 Okay, we're going to talk about research. And the researchers on campus here are very busy, they're helping to discover new crops and developing new production practices for the horticulture crops in North Dakota. And here to tell us about a summary of her latest findings in working high-value crops is Dr. Harleen Hanerman-Valenti. She is a high-value crop specialist in the Department of Plant Sciences. Dr. Harleen, welcome to the forum. Thank you, Tom. And I appreciate the opportunity. Tonight I'm only going to talk of three crops because we have a limited time. And I wanted to go into them a little bit more in advance than just kind of skimming the tops of each of those. And so with that, the first crop I'm going to talk about is junaries or saskatoons. As they would be called in Canada. And had a graduate student just finish up with her masters in which she was evaluating some of the native selections that Dr. Jim Walla and Dr. Joe Silesnik helped with in the selection process. And so we've now gone and collected fruit yield and some other characteristics data on this. And I thought I'd show it to you. So for those who aren't familiar with what june berries are, I always hear this. It's like the poor man's blueberry. And in North Dakota, we know because of the buffering capacity of our soils, it would be really hard to grow blueberries. So why don't we take advantage of saskatoons or junberries? So what is a saskatoon or a junberry? Well, it has a very simple flavor profile. And perhaps that is some of the reasons why it loses some of the flavors shortly after harvest. But most of the time this fruit is used in processing of pies, jams, lemonade, and those kind of things. So it really works still very well. It does have a short shelf life, but I think it actually has a longer shelf life than something that like blueberries because actually june berries are a miniaturized apple. They have small seeds just like apples. They're a poem. They aren't a blueberry, although for some the EPA has grouped them in with blueberries because they see that small fruit and said, well, that kind of looks like a blueberry, only a little bit on a purplish color. So they do an excellent job of retaining their shape and texture when frozen and thawed. We were trying to see if some of them had higher pectin levels because when we were as fresh, we were squeezing them to take some of the data on pH and bricks and like that. It seemed like the juice would gel up rather quickly on some. That data we're still analyzing and they are very high in antioxidants and so even more so than blueberries, so they're even better for you. As far as locations, mainly the berries of Canada, Alaska, and of course, North Dakota. There are other amelancures that are grown in other locations, so other species and actually a number of the species actually cross and so I think some of the native ones that we've collected aren't actually just pure amelancure onopholia. I think they are actually a cross between another species of amelancure. So you can see how it's very similar to our blueberry, except our blueberry is probably grown in a much larger area. From this data, we looked at the height and I probably should have went and converted this to feet, but we had this study, we planted these in two locations at the Williston REC as well as the horticulture research farm near Absaraka, which we always just label Absaraka because that's the closest town to our location. So a meter is about three feet, so you can go and figure out that way. It's kind of nice to see that regardless of where these were grown, as far as the tall ones, we had similarities in both locations and the short ones likewise. And Regent Northline are two commercial cultivars that we have in the study because you've got to have some standards to compare. So these were collected mainly along the northern part of North Dakota. Well, one year Jim went to the east half of the state and the next year the west side of the state. And there was about thirty-some, well actually more. We whittled it down to about thirty-some that we further evaluated. Probably had around a hundred, I would think. And Jim probably tasted twice as many. So now this table I just wanted to go and show you as far as the yield. And so I have that whole long list and you can see that we have six of them that yield very high. How you understand those letters next to the numbers is that statistically when you see an A, all those As are similar. And if you see a B, for example, Nd1-2 is not different yield-wise than Nd1-7. But it is different than Nd9-1 and so on down. But you can see we're having almost, you know, 1800 grams per plant, which is how it goes down and how you see some of those cultivars that are the industry and grown in Canada and where they are at. Success and Park Hill and Regent, those three were thought to be a cross, actually, between Amalankar Olifolia and Amalankar Stolen Infra. They're much more floriferous, so they produce a lot more flowers. And if you have a lot more flowers, you end up with a lot more higher yield. And so, having taken data on flower production, those first six, I have a feeling that they also are probably a cross with Olifolia and Stolen Infra because they would make a beautiful edible landscape. When they flower, that whole plant is just covered with white flowers and it is amazing. And so, I'm hoping that we will be releasing a couple of these in the really near future and that they would be available for gardeners and homeowners to have in their backyard. One thing I think everyone knows about Juneberries is Robins, just love them. And unfortunately, in the town, if you do not have them covered with a net, the Robins won't even let them get purple. They barely turn from green to a pinkish red and