little hair like things on the fruit are they orange hair like things I think if they're hair like is the rust is the cedar apple rust and the if you touch them at the right time this orange mist of spores will get all over yeah how about we got an entrepreneur here who's wondering you've inspired him and he's wondering is there a commercial demand for Juneberries in North Dakota I think there is a lot of a lot of the jelly makers do Juneberries there's people who make pies you know definitely if you want to grow any kind of fruit you should try to find out what your market is talk to cafes and see if they would use Juneberries I wouldn't I wouldn't think about wine making people have tried it just doesn't have quite enough oomph and concentrated flavor for wine making but jelly makers and pie makers are your best bet and then fresh sales prices are pretty good we have we do have about that I know of we have about four to five Juneberry orchards in North Dakota that sell out of their I think they sell out of their fruit every year well do you know how many acres are North Dakota no like I would less than five commercial I would say about five acres maybe so there's not very much an opportunity to satisfy I think a delicious opportunity there okay how about you know sometimes people see Juneberries at available to their soil conservation district are those varieties or just wild Juneberries those are seedlings from conservation and you should ask so conservation I should make a point of calling them what I have read is they are now growing seedlings from some of these more superior varieties of Juneberries so things like March and and Teason and North Northline they're collecting seeds from those better varieties and then planting those up to sell to people that is what I've heard but I know other people who have established Juneberry patches from soil conservation some people get fruit some people don't so yeah we have one person from early County who had that experience and he says that it does have berries but they never grow larger than a small pea doesn't all the variety so he's when he should he try a new variety I would try a new variety I really small pea that's probably more for the birds I would try really kind of you're like small peas and you don't have to do otherwise if you want something a little more substance might be a good idea our Juneberry self pollinating I'm going to say yes I think that they hardly need to be pollinated I think they're they kind of form their seeds with no pollen needed for the most part so you can just have one plant and get Juneberries many plants though it's good to have two varieties and maybe you have a little different ripening time so but I think you can just have one plant you mentioned using diatomaceous earth as a possible way to controls root aphids so how would you you would get a bag of it and you would just take a little dust little measuring spoon or something and just dust it right around that I would say the crown of the plant just spread it around that chronic plant so that the aphids would have to go through it to get to the roots about a spot spray when insecticides well it's just hard because those you have to see them when they are on the plant but once they get on the plant they crawl right down to the roots and then they're covered by soil so it's really hard to spray an insecticide on them. Have you seen actual damage caused caused by woolly elm aphid to older Juneberry plants? Well they have them ours are 10 years old this year and I know they have the damage I showed you that root where it looks all knobby and what you see are weak shoots coming out of the base of the plant and that is from woolly elm aphid damage if we controlled all of the aphids there would be really nice hearty healthy shoots coming out of them but when you have a lot of small shoots that's indicative of woolly elm aphid damage. We just wanted to reinforce out there about that rust because those hairs can be grayish before they sporily. They're kind of green they're kind of a light green before they turn orange. Yeah how about how do you handle getting your stuff from a Canadian nursery? If you buy a large quantity from a Canadian nursery they will have a plant inspector come in and they inspect the box before it gets shipped to you and that inspection costs as far as I know about $20 so that's on you and then the shipping they'll send it by their like quick post although it's not often that quick depending on how the trucks go and then that's about $60 and I believe you probably have to sign you may have to get an aphids APHIS it's USDA aphids service you might have to get an aphids import permit which is free you just have to do it call the aphids office in Bismarck and they can help you out and tell you what the form name is you need to fill out not hard it's not hard. So the Canadian option seems to be something when you're really getting into this big time we're not just buying three or four plants. If you were buying hundreds you want to buy right from Canada right and there is that nursery that is they sell seedlings on my slide there and you can use seedlings from from these varieties if it's a known variety you can use seedlings from that known variety once you grow those out it's not a good idea to take seeds from them because they're a little more removed from the parent block but definitely seedlings are okay and cheaper. A question about the netting again how do you secure the netting to the ground? Well I leave my netting long I said that I I saw two pieces together and then so it's extra long and then I use those garden staples they're U-shaped like hanger wire or whatever but you buy them garden staples and then we just push them in the ground about every five feet something like that at every at every bamboo post we stick them in and then maybe one in between. Have you seen chlorosis on Juneberries? We see chlorosis on a few plants in that planting and I know some of the soil was more shallow than others didn't have as much black soil so we do see a little chlorosis you could apply sulfur somewhat but you could also apply I can't think of it maybe it's just sulfur but if your soil is really high in pH you know it's so hard to change it if your soil is really high in pH I would maybe not try a different crop try a different crop try Aronia. I can't try Aronia but that's a good but I mean I have a good comment there get a soil test done yeah find out the pH and see like is it higher than 7.5 or you know it's like really high it's gonna be really hard. If you're getting to 7.7 if you're higher than 7.7 that's when you're really start to see problems in our soil contact your local extension agent look online for soil tests NDSU extension agents can help you do a soil test and they can help you interpret their results how it applies to your area that you want to plant and do this the year before you plant so you know what you might need to do to adjust your soil. How about you said you shouldn't plant Juneberries near Juniper. How about spruce trees that's just fine they're a whole different genus and a whole different family so spruce trees are okay can you don't plant spruce trees because they get a lot of diseases themselves. Sorry I'm getting into the trees. What do you want silk plants everything gets diseases how about can you talk a little bit about your masterful pruning technique like when do you do it you said you targeted the little the little sprouts in the ground yeah my masterful pruning technique. Can you just spend a minute and describe how you do it and when do you do it is now a good time to do it. A month ago would be a good time to do it. A month ago is better. You know it was hard this year because we had so much snow in the orchard and I should have I mean really stuff should be pruned probably by another week or so because of the way the weather's going but I couldn't even get in there because there was so much snow and now all of a sudden it's 60 degrees but you want to do it before your buds break dormancy. So for apples it's usually the end of March early April now and plants that bought a little earlier like currents and hascaps even earlier than that I haven't even gotten to those yet this year. Yeah you want to if this is if this is your stem you want if this is the shoot you want to remove you cut it off right here you don't want to cut it off here because what's left is a stub and the stub will rot and eventually it could move disease down into the lower part of the branch is just ugly so no stubs you just want to cut it off right there right there. Kathy are you going to discuss honey berries just say no. No we are running out of time. That's right we don't have time to start billings but the good thing about this is Kathy has talked about honey berries or hascaps in the past at Spring Fever go to the Spring Fever website and look at the archives it's all there for you. What's better, sun or shade getting back to June berries. Oh sun, sun keep those diseases away let them dry up early in the morning before the humidity gets all that fungus going on them. How about has that dreaded pest spotted winged or safflower affected your June berries. Yes. Yes. Yes it's terrible. Get your June berries picked as soon as possible. My