 Hello, I'm Kathy Widerholt. I'm the fruit project manager here at the Carrington Research Extension Center. We're going to talk about our hascaps here today. We have a lot of hascaps. We've been focusing on these, and we think it's important because they grow well in North Dakota, they are suited to our soil, we don't have any winter injury problems, and we think that you will like them too. They're very versatile, as I said, for the soil, but they ripen quite early in the season, so you're not going to have insect problems with them. They will bloom through cold weather, which is nice. Sometimes we have late frosts here, but they also produce their fruit early, and then the plant is kind of done for the year, and we can almost forget about them, just a little water later in the season, and they'll be ready to go. They're good for everyone. The hascaps start to bloom early in the year. A lot of times they start to bloom at the end of April, but more so in mid-May and then in through early June. Depends on the kind of hascaps that you have, whether they're Russian or Japanese or something in between. The flowers are light yellow colored. There's actually two flowers for each fruit, so each fruit actually is more healthy for you because it has one skin around each ovary, and then it has a whole skin that covers the whole thing. In the pictures, you can see that there are two blossoms for each little starting fruit. It's just an interesting way for it to produce its fruit. These blossoms can be healthy and hardy through about 17 or more like 19 degrees Fahrenheit, so if you do get a frost, they should still continue to produce fruit. Plants bloom over several weeks, so that makes a problem sometimes when they also ripen over several weeks. Just depends on what kind of weather you get during that time period. The plants can produce a lot of fruit. A lot of the pictures you'll be seeing are from Japanese hascaps. You'll see blue fruits throughout the plants. These are some of our most productive varieties. These plants start to produce fruit in late June and then up through about the 10th or 15th of July each year. We are trying to focus on the earlier fruiting varieties so that we can beat those spotted winged drosophila fruit flies. Also, when they fruit later, you have more opportunities for wind and hail and heavy rain to knock the fruit off the plant, and we don't like to see that. These plants can have fruit that drops to the ground in some varieties. We're trying to select against that. When the fruit falls on the ground in a commercial setting, it's generally not usable, although at home you may be able to pick it up. The reason these berries fall is, like I said, they bloom over a two week period, and then they kind of ripen over a two week period. When picking your fruit, you have to be a little tender with it. You know, they're not a tough berry. They are a tender berry. They're very juicy, and their skin is sort of thin. So you can either pick by hand, or you can use a little box, or I lay a sheet on the ground and I kind of tap the plants quite firmly, and then these berries will fall off generally. If the berries don't come off easily, it may be a sign that they're not quite ripe. I should mention that once the berries turn blue, it's really like another 10 to 14 days until those berries are ripe. If I were you, I would keep tasting those berries from when you think they're ripe until you really find them more palatable. They're going to be quite sour when they first look ripe, and then they're going to continue to develop flavor and sweetness as the time goes along. So when you pick these berries, you may get leaves and other little bits of trash in there. I use a light powered leaf blower to blow some of that out. Another thing you can do is use a fuzzy cloth, like a flannel or terry cloth, and kind of roll them over that cloth, and those will trap the leaves because the leaves are kind of fuzzy. So that helps clean them up. When you're harvesting, you want to get them as cool as possible, as quickly as possible. So after I pick the fruit, I always keep it in the shade, and then I take it into the cooler or refrigerator to make sure it gets cold. For the research purposes, we always measure how much fruit we get. We look at the shape of the berry, the size of the berry, and then the taste. That probably is the most fun part, is tasting the berries. They're all very interesting. There's different shapes and different sizes to them. In the lab, we get the individual weights. We weigh several, and then we can calculate how big that fruit is. And then later in the season, maybe in October or November, I take all the frozen fruit that I've saved from the season in spring, and I start doing lab work on that. We measure the fruit for the sugar content, which is called a bricks reading. And then we also do the acidity reading, which is titratable acidity, and we take the pH of the juice. So these are all done on juice. And then it's just part of a big table, and we compare that to each of the kinds of fruit to find out what is most acceptable. Our main goal is early fruit, fruit that clings well to the plant and then fruit that tastes good. We just want to be able to get homeowners and commercial users to be able to grow these fruit without them falling on the ground. It's always quite, quite sad when you've lost your crop. You don't want to, you don't want to do that.