 All right, well, thank you for inviting me. Last time I was here, we were in the barn, so this is pretty fancy. I'll just give you a bit of my background, and then I kinda wanna hear from you about what you guys are after today, because I don't wanna talk about things if no one's interested in them. So, my name's David Marchant, and my wife and I have a farm in Fairfax, Vermont, which is kinda in between St. Albans and Burlington. A lot of people don't know where that town is, but we've been farming there for 26 years, and strawberries and raspberries are a couple of the crops that we grow, as well as a lot of wholesale vegetables. Before that, I worked with UMass Extension doing strawberry research, so my background is quite a bit of small fruits. And I love growing small fruits, and it's a great crop for the home garden. So, I'm gonna, my talk is primarily focused on the big, through what I call the big three, strawberries, raspberries, blueberries. There's, I've got a few slides of some, you know, other small fruits that people like to grow, gooseberries, currants, grapes. But what, how many people here grow strawberries? Used to. How many people grow raspberries? Okay, more of the raspberries. How many people grow blueberries? More blueberries. Okay, blueberries are the big one. I'm not a real great blueberry grower. I don't grow too many, mainly, because our soils aren't well-suited, we're a little cold, but. So, what on, I'll start talking about strawberries, and maybe you'll rethink about that, and then we'll go into raspberries and blueberries. And please interrupt me whenever you want, ask questions, because a lot of times your questions are the same ones other people are asking, whether it be about what kind of mulch to use, or I do this. Well, that affects something. So anyways, we grow about two acres of pick-your-own strawberries, and we've been doing that for about 26 years. It's easy to grow small fruits at first, but as you grow them longer and longer, you seem to get more pest problems, which I'm sure many of you've discovered. All right, okay, and we do pick-your-own raspberries, which was a great, simple, easy crop, and we're gonna learn about a new pest that affects all small fruits called spotted wing drosophila. And it's, it kinda changed the whole industry from commercial growers standpoint, and it's made it really difficult on the home garden scale as well, because it's a little fruit fly, which we'll talk about later that came from China, which has been a real, kind of changed everything. So anyways, let's start with strawberries. Okay, so there's really two main strawberry classifications that you might wanna grow. How many people have gone to pick-your-own raspberries places? Okay, so you're primarily picking their Juneberry strawberries, and what they are, it's, the flowering is predicated on the amount of day length, and so long day length, and they will flower extensively for about a three week period. So you get a lot of fruit. So this is the kind of fruit that you might wanna grow if you wanna put a lot up, put it all up at once. They're incredibly productive. Some of the best varieties that we like around here would be Wendy's, a nice early one, Jewel's, a fabulous main season variety. Cavendish is another great one. Now the other classification, which is great for the home garden, if you're wanting fruit in your garden to go from June all the way till frost, there's some great day-neutral strawberries. The reason they're called day-neutral is they will continue to flower regardless of day length. So they'll start flowering in June, and they don't aren't super productive in July, but come August, they really start flowering. And this is the kind of strawberries that you're getting if you're buying strawberries in the supermarkets now. Pretty much most of the strawberries grown in California and Florida are all day-neutral, so they just flower continuously. Anybody here grown day-neutrals? What, do you like them? No? You don't like them? No. Before you do, okay. Anybody else, day-neutrals? Juneberry? She said slugs bother me. Slugs, she said slugs bother me. I'll try to repeat all the comments. Juneberry and growers, anybody grow? Okay, why don't people grow strawberries? Too many pests, okay. All right, oops, let's see if we can get this thing to work. There we go. Okay, strawberry plant. So, you would typically buy your strawberry plants as dormant crowns, okay. And what you wanna do when you plant them, if you wanna make sure you plant them, this is the crown here, and you would want to make sure that you plant them deep enough. A lot of people will plant them too deep, they bury the crown or too shallow and they dry out. So it's very important to, when you get them, most people will plant in the springtime, you would order your crowns from mail order nursery. We like to use Norris Farms out of Massachusetts, which I'll give you all those addresses at the end of places to get plants. So it's important to think about planting that properly. You can get it, as soon as you can work the ground in, it doesn't matter if you get lots of cold frosts or freezes, it won't hurt the crown at all. It would hurt the flowers, but it won't hurt the crown. And let them start growing as you can, early as you can in the springtime. Now, how do you plant systems to plant? A lot of people don't like growing strawberries because of weeds, right? People don't like to weed. There's a lot of ways you can start dealing with weeds. You can use a black plastic, you can use a woven ground cloth. There's a lot of systems that you can use. You can use straw mulch to keep the weeds at bay. But typically you would plant about 12 inches apart, 12 to 18 inches apart between the plants. And this is for a day-neutral system. If you're going to do a matted row system, which was the picture you saw at the beginning where it's a nice big wide bed of strawberries, you would probably plant a single row and let them all set runners. So what they're trying to do is, yeah, was there a question? Oh, no. Strawberry plants love to do is produce more plants. That's what they're really good at. Okay, so Juneberry, these are the ones that we like. Wendy, Cavendish for mid-season and Jewel is late. So if you're gonna buy strawberries for your garden, you'd probably wanna get some that start fruiting earlier, some mid and some late. So with the Juneberry, you could get fruit for three to four weeks, which is great if you're wanting to put it up, freeze strawberries or do something like that. Okay, day-neutrals, a couple of the great ones, these are new and they're nice big berries and seascape and Albion are a couple varieties that you'd wanna look for. And it's important to pick the right varieties because we are in a fairly cold climate. You wanna make sure you get varieties that are cold-hearty. And there are a lot of strawberry varieties that won't tolerate some of the cold winters that we get. All right, matted row. So we talked about matted row. This is what strawberries are very good at. They like to produce daughter plants or runners. And so the idea is you would have planted these main plants and then your first year, what you're trying to do is just to grow plants. You wanna get a nice matted row. So you would actually pick the flowers off as they flower the first year. And you pick the flowers away and you want them to grow little daughter plants. And the idea is to get a nice vigorous matted row growing. And that, it's not hard to really get that first year establishment. And this is where the weeds become an issue because you can see here it's hard to really kinda get in there and take care of them. So on the home garden scale, you guys have a lot of great options. Using straw around that because they'll set right through the straw. So if you mulch right away, that is a good way to deal with the weed issue. Okay. Now, there's a lot of creative ways. And this is where, how many people have no land or very little land? Okay. How many people have big gardens, a lot of space? Okay, matted rows might be more your thing. There's a lot of ways to grow strawberries. Hanging baskets, we grow them in hanging baskets. There's no reason you can't take a hanging basket and we sell them in our garden center. But you could just take a hanging basket, buy some crowns, put two or three in there and you can be eating fruit through October hanging on your porch. You don't get a lot at once. This is getting frustrating. Yeah. Okay. You don't get a lot at once, but this is an idea of a, this is kind of a planter that would go against a wall. There's no reason you couldn't do something like this. The bags, anybody's used the bags for to make those hanging bags, that would work as well. So you would buy the day-neutral crowns though. That's what you want to make sure you get, okay? Don't get June-bearing type varieties or all you'll do is you'll get a little bit of fruit and a lot of plants. But the nice thing about these day-neutrals is you can, if you're wanting fresh fruit for five, six months, you can do it around here. The more sun, the better. Pretty much with all small fruits. The more sun, the better. So if you don't have much sun, it's just gonna reduce the amount of fruity. You'll still get berries. You probably won't get as large berries. You won't get as much flower production. What would you do with these in the winter? This, you could try, you could try to put it in the basement dormant. Hanging baskets, you could keep them dormant or you could just buy new crowns in the next spring. That's usually the best way to go with day-neutrals. You can overwinter them and they'll fruit quite a bit right in the early spring, but then they tend to peter out. So it's easier just to buy new crowns. They're not very expensive. You can get crowns for about 25 cents a plant, so yeah. Would you be doing these at home? Yes, the earlier the better, yep. So you wanna get your crowns, like if you could get baskets started, soon as it gets a little bit warm, you could be ordering crowns here in the next couple weeks and start putting them in planters in late April, so. Because the plants themselves won't get affected by the cold, they might flower. Flowers will die in cold. Strawberry flowers are very sensitive to anything below 32, but the plants themselves are fine. But the nice thing about the day-neutrals, they just keep flowering. So there's just some creative ways. They just have some pots here, and they're just growing their strawberries, kinda tying them up to their railing there, and you can get fruit that way. So you can be very creative of your space if you don't have much garden space. And strawberries are great for that, because they're not like raspberries and blueberries, where they need a lot of space. All right. So that's a tube planter. You can see what it is, it's a big tube. PVC tube with some holes drilled in it. They put some soil in it and just push your plug in there. All right. Okay, container planting. This is probably more what most of you