new theory is to do that pick them early. You know they don't have to be totally ripe they actually will have more pectin when they're a little less ripe so if you want to make jam out of them or even pie they'll be a little more tangy and they'll be more pectin but get them off as soon as you can. The fruit fly shows up about July 10th. How about, you ever thought about using a product like a root starter for propagating June berries? Oh they have tried everything. The university here has done tissue culture on them and they will tissue culture. They form little plants in the medium but then you have to take them from there and put them in another something or other to make them form roots. That's the hard part getting them to actually from the root. They're just a weird funky, unhelpful plant to propagate. How about organic fungicide? You know I have meals that you could use copper. Copper is kind of toxic to humans. It can build up in your soil so it's actually not the best for us for our safety. The commercial fungicides are actually probably safer to you as a human but there's things like mil-stop. There's actinovate. It's one of the actinomyces. It's possible to use something like that, a bacteria that will hopefully keep the funguses off. So many things to try to get rid of. We've got a comment about spotted winter safflower in Fargo on June berries. They only occur at the end of the harvest season. At that time picking the fruit before it gets very dark colored. If you do that like you were recommending, it gets ahead of the insect problem. And get them frozen. Get those berries frozen as soon as possible because that will stop that little worm in its tracks. You know it goes in as an egg and within a few days it becomes the little maggot. But if you can stop it when it's still an egg or a very, very tiny worm, you know, then you'll never notice that you're eating it. Don't worry about it. Just take it in a pie. They're perfectly edible. They taste better with June berries. Do you wash your June berries before you freeze them? We do not. We do not. We just get them in the freezer as soon as possible. And then when they're frozen, I run them under water. Any last questions out there? Okay, see none. Thank you, Kathy. Thanks everybody. Have a great spring. Thank you. Okay, everybody. We're going to take about a five minute break before our next talk. We're going to learn how to grow. Have a great break before our next talk. We're going to learn how to graft an apple tree. There you go. Take a break. I tried to find the biggest props I could. I cut myself toward the end just to kind of make it more real. Oh really? No. I got a band-aid. I'm good, Tom. Thanks, Tom. First aid ready to go. Don't forget the band aid. I'll just keep it right here in case you get it. I'm going to use it as a prop. There you go. Be prepared. Oh, you're... I almost have to bend the rope a little bit. Oh, look at that. Perfect. I've never been happier. Thank you. It's like a charm. Nice. If you plan, you're going to cut that leader off and go to one of the side branches. Oh, right. Kathy, thank you. Thanks for staying on time. You covered everything all nicely. You really had a nice overview of it. And I love those resources at the end. It's not serious. It's all right there for me. I have some of that in the handout. Yeah. When I did the handout, I made it two slides. Oh, like that. Yeah. Oh, great. Then they have that when they read it. Because you had only a few slides. That was so beautiful. I love them when speakers only have like 16 slides. My favorite part is... And I know you're going to be on time. Somebody uses like their old presentation and like, oh, we're going to skip this. You're just distracted. Yeah. And annoying. Oh, are you not safe or not safe? Probably not. You can watch. We'll take it for you. I'm going to try this whole Juneberry and pear thing. Don't hurt Ron with it. Thank you. If I can get my pear science. Yeah, you can supposedly grab pear onto Juneberry to make them fruit faster and not get as tall. Do what onto what? Grab pear science onto Juneberry. Oh, so your pears are fast? Yeah. And then you leave the Juneberry plant grow. So as a pear tree growing out of a Juneberry plant, otherwise it'll reject it. Is the theory I read. This is not going to work well like this. I'm going to try. Why wouldn't it reject it? But it won't reject it if the Juneberry continues to grow. Let's see. Oh. But if you cut everything off. So let me leave the pear. Can we get a shot of these two? You'll have to hold it. No. It will not work. It's a different chance. You know. It's like people and monkeys. It doesn't work. You can try it. And then there's somebody in Ukraine. And they have a grant to try it in Minnesota. That doesn't mean anything. That's true. I was in Belarus and you know how you got sweeter apples. Show your drilled holes in the trunk and poured sugar water. That's how true that pear research is. I'm like spraying 240 on your red potatoes to get a letter. Okay. That is true. I'm generally talking in that direction. This is your camera. Right now. You carry yourself. I think you can. Right now all of your shot is basically about at the top of these. Just above your head. Probably down around there. Sounds good. Let me look and see. Please stand in there for a second. That's pretty much your shot. It's actually a little bit lower than your waist. That's what you've got to work with. If you want to move something close. I'll just hold it up. Over here. Yeah, I think so. Exciting. All right. Should we give him a minute warning? Yeah. One minute. Sure. I'm ready, Tom. One of these. Maybe I'll shave the night with this. I'm trying to fit in. No, it's a rugged look. Mainly look badly. It says our mic's on. Yeah, they're on. Way to go, Bob. That's okay. We have nothing to hide, Morton County. Did you want us to turn our mics off? Thank you. I appreciate that, Lynn, for... I wasn't aware of that myself. Are we recording this too? That's all cute, beautiful. Nice. All right. When's a good time to ask? Wow. Okay, we're going to start. Okay, I think... That's a really good introduction, Todd. You want to say just one of a kind type of guy. I'm just going to mumble. Let me say hi to Tom. Hi, Tom. Hi. Hi, Todd. 25 years. Wow, you don't look it. You age well, my friend. Plastic surgery. Plastic surgery. Oh, I can see myself. That's good. They're not going to turn you off right away at least. Go to commercial. Let's just run Kathy again. Why would we do this? Why would we do this? Crab on apples. What are you going to do, man? Well, sometimes the raddies that are available are better to graft onto a crab apple than the crab apple. They just won't grow here. You know everything about apples. It's hard to talk with you in the room. Yeah, I'm going to apple master here. I don't graft. I don't graft. This thumb... I've been in college for five years. Here's graft. First you go to college, get a dull knife. It's okay here. Everybody start grafting. Before you know it, see a trail of blood down the hallway. That's me going to the men's room. Trying to use that tape to stop the bleeding. Oh, that's terrible. And then go to the emergency ward. There is no forgiveness. So that was my last grafting episode. That's why Todd is going to the lecture. Not me tonight. Thanks for that. Inspiring words of hope. Okay, are you ready to get going, Bob? Yep. I'm not sure about this. Okay, I think we should get going here. Our next topic is we're going to talk about grafting apple trees. And I was saying, why would you graft an apple tree? I'm going to give you my answer, Todd. Then I'll hear yours. I'll just say, yeah, that sounds good. This is what happens a lot. You move into a house and you have an apple or a crab apple tree. You want to plant a superior variety, let's say, like honeycrisp. But you don't have room to plant another apple tree on your existing crab or apple in your landscape. So, voila, you can find a honeycrisp tree in the neighborhood or you can buy a scion and you can create your own honeycrisp branch on your apple. It's a tough one to surpass. That's a great way. Another way would be say, for example, a loved one had planted a tree and it's a variety that's not really common anymore. It's an okay eating variety, but they passed on and you'd like to remember them. You can take cuttings from that, graft it on and kind of keep that memory going. That's another way to not as fun as yours. I'll tell you, if you look at some of these like catalogs, like the old St. Lawrence Nurseries, if you look at their apple listing of cultivars, it's over a hundred. There's lots of heirloom varieties that have some special quality, special flavors to them and you know, you're not going to find a lot of these varieties from your local garden center, but yeah, there's a lot of heirlooms that are, or sometimes how to get the question, can you please tell me what variety this is? This apple? I love these apples, but I don't want varieties. Well, you don't have to know the varieties, just take a cutting from it and there you go. You got your own secret mysterious variety that tastes great. I always tell them it's a Tom Kelb and I say it kind of with dignity. It's an older variety called Tom Kelb. It's not very common, really great apple and