 Hello, and welcome to this episode of Farming Matters. I am your host, Erin Schneider. I'm a farmer and I work with the North Central Region SAIR program. And I am excited to be here with you all today. And I'm joined by Marie Flanagan. Hello. She's our Farmering Matters producer. And viewers, you are in for a treat. We are here with a farmer rancher grant recipient, Christine Williams. She is with Pepperberry's Urban Farm and Agape Grow Education Center outside of Kansas City, Missouri. And Christine, I am delighted and I hope I have a feeling our viewers will be as well to learn about ground cherries. Thank you, Erin. So I am excited to be able to share this with everybody. I love ground cherries. In fact, we just did a ground cherry tour this morning. Now our beds are not ready yet. We're kind of clean the hill. But everybody that comes to our farm, we share the ground cherry system, the hillside system. And I just tell everybody about it because it is a super food. It is such a good crop. It's so high in nutritional value. And it's a long lasting. I don't understand why, except for harvest. It's really hard to harvest. I think that why we don't see them in the stores and the farmer's markets because they last forever. I mean, you can harvest them and they'll be good a month, month and a half later in the fridge still. They taste like a smoothie in your mouth. So I mean, they've got mango and pineapple and a little bit of, sometimes I get a coconut flavor but not very often, but the mango and pineapple and a little touch of tomato every once in a while. So they are in the night shade family and very much related to Tomatilla. It has the husk around it like a Tomatilla does. When they fall to the ground, that's when you harvest them. And when you first harvest them from the ground, they're green or starting to turn orange, but you want them to turn a bright orange or a yellowish orange color before you eat them. So it takes a couple of days after you've harvested because they're in the night shade family. They're very frost sensitive. And so that's why we don't put them out until Memorial weekend. Even though our time here, we're in zone 6A, really September and October is the high point for around here when we harvest them, but we will start getting some in July and August. And sometimes if we don't have a frost until November, they'll keep going. We started doing this about four years ago and we had an area that we had to mow and it was a pretty steep hill. And we thought, well, what could we grow on this that we could get more production for our farm and turn it into an added value product or fresh crops. And we had already been growing the ground cherries on the ground like the traditional way. And it was good, but as a farmer, it was the last thing that I would ever get harvested because by the time I got all the other production done to get down on the ground and harvest them, I just couldn't do it, my back would not do it. And so this hillside system was just a perfect thing for us to try and figure out if we'd be able to get more production, be able to get ground cherries to our farmer's market and out into the public. So this is a few pictures of the ground cherry hill. You can see my grandson there at that time was seven and he can handle those panels with no problem. So we made them three feet wide by four feet long or something like, I think it was three feet by four feet. And so they're not heavy at all. They, we had very little wind pickup and we get a lot of wind here on our farm. And so they are really tucked in there pretty good. And but just easy to pick up. Control of weeds was wonderful. The third picture here on the side of the ground cherries and that one is, you see the first or second year when we decided we needed to raise them up higher we don't have the raised bed in between and that's where we changed it and put it much higher so that they were not touching the panels because here they're touching the panels and they just weren't rolling down. And so you can see on the other picture we've got one of the gutters in one getting ready to go in and everything is very movable. And so it worked very well. We could pick them up and this pretty well what we've done every year is pick them up at this time of year, get our beds rebuilt kind of and put all of our nutrition back into the hills the areas that we're planting in and then put it back down and weed control the only weeds we'd have would be between the panels there the rest stayed nice and clear of weeds so we didn't have that major problem. And so we started doing it four years, five years ago this would be the fifth summer of doing the hillside system. We first started out with making panels and running the panels up and down and we used the vinyl house siding and to use the panel so that we'd have these long panels to be able to let the cherries hit the panel and run down into a gutter system. And we made the panel small enough that a woman could handle it. I didn't want great big six foot long ones or anything like that. I wanted to be able to do set the system up myself. Every year we've changed our system quite a bit. This year we're gonna be changing it again and I'll tell you about the changes we'll do this year but we did two types of systems one with the panel and then one with black canvas and just to see how it worked all on the hillside. And so with the whole idea that the cherries hit the ground and roll down either the vinyl sidings or the canvas and into a gutter system and then we could take a little broom and sweep them all up into the edge and harvest in one bunch. The first year we did not take into account that it was the plant grew so short to the ground and so we still had to harvest up the hill and move the branches and so it'll roll down. Then the next year mounted it