may be doing. But again, this would be a great way to do, you could do day-neutrals. If you have a small area, the root zone is not very big on a strawberry plant. That's why I think they're a great crop to grow. You don't need a lot of space. So something like this, could be on a patio, could be on a deck. It doesn't have to be just a hanging basket. The little bit more soil capacity that they have, the better they'll produce. But this is what a day-neutral will look like from July through October. They'll just always be fruity. So it's a very nice crop to have. And the nice thing about a system like this, you can kind of stay away the slugs this way. So did you have them in a wet area of a garden or a slug issue or what was it like? Oh, they are and you're still getting a lot of slugs. Snails too. Snails, yes, snails love it, yeah. We've had some wet years lately and it's, have you tried any kind of trapping? We just need ducks. Ducks. Okay, oops, what's going on there? Oops. Oh, there's another idea, large barrel, okay? A lot of people have whiskey barrels with flowers. You can have whiskey barrels with day-neutral strawberries. They work great. They're very kind of decorative foliage. The foliage stays pretty nice all season long and then they'll just fruit and flower for you. So another, yeah, you could, the only problem with a, if you have plenty of snow, that'd be fine. The only problem with barrels that get up high is if we have a no snow load and they're above the ground, then the soil gets so cold that you might kill the crowns. But it, it should work. If you could mulch around that and then snow, that should be fine, yeah. The problem, the problem with what happens is because these wanna keep producing more and more daughter plants, it gets too crowded. So you gotta make sure you actually thin them out. And that was my question. How far apart would you plant? I would probably plant these. With the day-neutrals, you're not after the daughter plants. So actually you pick the runners, okay. So I would plant them on, you know, nine to 12 inch centers. So, and you get a nice big crown and that, that plant just gets big and bushy by it. So, no, day-neutrals, you'll fruit the first year. Yeah, it's the June-bearing ones that you wanna pick the flowers because it's the following year, you get all these daughter plants producing all these flowers at once. And it's just, you sit there and you can pick 30 pounds of fruit without moving. But the day-neutrals, you'll never get that much at once. So if you're wanting a lot to put up at once, June-bears might be a little bit better choice. Yes, yep. Yeah, you could, yep, yep. You can root them, they root very easily. So if you want to clip them off and start them in another spot, that's fine. Yeah, the only issue with a lot of small fruits is they tend to get virus and diseased after a little bit of time. That's, if the plants aren't that expensive, that's why you're almost better off buying new crowns each year, yeah. I would use a compost-based mix in here. You could use liquid fish emulsion. You could use blood meal, something like that that would have some nitrogen. There's a lot of mixed organic fertilizers now that you can buy, slow release that are usually composted poultry manure or something like that that's been dried. Any of those would work. Can you do that? Strawberry's relatively well balanced. You don't want too much nitrogen. You don't want a straight nitrogen fertilizer because you'll just get plant growth without much flowering, so. Yep, okay. All right, there's another nice system. Now you're gonna be a real creative gardener because you want to get fruit until November, right? So all you would simply do is in your bed, you would have these little hoops and then you would have a frost protection thing. Because like I said, these flowers are very susceptible to frost. So once they get frosted, the flower dies. But if you can keep it just above freezing, they will keep flowering and fruiting right until November. So it's a great way to get fruit. Yeah. Well, there's another good thing. I'm looking at that. Yeah, exactly. Netting is what you really need to do for bird protection. So on the home scale, it's a good way to do it because it's not that expensive. And then we're gonna talk a lot about netting for spotted wing drosophila too, which can do both. So, but the nice thing with a frame is then you've got netting, a way to support that netting. So it's really easy to do these little kinds of frame things. It's not too hard. And this material is called, anybody use row cover in their gardens or spun bonded polyester? Okay, works very well for extending the season, makes it warmer underneath, but it also does a great job of excluding insect pests. All right. Okay, so there's the flower cluster of strawberries. This is what the flower. And if you ever see your flowers with a black center, then it means it got killed by frost. That's what you want your flowers to look like. Now, strawberries are both insect and wind pollinated. They don't have to be insect pollinated. You get better fruit if they are insect pollinated. But if you had a system like in that last picture with the hoops, you could cover them and actually, because you're concerned about insects, you don't wanna spray. You can get great fruit even with just wind pollination. So, they're gorgeous flowers too. All right, and that's what you're after, right? Nice, luscious strawberries. First fruits of the season, so that's always nice too. All right, alpine strawberries. If you are in a real shady place, alpine strawberries might be something you might wanna think about. You can buy seed from the seed catalogs. They're very small strawberries, but they're very, very tasty. So, if you don't have any sun and you have trouble growing some of the standard varieties, you may wanna look at alpine woodland strawberries. So, anybody here grow them before? You like them? Yes, I doubt those are true alpines. Those are probably the wild strawberries, which kind of were the basis of a lot of the breeding work that got us those nice big ones. So, by pulling them out, getting them in sun and spacing them and treating them better, they produce bigger berries. The alpines really won't do that so much. They don't tend to runner quite as much as those and whatnot, so. Anybody else have? Yeah? Yard. Yeah, the wild ones, but those aren't true alpine upland-type berries, so. These are tiny, tiny berries, so. But how big are your berries? Tiny. Like that? Oh yeah. Okay. They do. They're very flavorful. Very flavorful. Okay. Well, we've got some good alpine growers there. Okay. Alpines don't send off runners. They do send off runners, but I'm not sure they're not as kind of like the Juneberry types that we've experienced, but I haven't grown them in a long time. It's probably been 25 years since I've grown them, so. Or no longer, probably 30 years since I've played them. All right. Insect pests. Oh, what's going on here? Okay. This is the biggest insect pest. Who has strawberries that doesn't like growing them because of insect pests? Oh, good. Okay. I wish I didn't have insect pests. This is the number one pest of strawberries. It's called tarnished plant bug. And it's a pest of many, many vegetable crops too. It's kind of has a host range of probably 200 plants, but it loves strawberry flowers and it will lay. It'll actually feed on the flower as an adult, but it also lays eggs and the nymphs become the problem. The young immatures which feed on the flowers. And what you get, there's the nymph. Okay. Wonderful little insect. And you can see these easily. If you have strawberries, you can, let's go back. You'll see the adults all the time. You can see them flying around. This is one reason to think about insect netting or the row cover. And what you get, unfortunately, is you get this. How many has strawberries like that? Cat face. Okay. They can, it can be so bad that they're really become almost an edible. Not only do they make them small and gnarly and seedy, they get kind of bitter. For a commercial strawberry grow, it's probably the easiest way to lose a whole crop is Tarnished Plant Bug. So it's a big issue. So you can see here that wherever the nymphs have fed, the plant kind of deals with that compound and it produces a lot of seeds and gets kind of gnarly. So something you want to try to prevent. You can spray for them. A lot of broad spectrum insecticides would work. If you're organic, there's, pyganic would work, but it's hard to control them because they're there all the time. So that's why I think netting is a great way to deal with them or a row cover. What other pests? Frost damage. Okay. We talked about frost. This is what the strawberry flowers will look like after they've been hit below 32 degrees. It's black and they'll never produce a fruit. So if you have a June bearing crop, if you want to try and grow a lot of strawberries for your freezing, you want to make sure you can protect them from a frost. And that can be done a couple of ways. You can use those row covers. You could use blankets. You can use all kinds of things. Or you can irrigate all night. That's another way to protect from frost. That's what we do is we just irrigate all night long. So if your plants are in full flower and they're gonna call for a 28 degree night, you better do something else. You'll lose your whole crop. Okay. Yeah. So if you have some that have been hit by frost and some that haven't, if you pick those dead ones off, will that help to produce the others? No, not necessarily. Because it's already put a lot of energy into it. The plant will somewhat compensate itself. In other words, there's the primary flower, which is always gonna be the biggest fruit, which we call the king berries. And then there's the secondaries and tertiary and quaternaries, which become smaller and smaller. But they will put some of that energy that was gonna be put into that main fruit. So you'll get a little bit bigger size on the other ones. But it doesn't nearly make up for what you lose in that frost. Anybody ever here try to irrigate for frost? You had luck? I've heard of it. Okay. Anybody done it? No? Okay. It works. It's the whole idea is that it just, water needs to keep freezing all the time. As long as water is continually freezing, there's something called the latent heat of the state of water transfer. So it gives off enough heat right at the layer, so the plants actually stay. We've protected pepper plants down to 20 degrees. We've protected strawberries down to 20 degrees. They can be coated in ice. They look, oh my God, what have I done? But they're fine. As long as the water continues to freeze and you continue the water until it melts off. So if you're an adventurous gardener, you may wanna try that this year. But usually on a garden scale, you can cover everything. You're not dealing with so much volume, so it's easier to cover. Okay. How to control these pests. Okay, so you saw those frames. Any kind of hoop frame will give you a way to