they usually buy that and I go on. Okay Todd, now we're done with the nonsense so let's get some serious discussion here. So please welcome Todd Wyman. He's our Ericultural Natural Resources Agent in Cass County. Todd, welcome to the forums. Thanks Tom and thanks for not leaving while I'm talking. One thing before we get started here, I want to show that Tom did provide medical equipment in case I do cut myself or someone else during this. We're not promoting this brand but we do have one in case someone were to get hurt here. We'll get started here with the basics and keep in mind that what I describe to you might be slightly different might be exactly the same as what you done or learned or maybe don't know at all but there's more than one way of doing this. Three basic parts of the apple tree that you should know are the roots, obviously the bottom portion the sign and the graft. When you see an apple tree like this you might think, oh it's just one tree but really there are two trees combined into one here. This apple state fair apple it's called is grafted on to a semi-dwarf rootstock. The semi-dwarf rootstock is more than likely a crab apple variety of some sort or variety that has no flavor but does very well in our climate here. Many people will say well I want a nice apple tree but I don't want such a giant apple tree like a standard rootstock so I would say a semi-dwarf or a dwarfing rootstock and also the standard rootstock sometimes but I find that they have a hard time surviving here in North Dakota. Many people say too when is a great time to start this? I'd like to do this, can I do it any time of the year? The best time that I found is April, May time but it's not exact, plants can't read and therefore you could always go like, oh when the crappies start biting in the spring or when the tulips are three inches tall or find some other type of little story that you want to think of but those are also accurate times for when to start doing this. The techniques that you can use different knives, the biggest thing with the knives they have to be sharp. Laser sharpened, surgical steel these things will cut through bone basically. You never grab the dull knife that's just your way to go into emergency room or hospital. There's a number of different shapes and sizes I like one, just a regular, looks like a regular pocket knife and on the end it has a real dull edge and this dull edge I used to help pry open the the dull edge I used to help pry back the bark a little bit because if I used the other edge I would basically just slice the bark right apart. Now if you look at this knife this little dull edge is right on the opposite side. Now I'm not comfortable enough to use a knife like this for popping it open without slamming shut on my fingers and so I'll use this to graft and cut but when I start prying back the bark I'll use something like this with a nice little dull edge on it. The first graft we're going to try is, or we're going to do is called a T-Bud. What I like to do is make a capital T-shaped cut into my rootstock. Now this is quite large for what I usually do but the ones I ordered didn't come in and this is the smallest tree I could find in the state. And so what I'm going to do is I'll make a little, just for demonstration purposes make a little cut right here. Usually I use newer wood but for this I'm just going to do this. See look it cuts right into that without a problem. I'll get rid of this. This is where Tom's Band-Aid comes in handy. Never cut toward yourself. I also brought a lot because as you know Applewood is very hard. Someone will clean that up or just leave it until next year if I get invited back. I'll just kind of make a nice capital T-shaped cut in there. Close this end if you want to keep your fingers. Hopefully I made it deep enough. I'll use both hands because I can do that. And you see this nice light green colored wood underneath here. Right underneath the bark. That's your floam. That's the living tissue. You don't want to damage that and time is kind of of an essence here so we're not going to just I'm just going to make it now and drive it a little bit here. So for this, I'll find a nice little bud on here. This one is not what I want. Maybe a little picky. As you see. I cut that bud right in half. Fortunately I have another one right here. Also notice too and maybe you can't see but I do have clean disease free wood. Very important. You don't want to graft anything that's diseased or filled with insects into something else. Take my little non-sharp end. That was not a terminal bud. Doesn't matter. This wasn't a terminal bud, no. You could use a terminal bud or you could drop it on the floor like that. I'll get another one. Remember I can't chew gum and talk and so if you say anything to me I can't come. I'm more clumsy. Please ask questions it helps with my relief here. I'm a little picky with it. I don't I guess as far as a terminal bud you could use one. I haven't here. Slide that in here. Same orientation that I was growing before. You want the floam to touch each other so they're nice and snug in here. And now there's a ton of different types of tape out there. I just bought a couple. This type right here is more of a parafilm wax type and it's very pliable and it will rot according to the instructions so I get that a little bit lower and I just start snugging it up like this and in theory it'll rot off once this starts to grow. Now I get up to here, get it above the bud. Some people go over the bud a little bit. You want to make sure all the xylem is covered. You can tie it on there. Ideally what you want now is once this starts to grow, you have success. It'll start to grow. You clip this top part off right here and this will become the new leader. From here on up is the new variety of apples that you get so the top part will be this and the bottom will be that. Now let's say you just like, you know what I just want to mess with my relatives or my friends. They're gone for the weekend. They have an all red apple. I want to put purple, yellow whatever can apple on here. Well you can do that too. They're gone for the weekend. What I would do is the right tool take and cut nice clean cut. Now that would have damaged this wood or the xylem but we're not worried about it right on the ends there. This is where the band aid part comes in again. It's not supposed to split like that but we'll try it again. It's not really good at piano or anything so that helps. Some people take a little hammer and tap on there but I found that a little bit overzealous. What I've made is a nice cleft craft here or cleft here now for a cleft craft. I'm going to take this one right here. I'm going to match it up to about the same diameter if you can to get both sides. I'll try here. Cut at an angle. Go to the other side. This inner wood really hasn't a lot of value to it. Now line this up a little bit too long yet. I'll have to whittle on it. As you can see the xylem and actually the xylem with the xylem is good right here. This is our part that we really want to take with this xylem right here. So it should be the same diameter. The more you do this with your friend or neighbor's tree the better you'll get at it and get that lined up there. You can use electrician's tape too. That is supposed to rot off in time. Masking tape does not but this is not masking tape. This is special grafting masking tape and that's supposed to rot off but just remember plants can't read and therefore you might have to see how it goes. Now this here one might be a little bit misleading. You won't always know if this actually took until the plant starts to bud and if this one starts budding and everything's looking good and it's been on there for a few months and nothing's going wrong with it. This is budding. This is budding. I'd say you're great but don't be out here just kind of I wonder if it's still on because that will not be good for what you want to do. This here one we have a brand new variety of apples. How come they're all red? This one's yellow. What happened? You can make up any kind of stir you want. They won't know. Or if you want to just put a little bud here and cut this off as this grows from here on up will be a brand new thing. People say well how many different types can you put on an apple tree? That I don't know but I've heard up to 14 with success which is a lot of varieties but this thing what I've done here is I've grafted this state fair apple which is an earlier apple probably late August with a variety that's done after Goodheart Frost in September. So in theory what will happen is I'll have apples for an extended period of time. I'll get the earlier flush like oh yeah apples this is great and later on I'll have a different apple. It'll be nice and fresh in the tree and such. That's just something that you can kind of consider too. What you want to do is graft on the varieties that you like to eat though. As far as can you graft on to crab apples? Yes you can. A lot of trees are grafted especially dogo crab and there's a number of different crab apples that you can graft on to. I prefer grafting on to smaller trees maybe about two and a half or four feet high. It seems to be trees that I like that I have the most success with. People say how can you get good at this