 So welcome to this week's Wednesday weekly webinar, and we hope you continue to join us. We have 10 in all. I'm your moderator, Julie Garden Robinson, and I'm a professor and food and nutrition specialist. I work for the NDSU Extension Service. And we're really happy to have the nice turnout we've had on these webinars. Just to remind you, we have several more coming up. Next week you'll hear from Esther McGinnis and she's an assistant professor and horticulturalist, and you can look at the other ones. I'll be helping with a couple down the road in April if you want to hear about food preservation. You'll be in the listening mode as you've detected. You can certainly type your questions at any time in the chat pod, but you've been seeing some back and forth remarks. And you can see the different parts of the screen and so on. So if you have questions, just go ahead and type them in and we'll be sure that you get answers. There will be a short survey at the end of the webinar that will be sent to you directly through an online system. So you'll get a quick little survey. It'll take you two minutes. We have some prizes for you for the lucky winners of drawings. And then there's also some questions to see how you liked it if you learned anything, that sort of thing. This was all part of the grant project. So if you've ever been part of the grant project, you know that we have to submit some results. So we really appreciate your help in getting feedback on these webinars. And I certainly appreciate all the people who are helping develop them and put them on. I just wanted to quickly show you the website. If you haven't had a chance to really go and dig into this website, we're building it more and more every day. So you might have gone in and registered on the top link. But if you go back to this site, and if you can't remember it, just remember NDSU Extension, Field of Fork. Click on Learn About North Dakota Specialty Crops. And you'll find all kinds of information about growing and using specialty crops. If you go farther down the links on the front page and you want to invent a product, we have all those sorts of background information to help you do so safely and also according to the North Dakota laws. Some brand new stuff that's going to come online real soon. I hope by early next week, we will have 10 new fact sheets. And since we're talking about berries today, this is going to be one of the first ones that goes live. Anything that you see on our website that you would find useful, for example, if you work at a farmer's market or if you just want to try some unique recipes, I had several community nutrition interns this fall. And they help test recipes and help gather some content for these 10 publications. And they're just front and back and they're real colorful. So come in soon. And then feel free to use them and do a lot of berries. They're not dietitian and we want you to eat lots of berries because they're very helpful. Well, I'd like to give you an introduction. I'm very happy that Kyla was able to present this for us. Kyla Slickle is a research specialist in horticulture at the Williston Research Extension Center. She's in charge of the horticulture research including small fruits, vegetables and flower demonstrations, irrigated as well as irrigated vegetable crops grown off station. She also does work on various other high value specialty crops. Kyla received her bachelor's degree in horticulture from NDSU in 2010. And she and her husband and their three-year-old son made the move across the state from Waperton to Williston in the spring of 2013 and they caught the tail end of the oil boom, she said. They made the move for employment opportunities but also to be closer to Kyla's family in the hometown of Minot. So welcome, Kyla. Thank you for being with us today and I'm going to turn the mic over to you. All right. Thank you, Julie. Can everybody hear me okay? Hopefully. Good deal. I'm seeing some smiley faces. Okay. That's good. Yes. Okay. Welcome to the March 16th edition of the Field to Fork webinar series. I'm presenting today in place of Kim Holloway. I believe her prerecorded video archive will be posted online on the Field to Fork website. I believe we're going to try and post my slides on the Williston Research Extension Center website and then we could post a link from the Field to Fork. I'll go over that a little bit later here. The reason I'm presenting for Kim, some of you might have met her, maybe not, but she is no longer at the Research Extension Center. She moved to North Carolina to be closer to her grandbabies. So we miss her already, but wish her well and whatever life adventures bring for her. Okay. I think I'm going to start off by giving a brief overview of the Williston Research Extension Center, the history and our mission statement. And then we'll talk about the different fruits that we grow here, which include raspberries, juneberries, honeyberries and grapes. So how does the food safety modernization act affect my operation? Well, farmers produce food and at any point in that production germs can be introduced that can harm the consumer. Steps should be taken to ensure traceability and the safety of each product allows each producer to take control of their product. So what are those steps? Well, every fruit in the ensuing slides follows the same basic rules. Keep everything clean, be aware of application in harvest states, and keep records of who, what, when, how, and where. Okay. Our farm, the Williston Experiment Station, as it was known back then, was established in 1907 on the grounds of what is now Williston State College and relocated to the present site in 1954. It is an 800-acre rain-fed farm located in northwest North Dakota, near the city of Williston. In 1989, the Williston Research Center was renamed, was renamed the Williston Research Center, and it was later amended to include Extension. In 2001, the additional 