the Robins are going crazy for them. And if the Robin likes them, that must mean something, and they are very nice and sweet. So, going on now with our Blackberry research, and you might go and say, Blackberries, we can't grow Blackberries in North Dakota. And I will say old contrast. I had two grad students working on Blackberries. The first one was looking at primal cane cultivars under three different environments. And the second one did a study looking at the fluorine cane cultivar evaluation. And because it is true that with the fluorocanes, they can't take the kind of cold temperatures that we have here in North Dakota. So you have to do something to protect that. And we were making some row covers and we used a rotating cross arm to go and have that ability of laying them down and then covering them down. And so, I'm going to start with that one because some of the work had shown that the primal canes over winter can't take it down into the mid-teens temperatures. And we get way colder than mid-teens. If we stayed in mid-teens, we'd probably have everybody coming here because of our not so bad winters and our gorgeous summers. So here's a couple of pictures showing how in the fall of 2015 and 2016, no, 2014 and 2015, they were covered up. And we used two treatments that had black plastic and we covered it either with straw or with corn stovers. And then we used a thermal blanket for the other two. And either we left the thermal blanket alone or we used corn stover on that one. On my right, which I hope would be your right too, is that rotating cross arm. And how that works is as those primal canes are coming out, we train them onto a bottom wire that's probably about a foot above the soil surface going horizontal with the soil surface. And we train it so that after it's about three foot, we'll cut the ends off and then all those lateral buds will break. And on one half of the side, the one with the longer arm, that's where the floor canes will be and they'll be fruiting. And then on that short one, that's where we're training three or four of those primal canes. And then the other ones will be cutting off because you don't need more than that. And then after the floor canes fruit, you cut those out and you switch it over. It's a unique little system, it's used a lot in the east and in California for more of the shading. They're using that and keeping that at 60%. So the fruits kind of shade it so they don't have to worry as much about white droplets because in the southeast in California, they get too much heat. And then it causes some problems with the fruit. So there's our table. And there's only a few things I wanted to really show here. As we look at the yield, there's two that you see are much higher than most of the other ones. And that's Chester Thornless and Elinai Hardy. And Elinai Hardy, this probably was enough to go and make David think twice. That thing is extremely thorny. And to go and try to use a thorny cultivar on this rotating cross arm, where you really have to handle those canes a lot, is ridiculous. So even though we knew it was really one of the hardiest of the blackberries, I do not wish that on to anyone. But Chester Thornless, I think there's some real potential there. In the eastern part of the U.S., they use Chester Thornless a lot with making jams because it has some tartness to it. So with the sweetness, it gives you that complexity in your blackberry jams. And that's probably a standard for blackberry jams. It also tastes great. But as you can look here, when we're looking at Juneberries in grams of yield, we're over a thousand. And if these were being grown in Arkansas or somewhere along the east coast, we would be in that range also. So we need to do more if we're going to go and try to utilize this system because the yields just aren't high enough for us to go and have someone trying to commercially grow this. Now, for a back home or a backyard gardener, you can easily get, and I would go with a thornless, even though the thornless tend to be a little bit less hardy than something that's thorny, but you can easily go and lay those down, train them so that you can cover them up in the late fall. And I know somebody in the Fargo area, he uses this kind of a cheering blanket that they use for cement, or a tarp type thing, covers them up every fall, and he has blackberries every summer. And he cherishes those, and he also likes to brag about his blackberries. And I would too if I could go and do something like that. When you look at the bottom part, you can see that the BPC is black plastic corn, and then black plastic straw, thermal blanket, corn, and thermal blanket alone. And so we see that we had higher yields with that thermal blanket with the corn, much higher than we had with just the thermal blanket. So the thermal blanket isn't enough, but trying to work with corn stovers or wheat straw is a real pain. So what I want to do in the future is I want to go and go with multiple thermal blankets, coverings over that. Putting that first one out early enough so that when we have some of those temperatures that might quickly dip down into the teens, they're covered up and some protection. Also avoiding the wheat straw, I avoid rodents quite a bit. So we may have went and waited too long before we put our coverings on because we were so scared of the rodents and we didn't want to go and have rodent hotel alley in our blackberries. So we may have waited too long and those primal canes could have gotten some cold damage. So the black plastic, I think the reason we see that that's so low is black plastic doesn't breathe. And so we, you know, that gets, with snow, it gets really pounded down on there and there probably wasn't enough oxygen exchange and so we saw the much lower yields in comparison to the