practice and take your time and patience. Don't drink a lot of caffeine beforehand so you're shaky. Don't have anything to drink and just be ready to go and have a good time but remember these knives are extremely sharp. As you saw when I was doing it it just flipped right off. Good thing Tom wasn't there. Who knows what would have happened. I want to talk about just one quick story. We've got time here yet. Yes we do. The very first time I did this was in South Dakota about 18 years ago. You have to be very careful if you teach a class people that are overconfident and they portray that they know a lot but they really don't. So I had a man come in he had grafted apple trees since before I was born and all this. I had beautiful knives from Sweden. They were fantastic. Just fantastic knives. I had gotten some money and I bought them handed them out to the class. We all started grafting. He pulled out a buck knife and immediately sliced open his hand. Blood everywhere. I almost passed out. When I put on this class I do not have anyone bring their own knives. You just can't. I'm not too big on having kids there just because kids want to grow up but you get adults in your class and they are fairly competent and not shaky. But don't let them use their own knives. Disease free. Also Tom had talked about earlier too limited space. There is an excellent example. If you have for example just one tree in your yard and it's a crab apple tree or a regular eating apple and you want to do something where you get more apples this is a great way to start that. That's something to do. Let's see here. Too bad I can't quiz people but one question and I'll answer it is when you have an apple orchard has anyone ever had the opportunity to go and pick your own apples which is fun especially great family event you go and eat apples and pick them you get way too many and never eat them all. You look at these beautiful rows of apple trees and then all of a sudden you see what is that? It's a crab apple or something? It's for pollination. These are not trees that are self pollinating they need another apple tree to pollinate and that's the thing too. Say you live someplace and there were no apples anywhere and you only had room for one apple you could graft onto this a crab apple just a little crab apple even and you would be perfectly fine the bees would come. I know a friend of mine did that and then the thing was one branch always has these little terrible apples and she cut it off and then the next year there were no apples and I think they got divorced but it's one of those things where they want to happen if they want to know about this so to save your marriage I would suggest that you learn how to graft you have some communication issues communication issues right is there any I got some more or let's maybe answer some questions first if the leader was broken off can you graft the new bud onto it? Okay, so let's say the leader broken off a deer or neighbor kid climbed this and broke it in half or whatever could you graft on what I would do is I would clean it up if it's all raggedy and stuff and I would clip it and I would look at it and I might actually even go further down just in case disease got in here and I'd put a little teabud if it was nice and narrow like this I'd put one of these cleft grafts on there there's also a bark graft let's say you had a large branch like this they broke off from who knows what you could cut that off with a chainsaw or the best you can and you drive and I don't remember the terminology what the tool is called but it's like it's like a wedge you drive that in there and you could put on each end of those wedges basically a cleft graft just like we did here and many times if you for example inherit an old orchard it's like oh these trees are dying but they were so nice I've seen this before where they cut them and they grafted onto those in the hopes that something strong would take over and usually my understanding is they leave one of them but they might put on several and just to get something going and they'll keep the best one and so that that bark that bark graft is described in the last page of the handout there's a drawing there for you and that's like kind of seen for large stock right you do that yeah a large tree how about our dolgo crab apple tree still available oh sure yeah the nurseries there's many time carry them almost any nursery I would think would have them unless something's happened in the last couple years where they're no longer available I would just go to your local nursery and say can you order me a dolgo crab and they'll say well they were all wiped out I'm sure they can get them unless something weird has happened it's possible I don't know everything like Tom don't say that dolgo that's the for D-O-L-G-O it's very common crab apple and I've seen them in nurseries in North Dakota so just they're widely available they're a nice nice hearty crab apple for here it's a good one it's okay how about can you graft a winter apple onto a summer apple I'm not sure what that means a winter apple would be a late ripening apple they could eat the fruits in a winter time you sure could yep that would be an ideal thing to do for example when I first planted apple trees at my parents home and they started to produce 1,000 apples per tree I'm guessing I went out there right after a June drop that's when they'll drop in June and July at the time the apples that are not pollinated or fertilized will fall off the tree and everyone panics but still after that there are a tremendous amount of apples they'll go through and pick those all off until there's only like 200 per tree and they get quite large so you can graft a winter apple on a summer apple but Todd can you graft among different species like how about can I graft a plum on an apple I would no no you can't the genetics are too far apart if you could I mean it would be fantastic but for one other thing it's a different kind of wood all together it's just not going to work not like your citrus you can I'm not all that familiar I've never done it but I have seen citrus where they've kind of messed with them a little bit but apples and apples you know different varieties of apples I see down there but you don't see a great fruit on an apple tree or anything like that they're not compatible we don't need to talk about citrus we don't need to go to gardeners right even a pear and an apple now that I don't know they're pretty close but you know one time I was down in Brookings and I saw that they had grafted a lilac onto an ash stump and it was blooming now the thing with that is though it only lasted one season it's kind of messed with it and who knows what else it did with it if it did work it would be so temporary it would be kind of a huge waste of time so I wouldn't do that how about is when you look at when you choose a scion is the winter hardiness of the scion an important consideration maybe I'll answer that as far as winter hardiness yes but also you want to keep in mind that the storage say you go out in the fall and you harvest your scion would you want to keep that would between 32 and 40 degrees like maybe in a refrigerator crisper if you're not married something like that and if it gets below that you start to get tissue damage and things have real problems with surviving so I would say storage is good about this point Dorotan let's say they really like Granny Smith or something that's not hardy in North Dakota I've never seen that I don't believe that it would it just isn't tough enough to you know for the climate that it's grown in it would be fine but here it'd be either too cold or there's something that there's a reason they're not doing it for right now and I would say no it'd be nice but you can't have everything it's not going to work sorry our winter is too brutal can you teach but graft on lateral shoots or just on the main trunk I prefer to do lateral shoots or the main trunk if it's smaller this one is pretty big I like to do it when the trees are a lot younger this tree is a little bit older but I'm just using it for demonstration purposes if it's younger more supple tissue you have a better chance of it taking okay speaking of taking what type of grafting have you had the most success with the most success I've had is with with tea budding I've had the most success with that cleft I think what happens is like you saw me it's like it's not quite perfect not quite perfect I think by the time I'm done whittling it down to the perfect size it actually dries out I think that I'm too slow with it I don't do it all it's just I do it once a year so I'm not very that proficient or fast at it so can you turn it down to a 25 year old crab apple tree even like let's say it was one that I don't know somebody hit it with a truck and the branches are broken you could take a chainsaw or something cut it and do like a bark graft on there you could try that or even just little branch I prefer the younger wood but you could do older wood it's just easier to work with the younger wood here's a situation where the rabbits took off all the bark all the way around about two and a half feet off the ground so the girl did two and a half feet off the ground can the upper buds be grafted onto the lower trunk that'd be called a