160 acres were purchased in the Nessan Valley, and an irrigated research and development project was established. WREC research studies are conducted on crop variety evaluation, herbicide performance, and other cultural management research, cropping systems, and soil and water conservation practices. The main dryland crops are spring wheat and durum. However, we do grow winter wheat, barley, oats, safflower, pea, lentil, chickpea, canola, flax, alfalfa, and other alternative crops grown as cash crops or for livestock feed. You'll see in the aerial photo that I've included here, I've outlined just exactly where we conduct our horticultural research on the dryland station, and that's in the red box. This is the view of the station looking south, and in the red box is our fence in horticultural gardens. The yellow box outlines where the original orchard was planted back in the 1950s when the station was relocated. This area now includes a second vineyard as well as some Juneberry shrubs, and the photos in the bottom were taken from Nessan Valley, which is located approximately 23 miles east of Williston on Highway 1804 near Lake Sakakawia. Our Farm Mission Statement. The Williston Research Extension Center conducts research to increase agricultural productivity in the semi-arid region for Northwestern North Dakota while achieving a necessary balance between profitability and conservation of natural resources. There I've placed our web URL in this slide. It's easiest if you just Google the Williston Research Extension Center. You should be able to find us that way, and there's lots more great photos to check out on our webpage, and more in-depth information on what we do besides berry growing here at the Williston Research Center. The research conducted here is intended to increase the producer's net profit, support crop diversification, and encourage more intensive cropping and irrigation development. Research on soil and crop management systems for sprinkler irrigated on alternative irrigated high value and value added crops. That's us in the horticulture. And on western mulching barley programs are conducted for the region. WRAC also conducts variety development research on safflower, winter wheat, and germ variety evaluations in cooperation with NDSU main station scientists. WRAC produces and supplies foundation seed to area farmers of new and old varieties adapted for the region. Okay, let's talk about fruit. So the first one I will highlight is raspberries. Our farm raspberry patch is located in several different areas of the garden, which is just south of Highway 2 West, and about half a mile west of the intersection of US Highway 85 South and Highway 2 West. Our garden is over 2.5 acres of vegetables, fruit, flower, herb, and landscape plants surrounded by fully mature shelter belts. I'll show a picture of that in the next slide. This used to be a farmstead with crops and continuous cultivation from the early 1900s until NDSU purchased the land in the 1950s. They set aside the area I showed earlier for the orchard and later set this portion aside for the gardens in the 1990s. The shelter belts were planted in the late 90s and the current fence was erected in 2013. To water our plants, we use a combination of Missouri river water, well water, and rural water. We wash produce with only rural water. The City of Williston releases a report on their monthly water tests twice a year. I have to note as well that we do not irrigate our raspberries. At one time they were most likely irrigated, probably the first few years after they were planted, but currently they only receive rainwater and whatever is available from the irrigation from nearby garden beds. Okay, this is an aerial view of our garden. It's facing north. At the top you can see US Highway 2, as well as the nice shelter belt that protects our garden. The very top arrow indicates the location where three of our raspberry varieties are grown. You can see the high tunnel to the left of the arrow. That was where the varieties Boine, Nova, and K81-6 are located. They were grown inside and outside the high tunnel as a comparative trial initiated in the early 2000s. However, we only grow them just outside the high tunnel now. Boine is the northernmost row. The middle is Nova and the row to the south of that is K81-6. I'll talk a little bit more about these varieties in a bit. The middle arrow is the location of the variety known as Revely, and that's just north of where the rhubarb trial was. And then the bottom arrow is indicating where the variety Latham was planted. So the varieties Latham and Heritage were originally included in this high tunnel research project, but it was indicated in the records that I could find that because Heritage produced a very late crop, it was replaced with K81-6. And I'm not sure why Latham was replaced with Nova. Maybe it grew too tall for where it was planted inside the high tunnel. Either way, it was clear that it was transplanted to the south of the garden. And that research was never fully fulfilled. She had some problems with the high tunnel. The covering didn't stay on the first few years of the research project. So that's basically why the raspberries were planted in Williston to begin with. Let's talk a little bit about those varieties here. Okay, we grow, they're all red-fruited varieties on this farm. And they're summer-bearing. And boine is an early-to-mid season grower. It's very vigorous. It has strong flavor, keeps well, travels well. And it's an old variety still available from nurseries. In our taste test, it seemed to be the favorite. And when Kim put this slideshow together, she indicated that boine was definitely her favorite as well. Reveille is the next one. It's an early season, large-fruited variety with vigorous upright canes, and the fruit can be somewhat soft. K81-6, I'm not sure if that one has been named now or if it's available. I've seen it in the nursery