thermal blanket with the corn stover. So the next one was the primal canes and which we use the high tunnel, just a single layer high tunnel. We use silver mulch and then we use bare ground and with these primal canes, they were all cultivars from John Clark in Arkansas, Prime Jim, Prime Jan, Prime Arc and Prime Freedom and so. And in the lower left is just a picture. We used a landscape fabric to go and keep things weed free in the high tunnel and we weeded in between the others. So now what we look here, we see the number of berries. Now you see that in the high tunnel. Statistically, we can't compare our different environments because we didn't have that replicated. We didn't have three locations where we had silver mulch. I had only one high tunnel so there was no way we could go and have three locations with high tunnel. But you see that there's an NS by the total yields and number of berries for the high tunnel. What that means is even though we had some differences there, statistically, there was no differences in those yields or the number of berries. When we look at silver mulch though, we see that with the silver mulch, Prime Jim did better than Prime Arc Freedom. And Prime Arc Freedom, you can kind of see, really kind of wasn't doing the best in comparison. And it really is, it is kind of unique. It is stormless and so that was a real nice thing but it would have these canes that were 15 feet long in the high tunnel and was really going gangbusters. Now what Abby did is she also looked at tipping and there was an interaction with tipping for the silver mulch. And so that's why tipping is there. And what we found is with that double tipping we're just delaying things way too much. Abby would tip the first time when the stems were 18 inches tall. And then when she had an additional, she'd do another tipping. And what the tipping does is basically you're trying to force more laborals. Which if we had a much longer growing season, we probably would have more fruit. We did get more fruit, however, if it isn't right, it's really not worth it. And it just goes and it's hard on those plants trying to produce this fruit that never ripens. And then at the very bottom you see the bare soil. And you can see how there, actually the Prime Arc 45 was one of the worst ones. But again, we see NS so statistically there was no difference in the bare soil. Now what I'm trying to do with these primal canes is a lot of places are using the primal canes, especially the Prime Arc 45 as flora canes. So my thought is if we can't get enough yield with these primal canes, what I need to do is I need to leave a foot of those primal canes, then those buds, as long as I protect them and they survive the winter, they'll become flora canes and they'll break those. And so hopefully I can increase the fruit production by making like a pseudo, what I call double cropping. And so I tried this last winter in which in the past we would cut everything off and then we put a thermal blanket and some straw over it. Well I did that except for now you have some of these stems that are a foot tall. So the thermal blanket went over that and the straw went over that and then the wind came and it blew the straw away. And just like we saw in with the flora canes, that thermal blanket alone doesn't really provide enough winter protection. So this last winter what I did was I'm going to hope I put out a lot of mouse bait, but I put the straw around the stems and then I covered it with the thermal blanket. So I reversed my insulation practice and I'm hoping that this does a much better job of protecting these primal canes so that they will break bud and actually have flora canes that we can go and collect fruit from. So the last thing I want to talk about is potatoes. Now how we go from fruit to potatoes, I don't know, but I think as gardeners one has to be kind of concerned about spray drift. And what I'm doing this for is really for commercial growers, but a lot of the things also relate to gardeners because we have now dicamba tolerant soybeans. But for a gardener dicamba is used a lot of times on turf grass to control broadleafs. And what we were looking at is the combination of glyphosate and dicamba. And what we found was that dicamba alone is much more injurious on potatoes than glyphosate. Glyphosate or roundup really is much stronger on grasses than it is on broadleafs. Dicamba on the other hand is much more tougher on broadleafs than it is on grasses. That's why it was labeled in cereals and corn and like that and turf grass. So we looked at a chipping variety, but I've done a lot of work on all kinds of potatoes and I found that reds are the most sensitive and then everything else is less sensitive as far as types of potatoes. So we did this at two locations and last year basically the only thing that came up that was significant was that green bar which was our culls. So they were less than four ounces and basically showed that with that high rate of roundup or the high rate of dicamba second high rate of dicamba or that combination and all combinations we had more culls. And so you can see how things dip up and down but nothing was significantly different. So you can see that with some of those higher rates and especially when we went with dicamba and glyphosate together we really went and reduced the marketable yield but we really didn't see that much difference to the untreated. And so on the left hand side is the untreated and so that's some of those we actually and it is known that low rates of dicamba can actually stimulate growth and that's maybe what happened with some of that dicamba but it wasn't significant. So why did this happen? And I wanted to bring it back to two years ago. This is combined data when we were looking on the type of potatoes and you