bridge graft and I've tried that and have failed every single time whenever I've done that so I've heard of people that have done that and it's been successful but I've never had it work for me I don't know why I'm not getting it to work but I've seen that but this tree is only one and a half inches in diameter so it's a pretty young tree yeah just get a start a new buy a new one or just make the cut you got two and a half feet oh if it's two and a half feet you could graft right below that you could put one of those bud things right remove the damaged tissue and just put a bud graft that would be perfect bud graft bears fruit it kind of depends sometimes I've actually cut off the little spurs and I've grafted those on and you could get an apple probably that year but that's cheating it just depends it takes forever it seems like sometimes if for example if this were to take off and this branch right here I would say maybe with my luck five or six years at the earliest I just don't have whenever I've done trees that they just take forever I'd say five or six years I know that some people have cheated and put things on them and made them go faster but I don't do that okay so you still have to be patient yeah patient this is a patient sport right here can you graft onto a flowering crab yes you sure can any kind of crab apple tree yeah here's a comment top jim walla top working tends to increase winter hardiness by about one hardiness zone level so if it's a marginal tree you might get away with it sure so like if jim said it it's got to be true I believe it it's a man of experience and knowledge yeah jim has quite excellent at grafting so not even more nervous than we promised at the whole grafting world watching me and we're taping this yeah how about let's see if we can let's stay with the grafting as much as we can okay we're just gonna we're gonna veer off a little bit into general stuff to your Todd do you got a recommendation about when's the best time and what's the best method of pruning an apple tree when's the best time I've always told that when you prune a tree it was when the saw is sharp but as far as apple trees I would say that you don't want to do it when the fire blight and you know so don't do it when it's actively growing like if you're gonna prune it I'd probably prune it now or this fall after it gets kinda miserable tomorrow the best day is tomorrow tomorrow but the day after won't work you have to do it before the growth begins do it now but not in the summer and the best method for pruning an apple tree we don't have enough time for all of it just open up the tree to get more sunlight and more air into it one thing with that too is whenever you prune a tree I don't take off more than 25% of what I guess the leaf area is so like a good killer of trees is a man who just got a brand new chainsaw and he's gonna prune his tree you might as well just make one cut at the bottom because it's done how about if those rabbits are a problem Todd can we save a tree that's chewed by rabbits around the whole stem by wrapping it no well if the living tissue the floam is damaged underneath it's too late now if they just chewed a little hole here there's a good chance that it'll fill right in but if it's all the way around and the green tissue is eating off, no that's right that tissue desiccates rapidly we're talking minutes so you can't get out there and put some saran wrap and save it doesn't work how about growing apples as a shrub have you ever thought of that Todd or I've seen where they've taken and grown apples alongside of a building kind of almost like an art form a spillier I can barely say it it's fascinating and I'm assuming it's dwarfing rootstock maybe not but I'm assuming it is maybe every 8 feet there's this little apple tree and horizontal branches and it's right along all on wires fantastic if you're growing as a shrub I don't know why you'd want to the problem would be it'd be a mess always damage I wouldn't do that the other thing to keep aware of is that the apple trees that you plant are grafted and so like if you're just relying on suckers then that's going to be it's usually a doggle crab or a super hardy crab that's the rootstock and it's not it's a rootstock that will create low quality fruit so you don't want to be relying on apple suckers you should trim out the suckers at the base they're not going to create quality fruit what thing I was going to add quickly too if we have a minute yes we do let's say you had a zestar tree or whatever type you like you saved all the seeds from that you planted them all and you had 300 little apple trees growing none of them are going to come true as a zestar none of them they've all cross pollinated with something else in order for that to be fertile and they are not going to come true will they be great I'd say you have one out of 164,000 chances of it actually becoming a tree to keep so if you had that much room take the chance 164,000 trees that's how we did it any hands in research that's a lot of trees yeah so if you got the room it's a lot of pruning how about have you ever planted comfrey or rhubarb at the base of an apple tree I haven't but I have put flowers or strawberries at them at the base I think that when you put little flowers or other plants with them it's kind of nice so I haven't ever planted the comfrey or rhubarb would not add anything to that oh no it wouldn't but I have put plants underneath a tree I misunderstood I recommend shredded bark mulching it's nice and the lawnmower hits it it's not as messy how about putting a ziplock sandwich bag over an apple while the apple is ripening is that protected from wasps etc no not a ziplock it'll get all moldy I think you can purchase or make I guess probably purchase to start there are bags for protection for apples I've seen those it's kind of fun if you got a lot of free time but I don't know I wouldn't do it but I have seen where people have purchased a special it's not a bag where air flow gets through though if you put like a bag over it I think it'll do a rot in there you have to cut the bottom the bottom sides of each one just for like you say Todd otherwise the condensation will leave a rot oh thanks I didn't realize that so yeah you don't want to but last part of the problem we want to protect the fruit from like apple maggots that's really what we're after but that gets to be a lot of work so if you need a hobby there you go and you got to put it on when the fruit is like the size of a nickel you got to put it on young lots a lot of work sounds horrible actually how soon would you start putting an apple tree after planting like after about three years is that a good time to get started I would look at it the second year the first year when you buy your tree I try to get one well make sure it doesn't have any damage or disease or insects on it it looks fairly healthy the first year I like to leave it alone people are always picking and stabbing their plants I don't care if there's like a branch that's rubbing or something really bad going to happen I might clip it off and then the third year I'll start to clean it up a bit so yeah probably the third year but the second year I'll start but the first year I don't bother with it at all Jim Law has another comment from his days of esteemed experience he reports that Jack Carter a former agronomist at NDSU had more than 100 apple varieties on one tree in his yard there you go that's a grafting champion can you imagine what the pie tastes like wow I don't know Jim Jim I don't know Jim said it's true whatever he says we're just going to assume it's true that's what we're doing did Jim say it this isn't from Jim this is from a mysterious person from Nelson County do you know why someone would plant garlic underneath their apple tree no maybe for rather protection or something garlic is they like full sun too so if you're growing it garlic you're not going to do well I wouldn't do that it's not going to be very effective but that's probably why they're doing it is they're probably trying to repel past the best repellent of a past is exclusion physical barrier chicken wire hardware mesh much more effective than garlic let's just scroll through any last questions here as far as again as far as graft compatibility the closer they are it's among species the better even if it does take long to run it's going to be very weak and likely to fall off I don't see anything else we're going to shut it down there thank you very much for the demonstration and you came way safe we're so glad we did have to call 9-1-1 I did it so that it would only take two fingers off it wasn't like the whole hand here but you wouldn't give a couple fingers for the spring fever I would give two fingers for the spring fever it's not one finger and also maybe lessing if you're interested in grafting read more about it read that publication this is a timely situation and I have a little quick commercial April 25th doing a pollinator workshop check my website April 25th emphasis on honey bees and flowers that attract pollinators May 30th a little bit late but we do have some apple trees coming that we're going to mess with and they will be ready to graft on May 30th so we'll have a grafting workshop May 30th and for information they can contact you at the