trade called K81-6. I believe it's out of Canada. It's prolific, late-season variety with intense flavor, large conic-shaped fruit with a large cavity. Nova is a mid-season, very pretty color, mild flavor, travels okay, also available from northern nurseries. And then Latham. Latham is a mid-season, very large fruit, tall upright growth, about four to five feet tall. Really nice burgundy fall color on the stems and leaves. So we did have a few issues with diseases and pests this year. We had some sort of stem canker outbreak on some of our rows. It was never officially identified, however, but to combat it, we cut the canes to the ground, disposed of the litter, applied a fungicide, and hope next year they'll recover. They looked good going into the fall. We have found no spotted wing drosophila in our berries at this point. Other fruit flies, yes, but no spotted wing drosophila yet, thank goodness. Birds don't bother the raspberries here. They seem to go after everything else first, which ripen of hope the same time as the raspberries, and then they go after our raspberries. So we don't generally net our raspberries at all. Okay, we use a mulch for weed prevention and water retention. Fertilizer happens about twice a month when we fertilize the entire garden. Fertilizer is typically whatever we have on hand. We've used granular as well as Miracle Grow. We generally use no pesticides except for the fungicides. These applications happen after harvest. Raspberries are delicate more so than the other fruit we grow here. We harvest by hand into sanitized small picking lugs or buckets, sometimes with a clean towel on the bottom to cushion them. If we wash the raspberries, it's only just before putting them on the table. Basically that process is dipping and swishing in cool water, sometimes a weak vinegar solution, and then dipping in water again. Those slotted picking containers really are wonderful from going from field to table. This means that good practices are essential in the field, checking for animal intrusion into the garden, clean hands of all the harvesters, and clean bins, equipment, and your cooler. The next berry we're going to talk about is Juneberry. Amelanchir elnifolia. Juneberries are native to North America, up in Canada they're referred to as Saskatoon berries. This trial began in 2012 with 30-plus selections in 10 rows, so about 300 plants, 258 of which survived today. This trial was initiated under the direction of Dr. Harleen Hatterman-Valenti and Dr. Jim Walla, retired plant pathologist who actually went across the state and selected the germ plasm for this trial. There are a few Juneberry cultivars available in the nursery trade, seven of which were also included in this trial for comparison purposes. Those varieties were CC, Buffalo, Honeywood, Kellner, Martin, Park Hill, and Regent. If you are familiar with Juneberry, also known as the Saskatoon berry, as our Canadian friends call it, maybe you've heard of some of these cultivars. Juneberries mature within three to seven years, so are they approaching their most productive years? Last year was definitely the highest yields that we've had out of this trial so far, and with that we harvested 110 pounds off of these highly attractive shrubs even after a late freeze on May 17th. Didn't do too much damage to the buds apparently. The bird predation is high, but we kind of created our own little netting system that worked well this year. Every once in a while the robins will still get into it. They seem to be smarter than the other birds. Since it's a fairly firm-skinned fruit, it's easy to wash, transports well and peep. Getting to the cooler quickly is the most important flavor saver. You could compare Juneberries to a blueberry, although they actually are higher in antioxidants than a blueberry, and they're native here, so that's great for our native pollinators. Disease, however, is probably the biggest problem with Juneberries in general. We'll talk a little bit more in detail of a few of the diseases we see in Williston. Fungicides were applied early this year before bud break, after bud break, when they set fruit, and once after that, so between April to May, and that seemed to prevent some of the problems from the previous years. Kim had decided she was going to be proactive this year and get out there with an organic fungicide that she was using. Cleanup of the fallen leaves adds to the disease preventability, regular fertilization, about three times in the growing season, plus irrigation, which we irrigate ours three times a week, raise the cost to this fruit, but we think it's well worth any extra effort. Our irrigation system consists of drip tape. You can't really see it in the photo, but it's actually at the base of the plants, and we actually taper off the watering after harvest. So by about September 15th, we stopped watering them completely, and we used a woven fabric weed barrier to suppress the weeds, and you can kind of see that in the photo there. Okay, let's discuss some of those diseases. So the first one I want to mention is called cedar apple rust. It's caused by the fungus Gymnosporangium juniper virginianiae. That's a mouthful. This type of rust fungus requires two different hosts to complete their life cycle. The two families involved are the Cooperacea family and the Rosacea family. So unfortunately for us here in Williston, a juniper host plant for this disease is planted about 50 feet away in the shelter belts, and junverias are part of the Rosacea family. If you can see that green arrow in the photo to the right, that is what cedar apple rust looks like on the fruit. And the orange spots with red borders are the symptoms on the foliar, the leaves. And then the spores are generated on the undersides of the leaf, and that's what's characteristic of cedar apple rust. It definitely takes away from the quality of the fruit. So if you don't get out there and spray right