protect both from insect pests, and this is also a way to protect for frost, so. I think hoops are a great way to go. Anybody here use garden? I make hoops to hoop over their plants. Tomatoes are, what do people use? PVC pipe you like? Black? Okay, anybody use the white hoops or metal hoops? Use the white. And how do you guys, do you guys just put them in the ground or do you have rebar coming up? Rebar, okay. Everyone hear that? So rebar, this is straight rebar hoops, but if you just have a piece of rebar in the ground and then the hoop goes over the rebar, so it gives it something to, it's a pretty inexpensive way. The nice thing about those systems is they're easy to put up, take down, and they're also last a long time. Okay. So like I said, strawberries can be wind pollinated, so you could actually cover these while they're flowering, and you'll also get pollination from ground beetles and whatnot. But if you wanna protect against some of these tarnished plant bugs and other insect pests, you want to actually cover them before they start flowering. So day neutrals, this will obviously not work too well, unless you're going on and off every day. Okay. Molds. Okay, this is called botrytis rot. Anybody had this ever happen for them? Okay. And not only happens in strawberries, it happens in raspberries, you'll see it in blueberries, not as much in blueberries. And usually what it is when we get excessive rains, botrytis loves wet, moist areas. So the idea of keeping your strawberries well thinned out, a lot of air movement, a raised bed will help, air movement through. Anyway, you can continually open up for air to flow through plants will help reduce botrytis. But it can be a problem. And if it continues, if you just get a wet rainy year, there's not much you can do. Now, the other thing you can do with those hoops is you can take a piece of plastic and just put plastic over the top. So let's go back to that one. You can take plastic and just have it just above the top. It wouldn't even have to be, because it could get too hot. And that will shed the rain and that will keep them dry. It's a great way to grow tomatoes. Anybody hoop their tomatoes and cover them? Yeah, I mean, around here in the Northeast, our biggest problem is diseases because we get rain. We get a lot of wet conditions. So whether it be fruits or vegetables, it's a great way to deal with it. All right, okay, now we're gonna, this is gonna pertain to not only strawberries, it's gonna pertain to really blueberries and raspberries. Anybody here learned about this pest before or have heard about it? Come on, Master Gardeners, you guys must have heard about it, right? Please speak up. This is the devil, this is the worst pest introduction. Yeah. Yeah, the blueberries are the worst. Well, fall raspberries are even worse, but blueberries are right up there. This is a, anybody here remember taking genetics class and dealing with fruit flies, okay? It's exactly, very similar, except it has an ovipositor, well, the way it lays its egg, it's got a saw. So it can go right through ripe fruit. Whereas normal fruit flies could only deposit their eggs in rotting fruit, okay? So it was never really an issue because as long as you picked, maybe you would get fruit flies, but it would be like in your house, when you get a minute, it's always in rotting fruit. This pest has a serrated ovipositor and it really can do havoc because it will lay its egg in a not quite ripe fruits. So just as you're ready to pick it, this is what you get, you get fruit with larvae, fruit fly larvae in them, okay? Isn't that fun? And you're making your jam and all the fruit fly larvae float to the top. Oh. Yes, it's edible, yes. Not a big issue. I mean, if you don't mind eating fruit fly larvae, it's, yes, you know, and the other thing that you can deal with it, we do pick your own raspberries and it's become a real problem. It was a great crop for us because it was easy, we could self-serve. Their fall raspberries are the best way to grow raspberries and that's when the fruit flies are the most active is they build up their populations for mid-summer on and they, you know, it's hard to keep up with it because the only way you can deal with them is to spray every three days or to exclude them. But if you take your fruit home right away and freeze it, it'll pretty much kill the larvae. So the quality of the fruit's not as good if it's infected, but it doesn't mean you can't grow small fruits and use them. It just, it makes it a lot harder. Blueberries, you can pretty much lose your whole crop though. They just kind of melt. Because if you're not aware of it, all of a sudden you'll look at what happened to your blueberries. Yeah, you got it. There they are in a raspberry, so. It was so easy to grow small fruits it was the, these, they were just wonderful crops until this got introduced. So this is a big problem with all kinds of pests. There's lots of new pests. How many people here grow garlic or onions? You ever heard of grape leek moth? You guys starting to get your, it's a new pest that's actually come from the north down and it actually affects onions and leeks in the same way and it lays its eggs and it burrows down in. And if you're wondering what's going on with my garlic and onions, that could well be the case. There's another new pest called swedemidge. It came from Europe, it came from Canada and it's come down. How many people can't grow broccoli? I've already had broccoli with all these like gnarly heads in it. You guys haven't had it yet. Well, it's a new pest in the north in Vermont and it's a lot of our gardeners that have given up trying to grow broccoli and I said, well you must have swedemidge so we give out the row cover material or suggest they use it and that's the way you can grow it. Pretty much if you can cover your garden you're gonna be a lot better off anymore so, which is sad. Yes, yes, they are. Okay, so we're gonna get into raspberry and blueberry stuff but all this applies to it. This is kind of a, since I wanna deal with spotted wing as a pest of strawberries, strawberries are probably the least affected. So, mainly because Juneberry strawberries happen before they've really come out so we don't have an issue with our Juneberries. Day neutrals they can affect but they don't seem to like them as much as blueberries and raspberries so you might get on it. The nice thing, another good management technique is to keep picking, almost pick slightly under ripe because if you let any fruit overripe and it gets infected they just like fruit flies they just multiply so fast you can't believe it especially when the temperature gets warm. So, a really good tactic is to make sure you stay really good on picking and if you're really good gardener then you'd make sure you pick up any rotten fruit and dispose of it, that's on the ground as well. Okay, so what can we do? What's happened on the commercial scale they've developed netting that's very fine that will exclude fruit flies, okay? And this is now a way a lot of people commercially are starting to grow. I mean they affect cherries, they affect so many things, it's really been hard. And if you don't want to spray all the time this is a way to go. So, the same hoop idea, blueberries I would really recommend it. Slowly start to invest in some netting and a few plants. How many bushes do you have? We only have six. Six, okay. Yeah, it's not nearly small enough for fruit flies. It just lets them in and then they hang out there, they love that. So, what you're looking for is this insect netting and I've got sources of places where you can order it from. It's not cheap but it will last for 15 years. It's well made, it's a knitted netting. It's called Prop-Tec a netting. And I'll show you the addresses at the end where you can get it. But this is a similar idea. So, for blueberries, you probably are, I'm so glad we have somebody here who had that. I'm not glad it happened to you but it's good that it's, because that's really hard. I've had commercial grower friends that have lost their whole crops. Like, I didn't have spotted wing last year and then all of a sudden that finds them and it can, yes, yes, so once they get there, then they're gonna overwinter into the ground so it becomes an issue. Yes, so blueberries, you can't net them all the time because they're insect pollinated. So you would only put them on after the fruits formed in are green and they're not gonna be affecting that. But if you've had spotted wing there before, they will overwinter into the ground. So the next option is some kind of ground cloth. So they can't get to the ground and emerge. So there's not very successful traps. They've been trying to use vinegar traps and that's the way we've tried to detect them but it's really, you could try making vinegar traps and detecting them and you can find designs online if you just put in spotted wing trap. For a small planting, you can try that, it will help but it is difficult so. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And oh by the way, you can't stop this. Yeah. But we didn't have any spotted wings the year that we had the traps. Oh. And the next year when we didn't. So you're gonna go back to the traps then? Yeah, try it, see what happens. Yeah, basically we'd fill it right up. Yeah. We had to change the trap water weekly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, easily. Well, there's a couple things. You can use like red Dixie cups and you would put a kind of a vinegar mixture in it and they'll get attracted to it and they'll get, I wish I'd put some pictures, I'm sorry I didn't put any but there's lots online if you go to spotted wing traps. Yes. Yeah. I bought really cheap wine to make mine too. Yeah. So this is the way most people are starting to go to, so. All right, so let's, we've kind of talked about spotted wing and saw some options but now let's talk, how many raspberry growers do we have here? Quite a lot more raspberry growers. People are more interested in raspberries. Okay, do you grow Juneberry or did you grow them summer berry or do you grow fall berry? Do you know the difference? Anybody? Okay, so Juneberry are the ones that will start flowering and fruiting late June, July. And that's the kind where you've got, you've got to prune out the old canes, you got to leave because it's called a biennial. In other words, it's fruiting on the second year cane. Fall berry are the easy kind and I think the ones I recommend but they don't start fruiting until about late August and they're very easy, you just mow them down completely to the ground and then they start growing in the springtime and they'll start growing up and then you, they start fruiting on that same cane but they don't start until about really September's when you get the most crap. So if you live in a real cold spot then the June ones are better but they've been doing a lot of breeding work and they get fall bears that are keep fruiting earlier and earlier. Oh, that was a mistake. That should have been back with the spotted wing but