Cass County extension office and I'll just type in his Wyman's Impossible to Spell don't even try it I gave up years ago or I'll see you give me a call 701-241-5707 perfect right there that's better because that's the way it will be and that's good thank you Todd thanks for having me sorry about the mess no worries we'll clean it up and we'll get started we'll learn about how to grow raspberries in North Dakota and we'll do that in about 5 minutes take a break I saw that you had a program going on over there in the Oscar yeah and so I went and I said hi to all the master gardeners or whatever that were in 102 they were waiting for you to start hey Todd also like so what I dropped off I dropped off you guys are glad you'll look for I gave you another box I saw I went over there so I'm going to grab the potatoes and take them for next week or else it'll be in nightmare and also I just brought some seed starter trades with anybody they'll appreciate it thanks Tom for everything appreciate all your help and everything this is really good I like seeing a live demo sorry I didn't cut myself that would have been a lot we'd get more hits on the internet next time think about that Jack Carter had notoriously gone and pruned 25 he may have tried to do 100 at one time but towards his later years he was only doing 25 on a tree and he did have he was stronger than I was he did have one in his backyard he did have one in his backyard and so I'm going to leave this here till tomorrow okay I will yeah and I found out what was it this weekend that I overbooked myself for Saturday but I think I got it worked out so I will I'll go up to my knot afterwards okay let's get going we're going to wind up tonight with a talk about growing raspberries actually I was on a farm when we raised about two acres of raspberries and they were I loved raspberries because you didn't have to bend down so far to pick them precious red rubies and they were so delicious and the story I remember about raspberries is that how they were so easy to sell and so I remember one morning Saturday morning we picked raspberries and I drove like 200 pints of raspberries down to the Minneapolis farmers market and I gave them to my brother Joe, he's 15 years old okay Joe, here they are I gotta go park the truck and I'll be back in a minute to help himself so I came back and literally 10 minutes later I was gone 10 minutes, I come back and Joe doesn't have any raspberries left and he was just like I said Joe what happened and he goes they found me and a swarm came and it all sold out she's been talking more that's exactly what I told Joe I said Joe why don't you change the price make it more expensive he said there was no time to change the price there was a huge group right there swarming them so that poor guy but that just tells you how unbelievably delicious raspberries are and they are a cold hearty fruit and I'm so glad we're talking about that this year because the fate of raspberries in North Dakota you know could be is really at risk with this Spotted Wing Drosophil you mentioned earlier tonight with the June berries and so let's talk about raspberries tonight and we're very fortunate to have our high value crop specialists from North Dakota State University Harleen Hederman-Valenti is here to share with us some tips on how to be successful growing raspberries so Harleen, welcome to the forums well thank you Tom and thanks for the invitation yeah on my way over here I almost died I'm hurrying because I thought I was supposed to be here and ready to talk at 750 and I saw it was like 742 and I was like oh my gosh so I'm scurrying on the sidewalk and this gray squirrel was in the trash can jumped out of the trash can as I'm just walking by I just went by and screamed and everyone's looking at me I said it was a squirrel everyone just kind of kept walking like crazy woman on the sidewalk but anyway so I'm much calmer now than I was about five minutes ago so we're going to get started with this I also I didn't grow up with as much raspberry experiences as you have perhaps Tom you should be talking here but both my grandmothers and we had well we had more strawberries and raspberries but both my grandmothers had raspberries so and red raspberries and I grew up in northeast Nebraska and so and what what Tom said is true is there are a lot of cultivars of red raspberries that are hard enough for our growing here in North Dakota not so much when you're talking about purple and black so just a little bit there's purple there's black raspberries and then they cross the black ones with the red ones and they got purple ones black raspberries are a lot less hardy so the purples are kind of in between and here we have been growing amesis for a while and that seems to do pretty well unless the rabbits decide to go and girdle all your canes on campus but otherwise not so bad so I kind of talked about the three types and there's also the yellow which you'd say wait that should be four types but the yellows are actually reds without that red pigment so they're grouped with the reds and then there's two fruiting types so you might have heard primocaine fruit bearing and fluorocaine fruit bearing and as you can see the fluorocaine fruiting ones are the ones that are typical that way back when that I grew up with in which the stems come up as primocanes they're vegetative they go and then set in the fall and the following year those canes then fruit flower fruit and then they die and so the whole thing with raspberries is you know after those fluorocanes are done fruiting you cut those out and then you keep the other ones the whole thing about the red raspberries and I'll probably get to that versus the purple and black is also kind of intriguing so now our primocaine fruiting raspberries they actually fruit at the tips of those first year canes and so what generally people do is they'll cut them to the ground in the fall or maybe early spring and new ones will come up and on the ends they'll bear flower and fruit later in the fall now you could go and actually keep that lower portion and they could go and bear some fruit as in a fluorocaine fruiting one but a lot of times it takes a lot more work to do that and so the fluorocaine fruiting ones are generally called the summer bearing and they'll bear more in the summer months your primocaine ones fall bearing or they also call them ever bearing because you could keep them over and get them in the summer and fall so here's a picture as you can see if I was to ask you which ones are the fluorocaine fruiting ones here during the season you would say it's the ones that have that woody stem and the ones with the green stems are the primocanes and so they won't fruit until next year where is the best place to go and plant these raspberries? I think it's really important and the most important thing is full sun. I remember riding bike by this one area and they had a nice, oh I'd say it was a 10 by foot by 10 foot square and they had probably 20 raspberry plants in there and for probably eight good years I never saw a single raspberry on those. In fact they never got more than about like this they were under this deep shade and you know I don't know why the homeowner thought hey let's go and plant this under this you know big maple and elm tree and think that they could actually get some raspberries but after eight years they gave up and they seeded it to grass but you also would like to have a well drained soil they don't really like to have I guess waterlogged feet and so it's very important that you have well drained soils. Now you will need to supplement as you can see there about an inch an inch and a half per week from flowering to harvest because they are taking up I mean that really determines how big genetically the raspberry is the size of the fruit is determined genetically but it can be altered by lack of water and so just like any fruit if you do not give it enough water you're going to have smaller smaller fruits so you want to make sure you really give it enough water during that flowering to harvest time you also see I tried to put that down on a more small basis on how much fertilizer and that's just basically we're looking at the nitrogen that we would be applying to those plants. Most of our soils have ample amounts of phosphorus and potassium I know we're removing some when we harvest but you know there really isn't much of a need and there's a lot of recycling and mineralization occurring so it's really the nitrogen that can go and leach out and that we need in a much higher amount and so with our full sunlight we would have a better chance of getting some air circulation but you also want to go and make sure you don't have this all packed in so that the leaves stay wet for a long period of time there are a lot of diseases that raspberries could succumb to and so good air circulation can be really good now that doesn't mean you want to have a jet turbine blowing through there because they also as you can see are sensitive to desiccation so if you're in a high wind area then maybe you have to provide some protection so that you don't have that 40 mile an hour wind just blowing them around spacing as you can see reds we're putting two to three foot apart are blacks and purple that's what the BL and PUR mean