up where we planted the transplants and so that it would not do that. It still went down a little bit more than I liked. I wanted it to be really a good space in between the branches and the vinyl siding. And so this year is where we're changing that part. We are gonna put some cattle guard under it so that it puts it up above it. It's also we're gonna be adding a spring release to it so that we can hit the spring like a bed spring or something like that and shake the cattle panel and it'll shake all of the ripe ones off and they're not totally ripe. When they hit the ground it still takes another couple of days for their totally ripe. But it would take all the loose ones off and then roll down and we can go on and harvest it from the gutter system. The only thing that I would probably change is using the vinyl siding. I would probably go with one of the metal sidings instead because we had some breakage from cold weather and even though we left them out all year long in the sun and so the sun would bake them, the snow would be on them. And we had a few just get damaged from that. If I was to remake them now, I would probably cut them to a two by four instead in the size of the panel itself because we really don't need that whole three foot across the beds and then we could get more plants in. Harvesting, they do fall to the ground. That's when you pick them up and that's why we wanted the hillside system so they can roll down and be easier for us to pick them up. This is a picture here of my husband cleaning them and cleaning them, it just means taking off the husk. They store really, really well in the freezer. So we put all of ours up in the freezer till we have time to go on and make them up into jams and jellies or the salsas. So there's a ground cherry jam recipe of the coffee cake. One of my very favorite ones is doing, it's basically a yellow cake that you're putting some ground cherries in there. So that's a really good one. The salsa, love that one. And which is really easy to make. What drew you to ground cherries at first? Like, do you remember the first taste of ground cherries you had, Christine and that? Yeah. Well, I'm a chef also, okay? So that was kind of probably my first curiosity when I discovered them through Breaker Creek seeds. And I was like, oh, I'd like to try these. And I planted them in the wrong place because it wasn't, I did not know that they would come back there every year or I would have put them somewhere else. And so it was just, I mean, it would have been nine years ago when I first discovered them. And when you take them to market, you peel them before you take them to market? No, we do not. We leave those husks on and we tell them because they're gonna last longer if they are not peeled back. We don't just sell fresh produce at our market. We sell jams and jellies. We sell ferments. And but we will give anybody the recipe of anything that we make. And they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa. You're giving, yeah. Because I would rather them eat healthy. And your project report, I remember you highlighting how you're bringing people together through your ground cherry festival. Our ground cherry festival, I love. Because they can come out, they can see the system. They taste the different stuff. We, you know, they're just, we're trying to make it a community. We are located in one of the worst communities in Kansas City, the worst in crime and drugs and stuff in Kansas City. And we are trying to change this area from the inside out by teaching people how to garden. The ground cherry festival, we don't just have people from our community come in. We really don't have that many from our community yet. But we have the surrounding communities coming out to it. The other urban farmers, some of the farmers that are not urban are coming to it because they're trying to learn too. And so we're just trying to create this community and acknowledge that there are farmers here in Kansas City right in the city. And that if everybody does a little bit, then we can provide food that we all need here. What would you offer to other farmers who are maybe wanting to try ground cherries? I mean, you've made it so generous with your information shared and recipes and how to grow, but it also sounds like you have a growing network. If you're a farmer just maybe starting and maybe they don't have that network, but what were some advice you'd offer to them to get started there? I would just say try it, put them in. They are so easy to grow. And I have not found very many people that don't like them, but even if you put them in, put them in a place that if you don't do the system, put them in part of your garden that you're gonna know, this is ground cherry area and they come back and then share them with everybody, even if you don't like them, let other people try them because they are a super food. I would probably get on Facebook and search for some farming groups that are in your area. And then just, if they're trying to find some ground cherry seeds, there's gonna probably be somebody that is willing to give a few seeds and try it that way. Even though they're in the nightshade family, we don't have a lot of problems growing them. I've never seen any disease on them. We have ants, ants like them, because it's that sweet sticky syrup that it puts out sometimes. But other bug control, we just have never had really any problems with it. Christine, thanks for being really generous with your time and your knowledge of recipes and your materials on our Project Report website, but then also just in your community more importantly and just growing food and building the ground cherry love from the soil. Yeah. I love it. Yeah. I appreciate you guys thinking about us for it. Oh yeah. And you guys get to Kansas City, you call me so you can come see us.