that's an idea of how to build a doorway maybe into it. A simpler way, you know, for a home garden you could just use sandbags or something, a piece of pipe to weight it down along the bottom and then duck under there but if you're trying to make it easy access you could do that. All right, raspberry cultural needs. Ideally full sun, well-drained soils, they do not like wet soils at all. So if you have a wet ground you want to either try to grow them in a raised bed. Soil pH 65 to 68, kind of like similar to strawberries, nice garden soil and you would buy plants and plant them about 18 to 24 inches apart. And they will grow stolons underground. They really propagate. Probably everyone's seen how raspberries can grow in the wild. That's not a thing about spotted wing drosophila. It's like you can protect your crop but they just build up because of all the wild raspberries around and wild fruit. So they're here to stay. Okay, so we talked about summer bearing, fall bearing. Anybody grow black raspberries? Nobody here? You try them. We're a little cold here. We're right on the edge for black raspberries but you can do it. There's a few varieties. Yellow raspberries, there are some. Blackberries, there's the thorn blackberries which are hardy and the thornless ones really don't make it here. But there's lots of different brambles and they're wonderfully productive. Okay, yeah, yeah, sure. You said plant them 18 inches apart, is that right? Yeah, that's when I buy plants I would set them about 18 inches apart. And those are the ones you mow over in the fall? Those would be fall bears or June bears. The idea is you're gonna try to get a hedge row going and it takes a year or two before you'll get to that point. Okay, so these are some of the favorite varieties we've grown for summer. We used to grow summer as we don't anymore but Nova, Kalarney, Boine is probably the most hardy if you live in a cold spot, you wanna look at Boine. Prelude's a very early one. That'll start fruiting when strawberries right at the end of strawberry season. But again, these are the ones that you have to prune by hand every year. You gotta prune out the dead canes and thin the number of canes out. Whereas fall bearing are very simple. You get the hedge row and you mow them down in the springtime. And these are the varieties that we like. We like Joan J. I love Carol, it's probably the best tasting raspberry I've ever had. Fruit's a little late, but it does fruit here. Polka, himbo top, Polana is extremely rare. This will start fruiting mid-August, the Polana. So that's a really good one if you're in a cold spot. All right, okay. So I was talking about fluorocanes and primocanes. They're actually, it's a biennial plant which means it'll grow this primocane up here, okay? It'll be green and fleshy. The second year it becomes a woody cane and it's gonna send out its flowers and fruit on that. And then once it fruits, that cane dies, okay? It becomes dead. So it's, you know, when you go into your raspberry you see all those kind of dried up dead canes. That's what's happened. They've gone through their life cycle. And every year they send up more and more primocanes each year because it's a perennial, okay? The canes are biennials, but the plant itself is a perennial because the root system stays alive. All right. Okay, this is a great looking home raspberry planting. So they have a nice little trellis there. And you see here how it's a woody cane here. So this would be a fruiting cane this year. And then like this one is real green here. That's a primocane. And that's the way you can tell the difference. But you can see what happens if you don't go in there and prune, this just becomes thicker and thicker. How many people grow raspberries had their plantings go wild? How do you prune them? You don't. Okay. You just thin it out. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you, good. And then you just kind of mowed them around them and thinned them and how are they doing? Good. Ha ha ha ha ha. Anybody else any other ideas, techniques? Yeah. I would suggest, yeah. Probably. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, you can do that. You can do that. If the quality of the fruit's good, the issue about brambles is they tend to get a lot of viruses over time. So even on commercial growers, they usually don't keep them for about six, seven years and then let us pull them out because the fruit's production tends to go down. So if they've been there a long time, you might be better off going with new virus disease, virus-free plants. Yeah. Cain borer. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It kills the top. Yeah, yeah. But I don't know what it looks like. It's Lepidopter. It's a kind of moth and it'll lay and the larvae girdles the stem. Yes. That's why I like fall bearers. It's not nearly as big an issue. But yeah, so with the day neutrals, with those, not day neutrals by me, with the summer bearers, they definitely can become a problem. The idea is to prune those canes out because what it does is it'll tunnel down and then it gets down into the root system too, so. Yeah. Yeah. You can mow them, you can prune them out. They just keep growing, but yeah. So if you're gonna try to manage them back, you wanna get them narrow into a kind of a hedge row if you can, so they get sunlight. The biggest problem of letting them grow wild is they kind of shade themselves out. Plus it's hard to pick them because you can't get in there, so. Well, I would actually physically prune it everything out to the shape that you wanna keep. So if you can get it down to a hedge row and then from that point on you would thin it down. So there's only maybe, you can see how here, they don't have a lot of canes. Maybe five, six canes per foot at the most, ideally like four. And the width of it could be maybe this wide. That'd be about as wide as you want the hedge row to be. So you gotta be, you can't over, it's hard to over prune raspberries. Yeah, yep. I would take them out and start new. Yeah, any other questions? Okay, all right. Yeah, ideally you should just dig out the root systems. Yeah, you can kill them, just keep mowing them. If you have a lawn mower, just mow them constantly. You know, every time they get up the side, it's mowing because you'll eventually they'll die out. If you're gonna try, I would not try to put the raspberries right where you had those old ones. If you could put them in a different spot, that would be better. Oh yeah, so what we use, I'm not sure if I got a picture. What we use, we just use like a portable plastic fence posts and just some twine along the outside to keep them from falling, because the fruit gets so heavy they tend to lay down. But fall berries, you don't even have to. Another way you could do is just kind of as a clump, tie them so that they kind of hold themselves up. Try, I got some pictures. So here's a good picture. This is a, that's a flora cane and this is a primate cane. So the green ones are the first year canes and the brown ones are the second year canes. Can you just cut out the second? After fruiting, yeah. So you would want, like right here, that's not too bad. Maybe I might prune a couple of those flora canes out because they're a little too thick. And you tend to let most of the primate canes grow. You can thin those out as well and maybe keep five or six of the best ones. So you, because the biggest problems is they tend to crowd themselves out. Yeah. After fruiting, or if you're wanting to thin right in the spring, like if you didn't get to it, say you didn't prune your primate canes, don't do it, let them overware. They need, it really helps the heartiness if you can leave those, leave most of those. But if you want to thin in the spring time, you could take out two or three of those in the spring time if it looks too thick to you. Oh, the dead ones? Ideally right after fruiting. Yeah. So you got a lot of pruning to do this spring because you got to pull all that stuff out, right? But that's okay. Yeah, it's all right. Yeah, it's not going to be terrible. They tend to harbor pests as a problem, but. Okay, so what to prune. So like I said, you would prune down here at ground level. If you've got too many of these fruiting canes or let's say this is after pruning, it looks like this and then it starts to get grayish. It dies. So it goes from that nice brown color to a gray color. And that's an easy way to tell which fruiting canes are done. Okay. All right, so there's a nice raspberry trellis. If you're doing summer kind, this would be a nice permanent system. Yeah. Nope, it's not like blueberries. They do not need two varieties for pollination. So you could go with one variety and like I said, I would plant like maybe 18 inches apart in this row. The nice thing about a system like this is that it's contained, they'll probably maybe start to come up in the yard because the underneath they'll start to send out runners. But this is a good system like this, you know, for the home garden, yeah. So if you're totally going to raise that line of runners. No, they'll go down through the hardware claw. You'd have to use something solid down about two feet like a piece of fiberglass roofing or metal roofing, you know, a slit down there like that. No, those holes are perfect for the roots to go through. Yeah. Yeah, you don't have to, and you wouldn't have to trellis these either. You could try to, they're just a lot easier to pick. They prefer it, it keeps them upright. They have less disease. If you can trellis them, the better. But it doesn't have to be this fancy. You could just take a couple posts and some twine too. But because you've got those canes that are overwintering that are tall, they kind of need some support. But whereas the fall bearers aren't, you know, because they're mowed to the ground. We just mow them at the. Right, in the springtime, in the springtime. Yeah, you mow them right to the ground. Yeah, because the, why do you want to do it in the springtime? You don't want to do it in the fall because all those canes that are growing are sending carbohydrates down to the root system or food storage, okay? So it actually helps the pernilness of the plant. I think it provides a lot more food source for the next year's crop. So as soon as the tall is back. Yeah, as soon as you can get, yep. And you don't have to do it with a lawn mower. You can just go out there and prune them all by hand with the pruners. Or you could take a hedge trimmer, whatever you want. Yes. I would say these are probably most, trellises would be about this tall, you know, five feet. You can get by with lower. Because really, as long as they can't flop over. So, and if you really get into it, you can start tip pruning the tops of the fruiting canes because then it will form, that'll force more laterals to start flowering. But that also can get, some, I think people get confused about pruning. So these are fall bears here. And you can see here, we don't really have much trellising all. Just we have a thing of twine, probably about