that's four foot apart and you might say well why are we doing that why can't we put them all the same and this is where I get to talk to you about how the blacks and purples differed from the reds the blacks and purples really set more of a crown system and so they kind of stay in their place the reds they have more of a creeping root system and so they like to spread out they like to fill in that's kind of good especially in the northern areas and so but that also makes managing them a little bit more difficult and so you can do a lot of things for trellising a lot of commercial operations we'll use a T or a V trellis something just to keep those canes upright and not snagging clothes as much as possible you know there are some of them that don't have as many thorns as others and definitely raspberries are a lot kinder than blackberries which like to just grab you and actually almost bleed you to death but but you don't necessarily need that T and V trellis you can come up with anything really if you want it to they are so fertile so is it mandatory that you have to have bees there to pollinate but bees will help with the pollination and actually I think it's really kind of cool to have that the raspberries are there helping the bees as well with the pollination we will need to prune annually with those fluorocane ones you got to take out those fluorocanes after they are done with the primal canes you can take everything out that makes it a lot easier and so a lot of times when you have these commercial operations they will just go and mow everything off with the primal canes instead of picking and choosing this one and that one rabbits love to nibble cane bark and I mentioned that already we one year well on campus here we seem to be growing a wonderful herd gackle I don't know but a lot of rabbits and they made this water reservoir where I had some grapes at one time and those things just love to go down there and then they come out and they are like great we got protection in this little hole and then we can come out later on and we can just eat all the raspberry canes we want so you have to be careful of something like that ok so I am not going to go through all of this I think everyone has this for a handout so and we were talking about how we wanted to stay on time and that there is a big basketball game that some people may want to watch and so but I put this picture you know recently there has been this kind of like a surge the thornless raspberries that you can have on your patio and so here is an example where you can go and actually be growing that it is in a container and so there is a couple of companies more in the northwest, specific northwest that are really kind of pushing this kind of thing and so I think everyone would like to be able to go and have their own little raspberry container and maybe don't have that kind of space to go and plant that in their back yard so here is an alternative if you want to try something like that you can see all this other stuff so I am going to go and pass over that and so that one was for the flora cane fruiting ones and then these are some of the things for that your primal cane fruiting ones and so you can see the list is much shorter, a lot less management I think or you can do it quicker because of the fact that you know you just go and moam off or you prune them all down in the fall or in the spring and start all over again and well we don't have a lot of Japanese beetles yet but hopefully we will never have a lot of Japanese beetle problems but that is one of those insects that we have to be watching for and you can see and this is something that I think one has to consider you see the harvest time that August through September and knowing some of the growers that have primal cane fruiting more of a commercial situation this really has been one of the downfalls of the primal cane fruiting one cultivars for North Dakota is okay so August, September well we know how cool our September's can start to get and so with that cool weather you're not getting the kind of rapid ripening that you will when with the flora cane ones that you get earlier so things slow down and then all of a sudden we have a freeze and then that's it and so I've seen where they've done some of the season extension with high tunnels with raspberries, fall bearing raspberries and have been able to really go and get a lot more of a yield than they could and you might be able to get that accomplished in your little area in your backyard where you might have this microclimate but that's something that you have to be careful about okay so here's some of the pruning with our reds you can see on well would it be on there your left you're looking at it too I'm over analyzing this whole thing and so and you can see how that fills in on the one on the left and then how you would prune to those six to eight fluorocanes per foot so you get that air circulation you get that sunlight like that on the other hand you're more of your crown ones your black and your purples you can see how on the left hand on the right illustration the left hand plant where you have the fluorocanes and then you're going and you're pruning those back to about five to nine per plant because they more stay in a plant not so much that you get this hedgerow that you do with your red raspberries and so this is all fluorocanes though and so these are the second year what you would do now as far and you know that's why this was sent to everyone is because there's so much information and I could have maybe narrowed it but you know I think selection is good and to try some things and see what works in your situation but this came from the University of Minnesota and were their recommendations but so they have some descriptions and some comments and you can see the zones the hardiness zones and so most of North Dakota is in probably more three than four North Dakota is mostly four now in the past global warming okay or they just decided to kind of reschedule things but so you can see if you think you might be in that low pocket where you might go and have more problems or something like that you could go with a zone three but you see the large selection that you have for the reds I also put up their Norse farms I think they have a great selection of raspberry and other plants but they I think are a very reputable source for plants now when we look at yellow raspberries there aren't near as many but on that one oh and perhaps they did it on yes so anytime you see that asterisks like on Laugh Latham and Autumn Britain those came as recommendations by Tom and so yes and so and so and you can see the difference between the floor cane and the primal cane ones in there now with the yellow and is the one that has been recommended primarily and really has wonderful taste we have it out at the Absaraka farm and I think it's very tasty nice size berries and everything when we go then to our purples yeah see things kind of slim down really quickly there's probably a few more like I said amacists but the problem with amacists is I got those from Jack Carter and they actually that was an introduction by oh an Iowa State professor I'm thinking not Nelson oh back in the 1960's and so so finding something like amacists is very difficult the only reason I have amacists there on campus is because of Dr. Carter having that and wanting me to go and propagate it because he liked it but royalty and then when we go to blacks really those are the only two that most everything else is zone 5 so you can see how if you want to grow raspberries you got a lot more selection if you go with the reds but then comes this little thing windersophila or SWD as a lot of people like to say have that mouthful much easier to go and roll SWD off of your tongue and that arrow shows the little larvae that are in raspberries and the thing that SWD differs from other fruit flies I'm sure you heard is that they can actually put their eggs into fruit and unlike other fruit flies like rotting fruit these guys attack and gal well gal well let's not go into the sex of SWD out of my range there but anyway so what happens is when you pick that fruit if you see some red on the receptacle you probably have SWD and that they're starting to the eggs have hatched and they're starting to break down the food to feed them and then the larvae will grow pupate and come out as a little fruit fly so it's a real problem we had Dr. Kathy Demchak from Penn State last week or weekend before talking about small fruits for high tunnels and we said so what do you have to know she said in high tunnels you can actually use some exclusionary netting to kind of keep them out but she said we just tell them two things you have to go and really pick things clean all the time do not let anything get overripe and drop to the ground because you're asking for more problems so pick things clean thoroughly on your picking rotations and if you have anything that has fallen down make sure you pick it up and get it out of there and also refrigerate your fruit ASAP immediately because that will slow down that whole thing of the eggs hatching and the larvae growing and then don't look at the fruit just pop it in your mouth so but we are looking at a lot of strategies we're trying to understand more of the SWD