away, it can affect your yields. Okay, so that picture there is what the gelatinous spores, rust spore producing structures look like on a juniper. So juniper is the host plant. It looks sort of like an alien life form to me. It's pretty ugly looking out there. The diagram there describes the life cycle. Pruning out the gulls on the juniper before they produce these spore horns can help manage this disease. For the Rosacea family, fungicides are sprayed typically when the first flower buds emerge and continue until spring, hence all of the applications that Kim had applied. It's easier to cut this out of the junberries if you're doing a little pruning unless it's a very heavily infected shrub. However, it's pretty hard to prune it out of the junberries, and that's why they recommend some sprays for that. Okay, the next disease is called mummy berry. This picture depicts mummy berry on a blueberry. I couldn't really find anything on junberry. The fungus is monolinia vasinii, and you can see the disease cycle here. It's very important in your IPM strategy to clean up those mummified berries. In the diagram, the spores of the fungus are released from the mummified berries in the spring and infect the emerging leaves, flowers, and fruit. Keeping junberries clear of leaf and berry debris in the fall is very important management tactic to control this disease. I haven't seen a lot of this disease here, but we do have it, and just keeping your gardens clear is just really important. It's a really easy way to take care of this disease and not necessarily have to spray anything, but just good management practices are very important. You can see the disease cycle there. Okay, so some other diseases we could spend all day talking about diseases on junberries, but I'll just note a few of the other ones that I have seen. Entomosporium, leaf, and berry blight. I've definitely seen that one here. Fire blight, which I've also seen here, and unfortunately that same shelter belt mentioned previously has catoniaster, which is very susceptible to fire blight. I've seen a lot more catoniaster planted in western North Dakota than in the eastern, and I think it's due to the arid conditions here, but they do get fire blight, and it is very unfortunate. Powdery mildew, which we see sometimes, but again, because we don't have the human climate, we generally don't see it. It is a problem when it becomes more humid out, but because we are semi-arid, it's not too much of a problem, and we don't overhead water, and that's also very important for disease management. Brown fruit rot and cytospora canker, which I have not seen in our junberries. Also, I'd like to note Kim was the other research specialist in horticulture here in Williston, and her priorities were the fruits, and so that wasn't part of my job description. Although I helped with harvesting and taking care of some of those things, I didn't delve directly into the berries, so bear with me here. She dealt with a lot more of these pests and issues than I did. The pests are numerous, but the biggest one for us has been the birds. I will note the woolly elm aphid that can be a problem, flower, thrips, mites, Saskatoon, soft flies, bud moths, pear slugs, soft flies, fruit flies and birds. I see there's a question here, can you eat the fruit if the plant has powdery mildew? I think you can, but I would wash it off, see if you can wash it off as best you can. I would not, however, eat the ones that have the entomosporium berry blight. When you're picking, you'll find that, and I just wouldn't eat it if I were you, but the powdery mildew, I think you can probably wash that off as best you can. Since junberries are a firm fruit, they don't squish like a raspberry does. So again, the biggest pest for us has been the birds. They just seem to know exactly when our junberries are ripening, and it seems like when we work as we're covering the junberries, it sounds like they're birds listening to them cry. Sometimes it sounds like they're plotting against us, especially those robins. Okay, let's move on to the honeyberries. This is kind of an interesting one. For some of you, maybe you haven't heard of them before. They're also called hascaps, and I'm going to start off by saying that after doing a little digging in our files here, I couldn't seem to find much information about ours specifically. They were planted here sometime in 2011, which was before I started, and the only thing I could find in the order form stated that the varieties were borealis and berry blue. Borealis is a Russian hascap, and berry blue is a Canadian variety, and I do believe that someone actually drove up to Canada and picked up that order. It was a multi-location order, so it sounded like it was quite the production. They brought all these plants in from Canada and dropped them off across the state. At any rate, I'd like to direct your attention to the URL that I've included there is for the Carrington Research Extension Center. Again, you can go out and Google Carrington Research Extension Center, NDSU, and you should be able to find the link to their website. The Northern Hardy Fruit Evaluation Project is under the directorship of Kathy Wieterholt. I'd like to direct your attention to her research at the Carrington Research Center because she grows more varieties of honeyberry, and she also has information on where you can order this plant from. I know locally some local nurseries have tried to get this in, and I believe they have. So a link to her research is found there at the bottom of the page. She's really done a lot more research on them, but what I can tell you about them is that they are a wonderful alternative fruit. It's relatively new, having been introduced in the United States in the 1990s. There are Japanese, Russian, and Canadian cultivars, and depending on where they originated, that's where the terms come into play. So the term Hascap in general refers to