two feet up, just so that the whole, you can see how loaded they are with fruit. And, you know, that started from being mowed in the springtime. And that's in September picking. It depends on the variety. So the Pilana is the earliest. You might start fruiting mid-August. That'd be the earliest, probably more like August 20th, 25th around here. But they'll keep fruiting, you know? So the nice thing is they're gonna fruit till frost. So you'll, you can get two months of fruit if you get a late frost. But that's why it's important to look at those varieties that I mentioned. And when I'm gonna give you a couple catalog sources, or if you go to garden centers, make sure you know what you're buying. Because if you're buying something like Heritage, which was the first fall bearing variety that came out, it's fabulous, but it doesn't start fruiting until end of September. So what good does that do us? So, yeah, yeah. You could, they'll take a light frost and what will also happen. Like if you have a light frost, you might hurt the ripe fruit, but all these green fruits will be fine. A hard freeze will take them out. But a light frost, yeah, you could use them. Especially if you freeze them right away. What they do once you rupture the cell surface, they start to dehydrate. So they kind of just turn dry. So, yeah. Okay, so what's happening with your crop is all fall bearers will produce, just like I said the summer bearers will. So if you don't mow them down to the ground, you'll have what happened. If I didn't mow my fall bearing variety to the ground, all those primocanes from last year will actually become fluorocanes and produce fruit. But also the primocanes will produce fruit. Okay, so you can get more. The problem with that in our climate is that if you allow that, the primocane fruiting happens later in the year. So by mowing them to the ground, you tend to put all that energy into the primocanes and the flowering happens at an earlier stage. So, do you like the quality of your summer fruit? Is it good? Yeah, so you may wanna go ahead and keep that, treat those as a normal summer bearing and maybe try a fall variety and keep it separate and just mow it to the ground. But that's what all, all raspberries will do that. Every primocane will flower eventually if it's given a long enough time. So I don't know what variety you had. The fact that, how close does it get to, is it just starting to flower when frost comes or you actually get a lot of fruit? I actually, Never quite makes it. It could well be heritage. It's hard to say. Yeah, it's hard to know. But yeah, so if they're great quality fruit, you may wanna keep doing what you're doing and maybe try a fall variety in a little different spot or something. But if you did mow them to the ground, you could do an experiment. You could mow how big of a patch is it? 20 feet, 10 feet? Oh, it's pretty big. Try mowing one section of it and see if you, those ripen earlier for you. And then leave the other part, yeah. So yeah, that's a good question. Is it better? Yeah. Yeah, well they don't like, they don't like wet saturated soils ground. So you must be on well-drained soil. Is it sandy where you are? Oh, it is. Do you don't have it raised up at all, or is it, wow, you're doing something right? But the fruit, you know, where we get into problems is if you get a lot of ripe, we get a lot of rain while you got a lot of ripening fruit. That's when you tend to have rots and stuff. But no, most plants, we don't irrigate enough. It's amazing in what years, how large in the fruit can become. Any other questions? Yeah, for fertility. I tend to just lay compost or fertilizer down in the springtime. I don't really want to encourage any kind of late season growth. You want them to harden off, so. Yeah, yes, but they will hit summer raspberries. They're usually starting to come into fairly good population in mid to late July. That's why those blueberries, the late blueberry varieties are really susceptible because you can usually get by with those first blueberry varieties without getting much damage. But boy, come mid to late July, they just go bonkers. You had a question? What time? As soon as they can in the springtime, as soon as you can get on the ground. Okay, so let me check the time because we've got to get through blueberries too. 11 o'clock, we're doing pretty good. Okay, all right, so, you know, the size of the fall fruits, usually larger, it's unbelievable. I mean, you can get blueberries like this. They're just amazing. The new varieties are enormous. They're very flavorful. They get sweeter in the fall, cold temperature. It's really, I love it. And then when Spot-A-Wing came up, I was so disappointed. All right, this is what everyone's here for. It looks like high-bush blueberries, okay? It's a great crop. It's dated to North America. Vaccinium corbosum. But anyways, high-bush blueberries, there's both high-bush and low-bush. Who here, anybody grow low-bush blueberries here? You like them? You do. You don't. They usually are small. But they're native here. They're incredibly hardy because they're usually so low to the ground they're covered with snow. But most people here growing high-bush blueberries want to know about the tall ones. Okay, so we'll concentrate on this. Okay, this is well-drained soils again. This is the most important part. And this is what more gardeners come to my garden center and say, why aren't my blueberries doing well? And the first thing I'll ask, what's the pH of your soil? And they say, I don't know. That's the most important thing. Blueberries cannot grow in pHs above that. Or if they do, they get, anybody have their blueberries look really yellow in between the veins of the plants? That means your pH isn't low enough, okay? They will not tolerate high pHs. And what it is is it's not that they can't grow in the high pH, they can't absorb iron in those low pHs or call it an iron inefficient plant. And so at low pHs, iron becomes much more available. So how do you get that pH down? Does anybody, everybody know how to take a garden soil sample and how to get your pH tested? No, okay. Go to UVM extension online. How many master gardeners are in here? Okay, what's the first thing to tell all of them when you teach? Take a garden sample, right? Garden soil, soil test, okay? You can take a soil test. If you go online, you can get the forms from UVM extension. You don't need much soil for them to sample only about a cup's worth, but just don't take it in one spot. So if my garden was half the size of this room, I would take samples probably in 20 different spots, mix it in a bucket, take a cup of that, and then that would give you one good sample. If you're worried just about, if you want to sample the soil just near your blueberries, just sample around your blueberries, don't do the rest of the garden. Because it's a good chance, you don't want the rest of your garden to have a pH like this because your vegetables aren't gonna grow very well. So yeah. Okay, but you got some topsoil in there too, right? Yeah, I would mix it with some topsoil. You could put Vermont compost in there. You're gonna want to fertilize with, or you're gonna want to add sulfur. The easiest way to get the pH to go down over and the cheapest way is just to add elemental sulfur. You can buy pelletized sulfur at garden centers. It takes a while, but you need to do it yearly if the pH of your normal soil is low. But you don't have a bottom to your raised bed, right? Oh, okay, okay. Yeah, so you're gonna have control over it, but you're gonna want to keep that pH down. You could put a fair bit of peat moss in there. They would love that. Peat moss mixed in with compost and some topsoil, so. If it's just 100% peat, in other words, herb-centered organic matter, you're gonna have a lot of potential micro-nutrient deficiencies, so. So that's what I would suggest. I wouldn't. I wouldn't, yeah. So if you're gonna test the soil like you're in a new spot, you've got the topsoil on, how far back are you? You probably, you want to get your top-level organic matter is probably about like this, but if you get down below the first three, four inches, make sure you get some of the subsoil down there. You don't want to go way down. You don't want to dig a hole this deep and take what's down at the bottom. But in the rooting zone, so, is where you want to sample. Okay? How many people do take soil samples and send them in? Two, okay. All right, the other big thing, I've offered that, this is the second question. Why aren't I getting fruit on my blueberries? Like, well, do you have two different varieties? I don't know, this is usually the answer I get. So you gotta make sure you get two different varieties, okay, because they need to be cross-pollinated. Usually about 10, I think it's $10. Is it 12 for a garden soil sample? Yeah. But you learn a lot. Not only do you get the pH, you're gonna learn about all your other nutrients, except nitrogen. Don't expect to have it, no, tell you what the nitrogen content is. It'll tell you your organic matter, okay, which is important, the higher the organic matter, usually the better. It's like, the organic matter represents the sponge of the soil. That's what holds nutrients, what holds water. It'll tell you your phosphorus levels. It'll tell you your potassium levels. It'll tell you your calcium levels, magnesium levels. And so if anything that's really out of whack, there'll be a recommendation there too. So it's really very worthwhile. It's a good $12 spent. And then full sun, ideally. Most homeowners don't have full sun. So that doesn't mean you can't grow the fruits. Just means they'd probably be a little bit less productive. Ideally, if you could pick the sunniest spot to plant, do that. Okay, varieties. This is what I would suggest for around here. Patriot's a great, hardy, early variety. Blue crops are very hardy variety. Blue Jay, Nelson's a great late variety. Now there is breeding work done where they've bred low bush with high bush. And these tend to be more about this high. So if you don't mind bending over to pick. Or if you're in a really cold spot, anybody here up in Wolkett area or places like that? North of here? No? Okay. You get really cold? Oh yeah, okay. Do you grow high bush blueberries? I have some. How do they do? Yeah. Conquered Vermont. You might wanna try some of the half highs. They're not that low. I mean, some of them like Northland might get up to this high. But they are hardier. And the idea is, most of their flowering and fruitings at a lower level so it tends to get covered by snow. So if you, a great thing is snow for blueberries because it's great, great insulation. So a lot of times, how many people have had their blueberry plants look dead on top and all the flowering and fruitings down near the ground? Nobody? Wow, you guys live in warm spots. So we'll often get winter kill above the snow level if you have a cold winter. This year might be a little interesting because we had that really long cold snip. But a lot of times what's going