are there certain fruits that it tends to migrate towards now I don't have anything scientific with this but I had a couple raspberry growers not commercial growers which had red black and purple and they said they really like the reds also knowing that the first fruit that we found SWD was red cherries near sour cherries kind of indicates that they might have a preference for red over other colors but Kathy probably said they did go into june berries june berries I doubt if they well we don't know maybe it was when they were red instead of when they turned purple but they found them anyway so it's really I guess a pest that we have to learn to live with and we have to learn figure out ways to you know more culturally what to do because I'm not a big proponent of spraying a lot of insecticides I'm as low key and this sustainable as possible and would go without that and probably just say close your eyes and pop it in your mouth and actually frozen fruit and make them into you know blend them up you'll never know a little extra protein not that you're in a body building with that but you know it's all good so okay here's some traps it's a vinegar trap that they use and an indication of whether or not what you have there so a good way of monitoring and we did actually Caitlin Krueger made some of these at the high tunnel workshop and was giving these out to people and so with that I was close but we're doing just fine we have some questions for you how about picnic beetles do you have any recipes for how do we deal with a picnic beetle you know I think the same thing those picnic beetles any time you leave over ripe fruit you're asking for trouble and once they come in then you're really it's difficult and so but again they're more attracted by scents and so that under ripe fruit attracts them isn't that the special thing about spotted winter saffa is that they will even go after under ripe fruit whereas a picnic beetle is really a target over ripe fruit so picnic beetles are usually much easier to manage but that SWD is definitely a problem but they might target the under ripe fruit if you go and make sure that you pick thoroughly pick anything that's ripe and make sure you remove everything that is ripe they showed how you could really reduce those numbers substantially with SWD and definitely for picnic beetles which we had a couple questions on so just let me also throw out we got a nice publication about integrated pest management of spotted winter saffa that has all the details on the pest and chemical both organic options and synthetic chemical options for you let's see what else we got here do you know like you mentioned those container raspberries do you know where you could get those like you mentioned Norse before would that be a source one? I thought it was something like something creek out of Oregon but I would think if you Norse might I just remember when I went with the Hort Club and we went to several nurseries around the Portland area and the one was talking about how they're working on the containerized actually raspberries and blackberries but let's see here you mentioned how the SWD's might like the reds what do you think about yellow do the SWD's fly away from the yellow raspberries it says here one in warning I was going to say I I don't know how about the SWD is a matter of concern any information about how did our winters affect the past can they survive the extreme cold of North Dakota yes they keep coming back there is one sad thing about them that they have come here and they have established themselves and you know maybe they're not surviving right there where that cherry tree is but you know if there's a bunch of leaves and they're underneath those leaves you know or by buildings that are staying warm and not that minus 20 that we're getting so unfortunately there's plenty of nooks and crannies I mean I even see ladybugs surviving all winter so how about are you aware of anybody using netting to control against spotted winger saffa yes it's very fine mesh and the only ones that I know that are doing this are more the commercials operations where perhaps they're trying to be completely organic and they you know it is kind of pricey and so and if you have a high tunnel then you don't need near as much to put over but even with the high tunnels in there you gotta have an area where you walk in and then make sure that you don't carry one on you so there's a whole bunch of protection that needs to be done there as well do you know when's the best time to spray the fruit and when's the best time to put out insect traps okay so your insect traps would have to be there before your fruit starts to ripen and then you have to really with any kind of insecticide make sure you look at the read that label thoroughly because they all have a pre-harvest interval and so and you have to abide by that because they've done all this testing to find out you know when those residues are within the tolerance level that they've been registered for so if like Malathion has a three-day harvest restriction then that means you have to wait three days before you can harvest those so read the label carefully it's a big decision maker for you have you ever heard of the variety called souris s-o-u-r-i-s I've never heard of that one souris never heard of it in other counties so you might have to google that or maybe you're mistaking that sounds like something from Canada maybe never heard of it it's not a popular variety at least the pupa stage of SWD what does that look like oh get that publication small that's for sure the other thing I wanted to also mention you know I mentioned Malathion it's really important that they really stress if you're going to make any kind of chemical applications to try to control SWD you have to rotate your modes of action you don't want to go and have resistance to a certain insecticide so rotation is important don't use the same one all the time okay well there's more information about that particular variety souris it's named after the souris river near Minot purchased from Plant Perfect okay well don't know anything about it better google it to find out if we have primocaine or I would think it's a fluorocaine but who knows this person has an older patch over seven years old it's dying back what can we do that we invigorate it we would practice all those steps that I had on there on things to do and I wonder if they're pruning regularly under if they're letting too many and not thinning it out and so I think there's been a number of studies in which they kind of that recommendation is because you could let more but you're not going to get any more fruit smaller so they've kind of figured out the optimum plant population to get the best size fruit because I mean you can get 30 or you can get 10 and they be the same weight but I'd rather eat the 10 than those 30 little ones that's right and the other thing is that when people say their planting is dying back I often get would you like to talk about that I haven't done any kind of research on the viruses but I know most of the commercial growers will only keep probably three years maybe five at the most because of viruses and that raspberries are very susceptible to a number of viruses and there's a number of diseases phytophthora that also causes a lot of problems and so to have a real old planting probably the disease buildup is just causing a lot of problems I agree with that and I look for usually at the college they talk about crumbly berries and that's usually the first sign of viruses are moving in there's no cure for a virus and so we just have to start a new planting um what else we got here of course I'm sorry I'm showing my I don't know how to plant seris as in seris river sorry about that it was developed by the Morden research station so many years ago it's an improved boing type and boing is very widely available boing but maybe maybe we got to do some research on this seris type maybe it is superior I figured it because of the river it had to be because we didn't have any breeding it had to be from Canada though how about does anybody else have any questions for Harleen okay okay hearing none thank you Harleen for your presentation we got to start our raspberry patch now I'm pretty excited about that as far as out there in the counties we do have some little freebies for people today we're thinking that first of all maybe everybody could get an insect trap but I don't know how many people really were interested in having a homemade insect trap so we thought that maybe a packet of gladiola bulbs would have wider interest so that's what we're going with tonight people and next week we're going to have a feature about landscaping and we're going to have talks about how to build raised beds how to have a landscape in shady areas and also how to attract butterflies to your landscape and in the counties the freebie will be some North Dakota potato cultivars so everybody can get a sample of an NDSU potato so that's what we'll look for next week so next week will be our last of our spring free reforms and I hear the weather is going to be very spring like this weekend so enjoy that everybody and we'll see you next week thank you for joining us tonight at the forums thanks Tom appreciate it thank you Harleen appreciate it