the Japanese varieties. However, in the U.S., we seem to use the terms interchangeably even though most of the cultivars that are in the U.S. are probably the Russian or the Canadians, so they're probably actually honeyberries. They belong to the honeysuckle family, hence the name honeyberry, and it's the lanicera genus, and cerulia is the species. I have it listed there on the slide. It is a strange-looking little fruit, but it's loaded with antioxidants and nutrients. We've never actually harvested ours because the birds always seem to be to them. Perhaps a plan to net them in early May should be in place. I ate one one time when it was the bluish color, but it really wasn't ripe. I think once they start to turn blue, you should give them about two to three weeks before harvesting, and that can be difficult if you don't cover them. Both birds are really, really voracious. Again, there's that website at the bottom of the page and a little close-up picture of what the flowers look like and what the fruits look like. So they're the first to flower, and so this is really helpful for early foraging pollinators. I've seen them flowering in March, which is scary, but it doesn't seem to hurt them. I see another question coming in. Oh, are the berries GMO? No, they're not GMO. Do they sucker like a honeysuckle? No, they do not. They're actually in the shrub form. I have not seen them. They will get to be about four to five feet, though. You will want to space your rows four to five feet between your plants, and you'll want to space them in row, depending on what you have for equipment. We don't have very many rows of them, so we don't have to worry about that, but they start producing fruit one to two years after planting, and they do require a pollinator, so one pollinator plant for every eight producing plants. Kathy has a list of that on her website, too, which ones are the pollinators, and I believe in our order the berry blue was the pollinator that was chosen. Now, again, because this program was started in place in the 90s, I was not out here, so our predecessor, when these were planted, I just don't have a lot of record of which varieties they are, so eventually in the future I'd like to actually get known cultivars and start an actual trial on these. I think that was something that Kim had in mind of something that she wanted to do, but it just hasn't panned out yet, so hopefully in the future we can do that. So right now we know for sure at least they're the Russian half cap, but we do hope to someday grow the Canadian and the U.S. ones, and hopefully some of the Japanese varieties as well. Okay, the last fruit for today is the grapes. We grow 21 different varieties here in Williston, and I guess here we categorize them into two different groups, which are the red colored and the white colored, but I guess you could say that there's three different categories of grapes. You have your table grapes, your juice and jam, and then your wine grapes. So we grow ours for wine purposes, although we don't make any wine here at the research center. I don't know how to make wine, so that's not something I've really ever gotten into. Maybe someday at home I could do it, but here on the center we don't. We are a part of the Northern Grape Project. I think that concluded this last group of grapes. We did this last year, but the results are available online if you search for the Northern Grape Project. This was another research project in conjunction with Dr. Harleen Haderman-Valenti. We have over 350 plants with all different colors and flavors. The spacing for grapes is 8 feet between rows, or more depending on your equipment, and about 8 feet apart in rows. So from plant to plant you should have about 8 feet. They need about 30 inches of rain per year, and Williston gets about 12 inches on average. So we do irrigate our grapes on a weekly schedule, which is about three times a week during the growing season. And we let our emitters run for about 45 minutes to an hour. They are vigorous growers. I should also mention with the honeyberry. We don't irrigate those. That's another thing that I'd like to implement into some sort of research design that we would irrigate them, but I think they would do... I think we would see their full potential if they got a little bit more attention from us. So maybe in the future we can do that. But at this point we don't. If you grow grapes once, you'll always want them around. There is magic about the grapes that defies explanation. This was Kim's philosophy. She sure enjoyed working with the grapes. In the photo there was one of our seasonal employees, Mariah. She did such a great job helping us harvest. So cleanliness in the vineyard is essential all year round, keeping the weeds down, keeping the grass cut, scouting for diseases, washing those pruners between the training and pruning of your vines, keeping literal means less chance of disease, and catching pests early on before infestation. So setting a threshold for insects is important in your IPM program. Each vineyard is going to be a little different in each pest as well. For example, Kim found some tomato hornworms in the grapes, and she's probably only found about a handful of them in the past three years. But if you know anything about hornworms, they can be voracious eaters, but not necessarily of the grapes. If you find one of your grapes you don't need to spray the whole vineyard, you can probably just pick it off and feed it to the birds. However, if you find a large number of Asian lady beetles, as we typically do, you might have to do something about it. So Asian lady beetles aren't necessarily harmful to grapes. They are a beneficial insect. However, they exude an aroma when crushed that can paint your juice when crushed and that can, when you crush your grape clusters, it can actually tank the juice. So it is a problem, but it's all about managing a balance. And so let's talk