on, what's happening is everything, all the buds below the snow level are protected so they're not being exposed to the cold and the desiccation. You tend to, you could prune it off or just leave it. I would tend to prune it off, yeah. Okay, this is ideally what your blueberry plant should look like. Right? So that's what we're after, okay? You want good fruit production and they can produce like that. They can produce like that around here. I'm not sure, I think it, it might be, it might be a half high. I would guess that's probably at least six, seven years old. Most times you're not gonna get a full crop till about year four. Blueberries is one plant where it's worth, it depends how much you wanna spend but buying a bigger plant will really kind of behoove the idea of getting the crop going earlier, so. You know, a lot of things you wouldn't, you don't wanna buy bigger mature plants but the blueberry industry has gotten it down so they're in nice big potted plants and you can buy a blueberry bush that's big and plop it in and do our right. Okay, so that's what we're after. All right, so these are the flower buds and leaf buds and they are very sensitive to cold and that's why you gotta make sure because of our climate, looking only for the heartiest varieties. So be careful when you buy, if you go to a Home Depot or a Lowe's or something to buy and they don't know what the variety is or if it's not one of those varieties, be a little concerning because there's a big difference in heartiness in the blueberry varieties. So anyways, that's what, you know, a nice flower bud. These came through the winter without dying but they are also frost susceptible just like strawberry flowers. So has anybody had that happen to them? Ideally if you could plant, you've had loss at the frost. In the neighborhood you got frost in one year. Yeah, yeah. Did you get any blueberry? No, yeah, they got cold. So that could be an issue. So something to be aware again if you could put some kind of covering over them if you're expecting cold nights. Yeah, but how tall are they? Like, yeah, you could still put a big blanket over it. You could put something over it. Anything, you could take a big piece of plastic or those blue tarps, any of that. Any of that would help quite a bit. When are you concerned about frost damage? Only when you're in full flower. Wow, the idea, they'll take some cold. If the buds are like swelling and just the flower buds are about ready to open, they can get nailed then too. But it's not like a straw, it's like, you can get cold damage even before it's fully open. That's not happening. You're not gonna, what's that? You're, yeah, okay. Right, right, but you can, you know, if you're in a cold hollow, you can get a cold. I know Rocky for you, certainly. Yeah, yeah, you don't have to worry about it. On the islands, you don't have to worry about it, yeah. But you have to worry about pH because you're, I don't know what you got for soils, but you probably got high pH soils. You're on the islands. They're about seven years old and they are, they look like your picture there. Oh, good. You putting sulfur down? Wow. And, you know, I was done. Yeah. Yeah. So this is what happens. I made blueberry plants look like that. Okay. So again, if we've had some winter kill, cold temperatures, they can kill the plants right to the ground. So definitely look for hardy varieties. Yeah, I would prune out all this here, all these dead canes. These, you can see if they're gonna leaf out. If they're not, I would just prune them out. For, you mean mulching just for weed control? Yeah. For protection of the bush? It's only gonna protect the root system so it's not gonna protect, yeah. If you wanted to wrap them in burlap, that would be, oh, it'd be great, yeah. Because not only is it cold temperatures, it's also desiccation, which is wind. You know, so the burlap really helps with that. Okay, that's what the flower, there are certainly at this stage, you could lose this to a frost, okay? Pretty flowers, but what do you notice about this flower? It's got a deep corolla, okay? And because it has to be cross-pollinated, winds, no way wind's gonna pollinate that, okay? The strawberry flower's nice and open, it can pollinate, can go everywhere. But not with blueberries, so you can eat insects to pollinate that. Pretty flower. Okay, this is probably a big problem for a lot of people with birds. I'm gonna suggest you don't use this unless you don't have spotted wing drosophila. Do you have problems with spotted wing? Not yet? Not yet. No, Japanese beetles, like, I heard something. Yeah. But we've been here with each other guys. Yeah, what's that? Oh, there's somebody else, no one else raised that. Okay, so birds can be a huge problem and easily netting, bird netting's relatively inexpensive, it's a great way to deal with it. But now that spotted wing's around, you may wanna consider using the insect netting, which would do both, so. Oh, yes, yes. But you don't really need to worry about netting it until the fruit is green. So there's really no need to net it until you've got most of your fruit set. The nice thing about blueberries is they tend to fruit fairly all at the same time, the variety. The insect netting. Oh, the insect netting, no. To keep out spotted wing drosophila, no. No, now if you're really clever and you're really a good gardener, you could take your insect netting and then you could put a beehive inside and then you'd be all set. Yeah. Yes, you wouldn't need it until it's the fruit set, yeah. And so why are we concerned about those? Spotted wing drosophila, once it starts to ripen. Okay, this is what frost damage flower buds look like. So this whole crop is gone. So you can kiss that one goodbye. But that's definitely an issue, not on Grand Isle, probably so much. Nice thing about the islands is that you guys are actually late, the cold. The nice thing about growing near body water is not only does it give you warmth and thermal warmth, but it actually slows the growth down in the spring so you don't get a problem, you get a nice hot, yeah. You get a nice, hot, sunny spot, everything starts growing and then we're in the low areas and that's when the cold, right. Okay, all right, so let's see how we're gonna do this. Okay, so year one, first thing you really wanna do is anybody here plan on planting blueberries this year? Okay, several people. Okay, so you're gonna buy, hopefully, you don't have to buy a large plant. I mean, if you wanting to put a bunch in growing one-year container plants are fine, but you would want to set those and ideally pick all the flowers off that first year, okay. You're not gonna really get, you might get a little bit of fruit, but it's not gonna help the plant at all. What you're wanting to do is develop a root system so that you can get a plant that looks like this in year two, that's your goal, okay. All right, okay, so young bushes in year two, we move low line or weak shoots, okay. And then you wanna keep the healthiest, largest canes. So you do a little bit of pruning the second year, not a lot, you're just gonna kind of the small, weak, spindly growth you might wanna get rid of, these cross ones that they got rid of. Ideally, you really want about seven to eight nice big fruiting canes to a plant at least. And as the plants get bigger, they can even do more. All right, okay, so first crop, most likely, you might get a little bit of fruit that's second year, but really year three is when you'll start to see some decent production. And really it takes four to five years before you're really gonna get full production out of a plant. So goals promote vegetative growth that first and second year, and then you get the structure of the plant. That you want that nice big blueberry bush. And from then on, then you're gonna start usually picking the biggest seven, eight type canes on the stems coming out of the plant, and then you wanna prune the weak ones out. And what that does, it increases the size of the fruit that you get. Yeah, yeah, no, pruning for shape is fine, especially in the homo at the home scale, because you want the shape to be easy to manage to get, you don't want it to go get too big and you can't get the lawn mower around it or something like that. So no, that's fine to prune it for shape. It would help, yeah. Yeah, it would certainly grow a more vegetative plant. Good healthier vegetation growth. Okay, all right. So does that, anybody else have any more pruning questions about blueberries? Yes. When? You should be pruning in the springtime before blood buds are starting to pop. So really, as soon as the snow melts, usually that first week of April is a really good time to prune. That's the best time I would suggest. Depends on what you're gonna plant. If you're gonna plant half-highs, you could plant two to three feet, so it's more of a hedgerow. I would say, I would tend to go, we don't grow blueberry plants like they do down in Massachusetts where they become enormous hedges unless they're really old, but I tend to go suggest like four feet between plants. Because then it becomes more of a hedgerow, because a lot of times we just don't get that nearly as vigorous growth because our growing season's not so long. Is there a record of canes? Yes, yes, yes. So you would then try to pick the kind of younger, thicker canes. The idea, usually the girth has a lot to do with its vigor. So that's why you're often pruning out a lot of, like we talked about the weak spindly ones on the sides. So yes, after a while to rejuvenate a big old plant, you can prune out quite a lot of that old, old growth. Yes. With blueberries, once you get them up to fruiting size, yes. Yep. Not a lot, not necessarily. If you're up with it, it's not a lot of canes that you're taking out per se, but yeah. Which is broom, this is where you're gonna get me because yes, I'm not gonna be able to answer that very well, but it's a fungal disease, I believe, and in terms of spreadability, I can't tell you for sure. I'm not really a blueberry grower, so yeah. Both plants, I suppose you have not much improved. No, probably if it's a transplant, we'd better have taken them off, but it's not gonna hurt it. Yep. Yes, yes. But what you gotta be careful about, if you're gonna buy one super early variety, one really late variety, that's not so good. Be better early in the mid, or mid and the late, so. Because you can get separation time-wise so you don't have any active pollen between those two types. Okay, so major pests. Birds are probably the biggest one. Spottowing jasophila is the next one now. Maybe number one now. Blueberry maggot, this can be an issue, especially if you have a lot of dead fruit lying around. If a lot of people will actually, a lot of wildlife will feed on those, which is good. Mummy berry is a fungal disease. If your berries tend to shrivel up, that could be an issue as well. Tends to happen in really wet years. Anybody here have dealt with mummy berry before, I'll show you some pictures of it. But right now, I would say what is