can see that Oaks and Inkster. Oaks is the blue and Inkster is in the yellow. And we can see how we had some really big differences. Our high rate of glyphosate which is the GLY5 almost a hundred weight per acre difference. That's a lot. And we didn't really understand why we could see such differences. At Oaks we got in there early. We saw after we made these spray applications we saw injury. At Inkster we didn't. We saw very little injury which wasn't what we expected at all. And so I start looking at the weather data and I looked at the maximum and minimum air temperatures. And that first star on the left is when we made our application at Oaks. We had some nice cool temperatures. Potatoes like cool temperatures. So when we made that application and this is just a drift type of application, the potatoes responded really well to the injury. However later when we made that our other application that was well we had some rain delays so our application came much later in Inkster. We had some high temperatures both at night and in the daytime. And so the potatoes were already stressed so they didn't respond to this other stress as well. But what happened was when we went and if we were to go and we took samples from those daughter tubers that were in the ground when we look at Inkster and Dicamba we see we had high amounts, rather high amounts of residues. Now we made this application when the potatoes were probably only about a nickel to a quarter in size. So for that to actually occur seems really strange. Now Oaks this is what we expected that during that time those potatoes aren't that sink and so they wouldn't be pulling in all of this herbicide residue. Kind of goes the same with what we see at with glyphosate although we do see that we did get some in Oaks. So what I'm really concerned about is that if potatoes are stressed and if we have seed growers that they actually had a drip they won't see as much symptoms because the potatoes were stressed initially then a drip comes. They don't know that they have this problem. They sell their seed, people go and plant it and then all of a sudden things don't come up because they have these herbicide residues. So I have a graduate student now that is going to be working at looking at what is the environmental stresses that it's going to cause this problem so that we can go and help the growers to have seed that isn't going to be injured because we know that Dicamba still they made some new rules and regulations but it's still going to be available for the soybean growers to use. And so I think with that. Okay, let's get right to the questions. How about, let's talk about the fruits. Where are your trials done? Is it only in Fargo or Ebseraca for example? Okay, so the primal cane one was done in Fargo and the fluorine one was done in Ebseraca. And so people are interested in this research they can come and visit the plots like you have a field day every year. So that would be a great opportunity and there's like graduate students who would be there to or Harling would be there to explain what's going on in the plot itself. So take advantage of those special opportunities at the field days both at Ebseraca and on campus and you can see this research with your own eyes. But otherwise it's not open to the visitors in general. You have to call you for a special appointment. Right. I mean you could on campus you can and because it's just up from the demonstration gardens you can walk around but not knowing what's what it really does. I mean oh there's some blackberries. Okay so speaking of blackberries do they require any special soil amendments to grow here? No, that's the nice thing is you know of course you got to keep up your fertility but just like a raspberry the only issue with blackberries is the hardiness or lack of hardiness. With those thermal blankets you cover the entire plant. Yeah. So that's what that rotating crossarm is nice about because you know if we knew we were going to have enough snow before it got really cold we wouldn't need that. But we can't guarantee that. And so that rotating arm just is laid down and then we just cover everything up. If some of those canes were outside of being covered up they most likely would that would die back and in fact even some of the stuff under died back ways indicating that we may have not got those covers on early enough or that the plastic was injurious and depriving of some of the oxygen that it may have needed. And you know some of those very cultivars that you listed are rated zones 6 to 9 but with winter protection they may survive. That's your challenge. Yes that was another thing we found quite interesting was depending on where you looked on the internet for plant material they said it was listed from zone 4 to zone 7 and it was like come on it's the same plant it can't be that different. That's right. That's why you have a university to give you research based information. We're not trying to sell you something. And you mentioned that you was a bait to manage my goals that's what works for you. We could we have these little yeah it's bait inside these little black boxes. How about can you plant a blackberry next to raspberries or should you keep them apart? Does that matter? I don't think you there are the same kind of diseases will probably affect both. So I mean you could plant them next to each other but you know having them next to each other if one gets it then the next is going to get something like a phytophora or something like that. But there's no real pollination issues with that. No. No don't worry about that. There's a question about higher antioxidants or tartness. Is that the case with these berries? Well actually phenolics don't necessarily mean acidity. Usually the darker the color so the deeper the purple the