about a few important diseases on the next slide. So here we have the list of diseases and pests, some of which I've seen, and I'll highlight those briefly. Powdery mildew on grape is caused by the fungus eunsinulanecator. It's kind of a mouthful. It can be a devastating if not controlled. It will affect all green parts of the grapevine. And there are a few ways this disease overwinters. It can overwinter in the dormant buds as well as clysothesia, both of which can infect other plants and reinfect new growth on the same plant. Fomopsis. I have not seen fomopsis and downy mildew or crown gall, although I know it can be a problem in the state. And the only time I've ever seen the botrytis, bunchrot, is when we have our grapes in the cooler because that can be a cooler issue on the actual grape clusters. So I think we might need to adjust our cooler temperature maybe. We'll talk about black rod on the next slide here, but I just wanted to go over the pests really quickly. Pests, we really haven't had major infestations in our grapes. The birds really are our biggest problems. And the main issue is just the reduced yields. So because our vineyard isn't that large, we can't just leave them unattended. So we do net our grapes using the same nets as our Juneberries. I list the Asian lady beetle there. Even though it's not a pest again, a threshold does need to be established for controlling their numbers. I think last year when I helped harvest them, when you're harvesting the clusters, especially because you do it early in the morning, the Asian lady beetles seem to cluster together within that grape cluster. It's like they're all bunched together to stay warm. They're not really moving. And then you harvest that cluster and bring it inside. And then in the warmth of the inside, they start moving around. And I started a jar last year with Asian lady beetles in it, and it got pretty full very quickly. It was kind of gross, but they can be a problem. The spotted winged Rastafla fruit fly, again, it's definitely a concern for us. I know Cassie found it in Carrington, and we've set out a number of traps and have not gotten any confirmed identification out here in Williston, so fingers crossed that we don't, as that would affect many of our fruits here, and there's really no way of managing that pest organically. I think there's a publication out there as well on spotted winged Rastafla that Dr. Esther McGinnis put together. So black rot, it's one of the diseases that produces a mummified fruit, again. It's not the same as mummy berry. It's caused by the fungus Guidnardia bidwellii. I have seen this in our grapes, and again, keeping the vineyard clear of the debris is important to manage this disease. These mummified berries, however, usually persist on the vine, and they produce what's called picnadia on the surface, which can reinfect as a secondary inoculum. So getting those clusters off your vine is important to help manage the spread of this disease. Sanitation is important, especially if you're watering. If you're overhead watering or the emitters are dripping onto that cluster with this black rot, you could be spreading that disease very quickly. And you can see that that's how it overwinters and so the spores can reinfect new tissues throughout the growing season and in the spring when the spores emerge. Okay, so we mentioned harvesting a little bit. The best time to harvest your grapes is in the early morning. Cooler temperatures is preferable. So we, you know, roll by roll we harvest stars and then we rush them to the cooler and we don't wash them after harvesting. We really just get them out of the heat and into the cooler right away. The closer they are located to where they'll be stored and processed, the better the quality. Cooler temperature is preferably below 40 degrees Fahrenheit and the bins we use have a small holes in them, bottoms and sides for airflow. And I think you could see that in the picture of our heart. Let me just go back. Yep, you could see our bins there, blue and yellow and they have little holes in them and that's good for the airflow. Yeah, so keeping the bins clean with each use is part of our cleanliness plan. Ideally in the northern varieties we want to have about 10 pounds per plant. With winter kill this year, we only got about one pound per plant. The yields were very low this year. Let's see, there's a question. Are egg shells, paper egg curtains and coffee good for berries? I wouldn't see why not. You'd probably want to keep those items incorporated fairly well into the soil so that they're not a source for rodents or any kind of vermin that might try to eat on them because rodents can have an effect on these types of woody shrub-like fruits because they'll chew on the stems. I would say just as long as it's well-composted or well-incorporated, that would be okay. We fertilizers with just, like I said, miracle-grow fertilizer or usually it's whatever we have on hand at the station here so whatever the agronomy people have, we usually use that for our fertilizer. I guess somebody might ask the question should I harvest my grapes? When are they ready for harvest? Well, it kind of depends on what variety and the color that you have and I'm just going to state the basic guidelines here but it's dependent on the sugar, the pH and the total acids. These three elements need to coincide for the grapes to be made into one but the weather also plays a role as well. So we usually harvest ours in late September but we test our grapes typically two weeks after Verizon. Verizon is the term used to describe when the grapes start to turn color and so I'm just going to give you some channelized numbers. They are more specific for each variety and really when it comes to growing grapes, experience is the best teacher for some of this and your location has a lot to do with it as well but typically speaking the white lines, the bricks reading, which