most problematic are birds and spotted wing. That's mummy berry. Do deer ever bother people with berries? Yes. What's your name, John? Yeah, they'll eat the apple trees instead. Dial soap is what a lot of orchardists have used. What's the question? Deer, how to prevent deer browse. That's a big problem. Netting, you could use that cheap bird netting year-round on it. In the winter time, it would be no problem. That real broad stuff, that would protect it. And that would keep them warm? Yeah, it would tend to. There'd be a little bit that would come through that they might chew on, but I don't think they're gonna wanna deal with that nylon netting in their mouth, so. You put dial on and it worked. Oh, it did not work for you. Orchardists used to swear by dial soap. Then some people said Irish spring worked better, but. Zest, yeah. Yeah. I haven't tried them, so I don't know. Have you tried them on shrubbery or on blueberries? On blueberries, so there's a good idea. Where do you get them? Okay, yeah, I know a lot of people, that's where a lot of people get them, yeah. That's an option. Physical deterrents are probably the best, you know, where they physically can't chew on it. That's why the netting or the row cover, if you have row cover that you would have. What's that? Yeah. Yeah, ideally if you can just keep the whole garden area protected. But they are a major issue, yeah. And they will browse on blueberries, they love blueberry plants. That's for birds, primarily, yeah. It is for a little bit, but not nearly as effective as netting. Yes. Hushed in the netting. Cool, that's a great, great idea. So there's a great, see, you learn all kinds of stuff, though. That's why I want everybody to share their ideas, because that's right on the ground, because physically they'll deter. What we do at our farm for, because we have a lot of deer problem in vegetables and strawberries, we use a portable electric fence. And it can just be one strand, but we bait it with a little bit of aluminum screen and some peanut butter on it. And once it gets shocked, they usually stay away. So that's another deterrent that we use that works. But in the wintertime, that's not gonna work so well. The wintertime, it's not gonna work because it's probably gonna be covered with snow, the netting on the ground. That's why, ideally, if you could either fence the area around it or net them. The nice thing about that open bird netting, it's not gonna catch too much snow where it's gonna break a lot of your canes. That's the one problem. If you have something that's solid over it, the snow will just sit there and kind of not fall down through it. So, okay, let's keep going here. Okay, so let's go back. Let's continue on blue maize before we get into these other small fruits. So, the biggest problem you're gonna have probably is, eventually, is gonna be spotted wings. You need to plan for that. And I would suggest of thinking about how to build a structure for them to be able to do it. That's probably the easiest way to do it. You can net the whole plant, but the nice thing of any kind of hoops like those pictures that I showed you is that it really would help, so. So, anyways, any more blueberry questions before we start going on to some of the other small fruits? Yes? If you don't have a correct pH, there's some fairly well-established blueberries. Would you advocate moving them and doing soil prep or is there a way? No, you can lower it. So, the sulfur will lower it. Now, another thing I didn't mention, if you wanna lower that pH quickly is you can use an azalea-type fertilizer. That will lower the pH quite quickly. Yeah, that's what you want. And azalea, wrote it down in your fertilizer, will lower the pH quite quickly. You don't wanna continue to do that. Once you get it down, then go to the sulfur. Yeah. Yeah, pine needles will help. Yeah, through branches under. Yeah. But, yes. But they're not, they don't lower it. Like, a lot of times people say, I got them, my blueberries aren't doing well and they grow right in the pines. So, if you, Vermont has very diverse soils. We have a lot of acidic soils over in this part of the state where I am, over in the Champlain Valley we have very high pH soils. The islands tends to have high pH soils. So, it really varies where you are. And just having pine needles doesn't mean it's gonna be low pH soils, so. Yeah. Coffee? It won't necessarily lower the pH that much, but it doesn't hurt, it's good fertilizer. All right. Yeah. Spring or fall? Blueberries, I would tend to say springtime, but I've done them in the fall as well for brambles or blueberries. Brambles, I would tend to buy new plants because you're gonna probably have fairly diseased plantlets. Blueberries, if you wanna take somebody's, I know a lot of people move super mature plants. You can get in there with a backhoe and move them and plant them. It works. It takes a year for them to get back on course, but if, I know people who've moved blueberry plants from one house to another because they love their blueberry plants so much. Yeah. Anybody, any other questions? Blueberries? Okay. So, let's get onto some of the other, what other small fruits do people grow? Yup. Mm-hmm. Yup. Yes? Gooseberries. Gooseberries are great. Red currant? Yup. They know, they're not as susceptible to pHs as the blueberries. They like a lower pH, but they don't have to be nearly as low. All right. So, I don't have a whole lot of information. I have a little bit. Grapes, anybody here grow grapes? What do you grow? Concord. Concord. It's okay for jellies and stuff. Do you, good, good. What do you grow? The same, Concord varieties. Okay. Nice thing about Concord varieties are very hardy. There's some of the wine grapes. The, people are trying to grow grapes for winemaking, and you're used to the names like Cabernet, Sauvignon, whatnot. Those are all vinifera type grapes. Those aren't usually hardy enough around here. You want to look at the American type grapes or the French hybrid grapes. Those, if you are into winemaking or if you want to do that variety-wise. But for table-eating, there's a lot of good table grapes out there. Swanson's Reds are really nice. Adelweiss is a nice variety that are very good table grapes. They're seeded. They're not seedless, but like Concord, they do well around here, so. They're very easy to grow. Grapes are great. And Spotted Wing does not seem to be as a major issue with grapes as they are with some of the other small fruits. All right, so. Yeah, so if you want to go grapes, it's a really productive, and it's a nice ornamental plant around the house. You ideally need to trellis it. You can trellis it overhead. A lot of people use them over patios. That's a nice way to grow grapes. If you're thinking about trying to get shade for your patio. Simple two-wire trellis like this works very well for growing grapes. But I think grapes are very undergrown small fruit that are actually pretty easy to grow. And you get a lot of fruit, a lot of production in a small space, and they're great for making jams and jellies and for fresh eating. So think about it if you want to diverse a little bit. So there's grapes along a nice, a nice thing about grapes, you can grow them up. They're fairly decorative, and you can use them as a wind block, all kinds of things. All right. Another way of growing grapes. You can plant them and use them in creative ways. All right, okay. This is one of my favorites. It's probably the most hardiest small fruit out there. You will get a crop every year, and they're delicious to eat. As long as you can get in there, protect yourself with gloves or some kind of combative things. Cause they have, as you can see up in that picture, very, very sharp thorns, okay? Gooseberries used to be regulated because they thought it was like the only carry of white pine blister rust, but that no longer is the issue. You can import them into the state and they're a great dessert fruit. So if anybody here grow gooseberries. One person, two people, three people. You guys grow the greens or the reds? Green. Green. I recommend the reds, they're really, they're really, they're a little bit sweeter, a little bit more dessert-y, they're great. You know, the nice thing is you get pretty big fruits. They're quite productive and it doesn't matter how cold it gets in the winter, you're gonna get a crop every year. Are they a tree or a bush? No, they're a bush, so they don't get huge, but they're a nice, easy plant to grow. I don't know, I haven't talked to too many people that have grown them that have had issues with them. They're a pretty tough, the thing about the softer the fruit, the more attractive it is, it's gonna be a spotted wing. So it's a little harder for them to get through that skin on a gooseberry. The more sun, the better, but we got them in shade and they produce pretty well. We got them in our front yard and yeah, it's just some nice fruit. Great for making gooseberry pie or jams, jellies, and eating fresh. People are amazed at how good they are to eat fresh. No, they're just like tough as nails. I mean, if you want, if you feel like you can't grow anything, put gooseberries in. All right, these are some of the varieties I suggest. And the Norris Farms is a great source of the Hinomaki Red is a delicious variety. You probably, if you have Invicta is one of the green ones, Tixia. Incredibly hardy, easy to grow. And you can see this growth habit. It's kind of like a blueberry, but a little bit more open and it's not as high. And they'll go down to 40, 50 degrees below zero and you'll still get a crop. Very hardy. But like I say, they're full of thorns and they're fairly attractive foliage. So if you're looking for a plant that looks good in the yard or along the house, they can be used very well that way. And the nice thing is they don't get so big. A lot of times people are looking for fruiting plants to use the long pathways, walkways, gooseberries would be a good way. What was the place you said to get it? Norris Farms, I got the address at the end so you can copy it down, N-O-U-R-S-E. So currents are also rivies, extremely hardy. And there's both red currents and black currents. Red currents are used a lot for cooking with sauces and whatnot. A lot of chefs really like using red currents. Anybody here grow currents? Okay, what did you put in? Reds, okay. Black, I had black. Black, okay, black are much bigger and bushier tend to be and they're probably the highest in vitamin C. Very popular fruit in Europe, probably one of the top fruits in Europe. Currents and gooseberries are fruiting earlier. So you're talking July. Most of your currents and gooseberries are gonna be fruiting about the time early to mid-blueberries are. So it's not as big an issue. I'm not sure, they do get into elderberries bad. And the reason that being is most of that elderberry fruit tends to ripen later, like you're in September. But elderberries are great, small fruit, nice kind of a pretty showy plant, but it will hit that pretty bad. Do you have a current question? Yes. Are there varieties that are resistant to the white pine? White pine blister rust. Not, there may be. I haven't done a lot with currents lately, but a lot of the black currents are. Some of those, yeah, yeah. But the big concern is whether they're a carrier. They don't necessarily get hurt by the rust so much. The big concern was that they were the carrier and the white pine would get it and they would destroy the white pine. But they've discovered there's all kinds of other alternate hosts besides ribies. That's why they stop prohibiting them being. If even if you wanted to encourage some wild growth back in the woods and meadows and things that we have, what would you recommend if you wanted to just like sort of spike the neighborhood with some wild growth that might be fun for foraging? Is it even viable to do that or would you not want to do that? I mean, I would, currents and gooseberries might do low if they need some sun. Probably raspberries do the best at trying. As long as there's some sun, you know, you'll see pockets of blackberries often in the woods. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Blackberries is probably the best. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, blackberries are probably do best in terms of that situation. Yes, they would tend to probably. Yeah, they're late fruiting. But like I say, it doesn't, it's not like you can't eat them. If you don't mind eating, you know, it's like I eat them exactly. You don't even know most of the time. What you start to notice is you, like with a raspberry or blackberry, you'll see sunken droplets, you know, the little, you know, how they're made up of multiple fruits. You'll see a couple sunken ones, which means those have been hit. So there's likely larvae in there, but as you're eating so fast, you probably don't notice. Little protein, yes. They tend to get, Spotted Wing is all. They're a great plant, but, oh right. Yeah, well I didn't need about, a friend of mine grows quite a bit of elderberries for elderberry syrups that he makes. And he just discovered last year, like ooh, Spotted Wing really likes elderberries. So we're just discovering on all these really, what other, okay, black currants. There's a lot of varieties out there now, incredibly productive, you would don't want to eat them raw usually. Most people tend to make sauces with them, or a lot of people will mix them and make juices out of it. Black currant juice is really popular, as long as you get enough sugar in it. It's probably the highest vitamin C fruit out there. Antioxidants are incredibly healthy. Europeans just eat a lot of black currants. Do you not want to eat them raw? No you can, they're just a lot of tannins. Yeah, it's like, your mouth puckers up, and it's like ooh. Okay, elderberry. The nice thing about elderberry, if you're looking for a fruiting plant that's a bit bigger, you want to use it like shade between neighbors or something. Elderberry would be a good choice. That's its growth habit. And you get nice big fruiting racemes, which you can cut the whole thing down. And then, have you been harvesting your elderberries? No, okay. Yeah, now I'm making my own. Oh good, yeah, it's unbelievable. They're like black currants, they're phenomenal. Yeah, they're way up there in terms of, in fact, my friend who does the black currants, he does an elderberry ginger syrup. And that's, whenever I have a cold coming on, that's what I take, so. Elder, oh really? Oh interesting, interesting. Yeah, they do. They grow like weeds. So, and you can see that growth habit, it's rather kind of stalky, weedy. It's not like a formed tree, it's a shrub. So, I'm not sure if I got much more, little bit. There's one flowering, you can see there. It's a nice plant. And that's what the ripe elderberry looks like. And the way you would harvest, you tend to cut the whole cluster out. And then you can make syrups and whatnot, so. But an easy way to control the spot, nice thing about a plant like this, instead of maybe trying to net the whole thing, you can take the idea of a little piece of netting and you would just net the flower cluster and tie it around it. So you could use like old stocking hose would work because that's fine enough, or this insect netting. But stocking material would work fine, nylon stocking. So, but yeah, so you would just, you would net it, you would net the flower, you know, after it's set fruit, then you can just net that young fruit. And then that would be a good way to protect it against spotted wing. All right. Okay, plant sources. How we do it in timelines. Okay. This is who we like to use, I brought, I just have copies, one copy, which I'll pass around, I just want them back at the end. These are the two companies that we use. Norris Farms is a great company. They have the insect netting in small quantities for gardeners. This is a blueberry company I would highly suggest out of Michigan, it's fabulous. Very great pricing. There's a number of them if you want a mail order stuff. If you want to go to garden centers, I mean there's Elmore Roots up here in Wolcott. We sell plants, blueberry plants and raspberry plants. Farm Between is my friend who's a small fruit specialist and they have a nice nursery now in Jeffersonville, Vermont. They've got all kinds of things. But mail ordering, it works great. Especially for strawberries, you can get all those crowns in Norris Farms. So if you just go online, the catalogs are online. So you can shop right online. But the Grand Champ is another nice one. So I would suggest definitely for strawberries a great way to go. Nice thing about Norris is they carry the currants, gooseberries, blueberries. They do it all. They're a really great operation. If you ever get, if you want to go pick your plants up, they're just down in the Connecticut River Valley, Massachusetts. So they're not too far away. And they've been doing it for 75 years. What do you say has the netting? Norris Farms has it in small quantities. And then I've got a couple other sources here. PropTech netting sources. If you go on to that website, Dubois Innovations, you can buy it from them. I don't know if they have smaller quantities. They tend to have like 300 foot long rolls of it. But if you get together with four or five gardeners, you can cut it up. Brookdale Fruit Farm is another one that's carrying the netting. But I was glad to see that Norris was offering it in 50 foot lengths. So, and you can get it like 13 feet wide or six feet wide. So, those are all potential sources. And I think that's it. Let me see if there's anything else. I think that's the last slide. Yeah. So any other questions, people think, comments? Yeah. The other fine, together. Except pH. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's a little bit. That's another small fruit, which I didn't mention. It's a great one. Hardy kiwis are terrific. They're incredibly hardy here. They take quite a while to establish to get the fruiting stage. You may be, yes, very heavy duty, ideally too. And you need a pretty heavy duty trellis, because they are vigorous. Hardy kiwi. Take it down. Destroy the pergola. Yeah. Yeah. You could try thinning it out. The problem is, is it's, you know, it's about 12 and high. Yes. Yeah. So is it a flat trellis? Yeah. The only way it would take it down is that if you got snow on top of it, that held it. So the heaviness won't hurt. I don't think so. You could, if it looked so dense, but they're gonna shade each other out, they're not gonna, you know, if it's strong enough to hold it now, I can't believe it's gonna grow that much where it's gonna, as long as the wood is structurally sound. But yeah, you need a very tough trellis to grow them. Like four by fours. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Any other questions? Oh, yeah, they're really tasty. And they're not like the kiwis you buy in the store. You don't have to peel them. And you're just starting to fruit. Yeah. Yeah, because they're about that. That's neat, that's neat. Yeah, so, yeah. Yeah, so it's another good one to try. I should have, I got to put that one on the list, but hardy kiwis, yes. Yes, excellent source. Not that long. Three or four years, you'll get up to big, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, they just are very vigorous, gross. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, blackberries. I wouldn't, you would, what you can do with blackberries often is just kind of mow it so you can get into it. In other words, is it a big round patch now? Oh, long, big cane. So yeah, no, that's fine. What you could do, because they grow long and then down to the ground, is you could provide some trellising for that so they tend to stay up. Those long canes, so sometimes they'll get down and then they'll root along there and that's how they propagate. But they can also, like a lot of the fruit will be down there and then. They didn't produce any fruit. They didn't produce any fruit for. You might have trelline blackberries, which aren't very hardy. If they're not a wreck, they tend to do this. They'll grow vigorously, but you might get fruit. How long have they been there? You're not getting any fruit. Yeah, I don't think they're hardy. So the plant will grow, but they probably, most of the flower buds just die. Yeah. You're just starting with them? Yeah, I would tend to go with some of the, there's some hardy, a variety. There's some day-neutral one, I mean, fall-bearing types now, called Prime Arc and Prime Jan, Prime Jim. And then there's, oh, what's the blackberry variety that I want to, it's in Norse catalogs. I can't think of the name of it. But the thorn ones are very hardy. It's the thorn list that aren't that hardy, so that's what you want to stay away from. But you grow them similarly, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. If you do a June variety, like the matted row, what kind of annual maintenance are you looking at going forward once it's done? Okay, so yeah, we didn't talk too much because people didn't seem to be too interested. So Matt, the question was, what annual maintenance is there on matted rose strawberries? So once they've produced fruit, what we do, you narrow it down. You could actually take a rototiller or a hoe and narrow that big, wide matted row down to about this wide, okay? What you're trying to do is then have them set new runners for next year. So you don't want to leave a very wide strip because if you just let it keep going, it becomes a patch and they choke themselves out. So that's what I would do. What we do is we tend to narrow those rows down, then you put fertilizer right in the row, whether it be a compost or a granular fertilizer. And then you're trying to encourage new growth. The hardest thing about strawberries, keeping matted rows year to year is the weeds because you can't do anything about it otherwise. But you can do them on plastic and actually handset the runners. That's another way to do it. Some people have done that. Any other questions? Well, thank you all for coming out. Appreciate it. Thank you.