more phenolics and anthocyanins and thus the healthier. I know you can't be this is a difficult one but purchasing juneberries or hardy blackberries you have a few nurseries that you might be able to point people towards. Yeah so we're working on the juneberries. The main reason we started this trial was the fact that most everything was only available in Canada would go and say you have to have $500 worth before you can you know. There are some places that well even Cheyenne gardens I know will have a plant or two in a quart or gallon container pot it. And so we were looking with this research to go and have more local sources as well as you know I think just like some of the other small fruits it's native it can grow here easily and just like up in Manitoba there are a number of orchards and it's a commercial crop it's very possible to do the same thing here but having the source is the main thing. If you had to buy a juneberry variety what would you grow? Well I'd wait until we come up when's that going to happen? I would think we have three years of data, fruit data on it so I'm hoping that this will be the fourth year that we should have enough data to at least release one if not more. Because your yields are much higher than the standard the more commonly available varieties almost double. Is there a place to get that chest or thornless blackberry? Yeah we you know I know we went there's a Cornell site that really has that list for small fruits all the nurseries and it has a really good description of what's available at the various nurseries. I think we went through Norse farms for a lot of our stuff Norse is a big one. Yeah you can only I think you can just google it and usually you can find some sources. What else we got here? You know that dicamba drift concerns you know how far can that drift occur from depends on the situation. Depends on the situation you know it's volatile so when you have temperatures over 85 degrees you know and of course wind will drift the particles but you know the volatility anytime we have temperatures over 85 and you're increasing the chances of some volatilization occurring. And dicamba can spread through the soil too. It can be taken up through the root system but glad to say not so much. Okay we got a burden over here it just gets depressed every time she sees a robin in the netting. Do you have an answer for that? Shoot the robin and take it out of its misery. Survival on its head is dumb robin. I think you can probably depending on what kind of netting you get that extruded plastic is very unforgiving. There's some others that is more flexible but I think the smaller the holes the mesh less likely. We put a big dome over ours so that we can work under there and not have to worry but even then they see those things and they're just like gold and can't control themselves. So they had a gardener who grew 1,800 feet of Juneberries he planted it during a high moisture year but they got mold and died. Rod you think they had a gardener or something? They're very nondescript as far as soil requirements but I have heard in heavier soils they don't like wet feet in the fall so I have had some people in the Red River Valley saying I bought a Juneberry it was this tall and 8 years later it's this tall what's going on and it's really I think the moisture in the fall that is hurting things. What is the root system like on Blackberry? So it's more of a crown system that's the nice part about it versus like a a red raspberry where it will start spreading all over the place so it's more like a black raspberry and more a crown system. Okay so we're just going to wrap it up we want to stay on the topic as much as possible we have some expertise here on fruits in general so I'm going to throw a couple more at you a few curve balls here. How about how do you protect strawberries from sand flies? I don't know what a sand fly is myself That should have been the entomologist and cedar apple rust So the cedar apple rust is a problem with juneberries especially at Willow Cymys because they have a row of cedars right on the north side of the juneberries the whole thing is breaking that life cycle if you have cedar next to juneberries or apples it's going to you know and you have the right kind of weather conditions you're going to have this problem. So if you could have your apples or your juneberries as far from cedars as possible especially not downwind Those juniper those scores from juniper can fly for a long time miles but how about resistant varieties if possible or maybe a targeted spray in the spring as a preventative. Cedar apple rust usually isn't a killer of land. Right it's just ugly What would be your favorite among the shorter junberries do you have a variety that you prefer? Well actually there wasn't one on here but it's an old one called Tim's that I really like because it kind of tastes really cinnamon-ish or kind of nutmeg like but it's a much older variety otherwise you know Martin has probably the largest fruit and you know if that's a whole thing of harvesting if you have to pick it by hand you'd much rather pick something like this than something like this How do you spell Tim's T-I-M-M otherwise Martin Martin's really popular. It's a sport off of a teesan and so those now there are some others like that par 90 that have large fruit as well and Lee 8 but really I stick with Martin ahead in five years we're going to have an NDSU juneberry cultivar release that's very promising and we'll have a production guide for backyard blackberry production. Is that right? Yeah. Okay there we go. Sounds good. Sounds great. Sounds really interesting. Any other last questions out there? I think we got them all. Okay here 9 we're going to wrap this up. Thank you Harleen for that. Thank you. Really interesting talk.