is actually just the sugars, we take grapes from the cluster, select it at random, put them together, mash them up and then use an eyedropper onto this device which reads what's called bricks and that should be right about 20 plus. The sugars aren't the most important factor because you can always add sugar to your grapes to make them a little bit sweeter when you're making your wine. The pH, however, is the tricky one and we want that to be about 3.0 and it's a little bit difficult to alter the pH when you're trying to make. So it's best to let them turn naturally if you can and then the titratable acid PA should be less than one and for the reds, the ideal bricks reading should be about 22 plus the pH should be about 3.4 and the titratable acid should be less than one again. Again, these numbers are general. You might have to do a little homework on which variety you have or which variety you want to grow and then the recommendation for harvest. It always has to do with the weather too. We started harvesting ours on September 9th this year. Last year we harvested October 4th so it just really depends on those growing degree days. The trading and the trellising have left that pretty open. There's so many different options out there and it's hard to give recommendations especially when we only have one setup. They're just, I don't even know what it would be called but they're just tied up onto one trellis that they're and then the vines are grown in two different directions but we really could spend all day talking about it or doing some research on it but I think it's important for a person to go out there and do a little bit of reading on the different types of trellising and training and find out which one will work best for their own individual operation and how you're going to be harvesting them, what types of equipment you'll have going through the rows that can affect how you train them and I guess there's been some research done on certain varieties that like to be trellised a certain way so those are always things that are good to consider when you're looking into the grapes. NDSU is doing some breeding on the grapes and we do hope to have some of those selections or selected ones that they're working on. Hopefully we can have those planted out here in Williston in the near future. That was something that Kim and I had discussed and wanted to go forward with so hopefully we can still do that in the near future. Okay, so other things to consider. You can't always control the unwanted critters or cats, rabbits, et cetera that come into your garden but you can control or clean up what they've left behind. Things you can control. Who's picking your crops? Are they healthy? Did you net your crop on time? And carry only as much as you can handle. Don't overdo it on yourself. There's a picture of our seasonal help, Emily, holding all those baskets on her shoulder. She's probably about five foot tall and I don't even know if she weighed 100 pounds in there. She was hauling those lugs in so don't overdo it. Don't hurt yourself. Okay, so Kim had broken the Food Safety Modernization Act for record keeping into the following categories. I'll go over those briefly here but she had it as before the field, in the field, and after the field. So we'll discuss those in the next coming slides and then finish up here. So before the field, harvesting. Let's see here. You've got your audit logs and standard operating procedure worksheets. If you deviate from your plan, what's the corrective action that needs to take place? Do you have information on your products? Are you making that available to your consumers? And steps should be taken when something happens. You should have all of this stuff lined up before you get out to your field. If you have a plan, make sure that you follow it. And if you deviate from it, then what are you going to do? What's your corrective action? And I know that there was a webinar prior to this on the Food Safety Modernization Act with Keith Knudson. So I'm assuming that he had gone over most of this information as well. The next slide, once you're in the field, how do you keep the pests out? Do you have pests being like wildlife or issues like that? How do you keep them out of your fields? We erected a fence. Apparently, there was a moose that liked to come into our garden in the past and always deer. But ours is six feet high and then we have two more strands of the barbed wire above it, making it eight. Seems a little excessive, but it does keep those types of wildlife out. Are you going to use traps? Traps for squirrels or raccoons, foxes, things like that. How about some repellents? We've tried a few. Voles and mice don't really like that fresh cab. And for the berries, we've used what's called bird guard. It's an electronic sound system that projects distress sounds of other birds. It sounds quite creepy when you're out there, but when you realize that it's just a recording, it does scare away some of the birds. It's a predator prey kind of thing. The birds hear a distress call of their species. They're more likely to stay away thinking that there's a predator bird in the area. That's generally the consensus with those bird guards. And that does work well to keep the birds away from the juneberries and grapes, except for those robins. They always come back, it seems like. Netting is mostly against the birds, which of course doesn't prohibit their feces from falling on the fruit, so you always have to keep an eye out for that. Inspection of the field before harvest and removal of the sound contaminants. I think Kim mentions in her webinar, the archived recording that she would go out and check for moose droppings or anything that might have been left behind, just as a general precaution every day. Tools and vehicle inspections. We try to keep them clean. A leak-free engine is good, as are sharp, appropriate tools. And then who harvests? Are they healthy? It's not. Write it down and don't let them harvest that a day. Some more information on in the field. Are you harvesting by hand or machine? It's easy to see the cleanliness of hand tools or your own hands, but sometimes machines can harbor pathogens as well. And then the availability of the hand-washing stations. We keep the doors to our building unlocked and the restroom is located close enough to the garden that we don't need to have an in-field wash station. Miner applications. So is your manure well composted? Where did you get it from? What types of things were thrown in there? I know there's always that question of composted grass and having the herbicide carryover or hay or something, what the horse is eating, it passes through and then it ends up in the compost. That's always an issue every year. So make sure it's well composted and have some documentation along with that. Where did you get it? Where did it come from? Ask those questions. What do you wash your produce with and where? Is it city water or well water, river water? We use rural water, which is the city water here. So for us, that biannual report is enough to keep track of that. Finding out what's in your water is important. And then after the field. So keeping your harvest tools and your containers clean. Your farm cart maintenance and cleaning, making sure all the equipment. We have a gator that we drive around making sure that's clean. If you have a packing house or a washing line cleaning, what do you use and at what dilution? What methods with which you wash your produce? Are there dedicated sinks just for the vegetables or just for the produce? What's your storage cooler cleaning log? Do you clean it on a regular basis? And do you do a temperature check? There's a picture of ours there and it says that it's running 41 degrees and typically we'd like to see that below 40. And all of these items, everything that we talked about here should be cataloged in some way. So keeping things written down is very important. Traceability. Do you have everything written down if you have this allows for the traceability and can save you time and energy in case something does happen? Who's responsible? It's less of a headache if you're audited. So write things down. Keep track of things if you're going to be selling your produce or your fruits. So just in review, a fine harvest with traceability, taking control of what you can on the farm. Common sense and good agricultural practices are necessary. So methodical attention to detail makes sure you don't miss anything. Follow through on the plan even though it means paperwork equals a fine harvest with traceability. So with that, I think that concludes my webinar presentation here. So happy harvesting. I think we have information on filling out a survey. Oh, somebody has here. I was hoping to find out. Oh, black bugs that devour our strawberries. Are they more about like slugs or actual beetles? We had strawberries here at one time at the Williston Research Center and beetles. Okay, I think there's a NDSU publication that was written by Dr. Ron Smith at one time and that might cover it. Again, we don't have strawberries out here like we used to. They used to have them in production. Strawberries get a lot of virus diseases and I know commercially they tend to be growing them more as an annual now with a rotation where you treat it like an annual. I'll have to look that up though and get back to you, Dwayne. Todd Weinman was supposed to be here today. I was hoping he could answer some of these technical questions, but he said that he had something going on. So I'll look that up and get back to you. Does anybody else have any questions? Oh, are spotted winged distalble a problem of juneberries and hascaps? Yes and yes. The thing about them is that they have a serrated ovipositor and they use that to lay their eggs and that's not surprising with fruit flies in general, but these go after the firm fruit first. They don't tend to go after the senescing fruit and that's typically what fruit flies do is they go after senescing soft fruit and that's where they lay their eggs. But these guys have that serrated ovipositor which is what can damage your fruit at the ripening stage or when they're very firm. So it is a problem, but I think they prefer raspberries, although research hasn't been done on that yet. I think that's part of what Dr. Esther McGinnis will be looking into doing some research on finding out if there's some species that they prefer that we could plant to deter them away from the crop that you want to keep. So I know that that's been done, but yes, they do attack, seems like everything, even cherries, even grapes that have a harder skin on them. How to help control the little black raspberry bugs? Are they picnic beetles? I'm really not sure. The only bugs that we had on our raspberries this year were spider mites and I think that had a lot to do with how dry it was here. I'd have to look into those. I would assume it's going to be similar to what's on the strawberries, but I'll have to look that one up. And I see somebody posted the publication there for the spiderweed gestopola. Okay, that's great. That gives a really, really good, well-written publication on that. Thank you. I think we'll bring it to a close. Thank you so much, Kyla. Looks everybody give her a smiling face for filling in. Thank you. We appreciate all your knowledge you're sharing with us and everyone, be sure to check out all the resources that we have on the SC Extension Service homepage and also visit the Research Center information. There's just a lot of information available on our website. So please join us next week. Just a reminder, you're going to get a link to a survey. Please fill that out. We really appreciate you doing that because maybe we can get some more funding in the future to do similar things. So thank you, everyone, and I'll see a lot of you next week.