 All right, let's get started with our second talk and learn some more about other horticulture research going on at North Dakota State University. Harleen Hatterman-Valenti is a professor, assistant head, and high-value crop specialist in the plant sciences department. She joined NDSU in the year 2000, and she has 85% research, 15% teaching responsibilities. She has sponsored three visiting scientists and trained two postdocs, three PhD students, 27 master students, and she currently has three PhD and eight master students in her program. Wow, that is impressive. That's like a factory. That's just like an amazing wheelhouse of research you got going on there. To date, Harleen has published 58 peer-reviewed manuscripts. She's authored or co-authored three book chapters, published 185 scientific abstracts and proceedings, authored or co-authored 25 extension publications, and she's published 282 research reports. Since joining NDSU, she has given 274 extension presentations, and congratulations. After tonight, you can chalk up another one. You'll be up to 275. There you go. So, Harleen, welcome to the forums. Thank you, Tom. And considering I don't have an extension appointment, but that's the part I really love to do. Well, so tonight I'm going to talk about some of the high-value research that we did this last year. And I was trying to find Buzz Lightyear to go and put him in here because I had that end beyond, but I decided just to get kind of spacey with my background. So hopefully, because hopefully I can tell you about some of the stuff that also is coming up in 2022 as well as 2023. So to begin with, okay, there we go. So there's a lot of research that we are doing, but I wanted, I only had 20 minutes and I know Tom's very strict on that. So I've dropped a pretty much focused on five of them, and then that the Grape and Juniperia introductions, that'll be if we have enough time. So with that, you can see the first one I'm going to talk about is small-scale vegetable planting technology. And this was done by a graduate student, Sarah Bogan-Reef. She finished up a couple weeks ago, and she's from the Minot area and really wanted to help more of your local food producers and local farm producers that were looking at vegetable production. The first part of her research, and this had nothing to do with what she did for her master's degree, this was something she wanted to do in addition. So she wanted to see if these various hand planters, how efficient they were. And I have a picture of two of them. There's actually four. She was using hand by hand completely. The next one are two vibrating ones that you can just dibble out the seed. And then the last one was more of a vacuum seeder, which has a vacuum suction, so that you can put them into a flat. You fill all the holes, you turn it over onto the flat, and it plants them all at one time. So we wanted to see how that did for, we looked at three different sizes, the seeds, lettuce, pepper, and melon. And then we looked at two different sizes of trays, 50 and 72 inch cell trays. So the first thing she did was she looked at how long it would take her to seed, using the hand versus the vibro, which was the one with the long trough on it. It just kind of vibrates and then those seeds kind of trickle down. The squeeze seedling seeding was the one with the green little tray and it has that little hole. You kind of just squeeze them out into that area. And then the vacuum seeder is of course something big and explained before. So you can see here that when we looked at the lettuce, small seeds, hand seeding was the best, and vacuum seeding was the worst. And the main reason that the vacuum seeding was the worst was the fact that it's not intuitive. I mean, you saw those other two, let's see. I mean, these look pretty intuitive. You put your seeds right in here and it vibrates and you try to get them individually. The same here you squeeze up there, you have that little hole and you try with your hand, you make the vibration it doesn't have a vibrator, and you try to single that those out, or whatever number you want. So what you can see with the vacuum seeder it just, I mean you got this big thing you got to figure out where to put the hose on and all that stuff. And it took a bit to go and really understand the mechanics of it and how to go and get it to work properly because depending on the size hole where that air gets sucked up is how big the seed will be that it will take. So there's a little bit of changing things around. So we look at medium size, then we get into those vibrating ones. It's still with the with the real small seeds, you know the vibrating or the hand vibrating. It's just impossible with the with let us see to go and try to get that to be more individual and singlet. But once you get to the medium size. It's much easier. So here you see with the large seed, the squeeze one, that's because the whole actually was inhibiting the ability to kind of single at those seeds. So here when we got to the melons, you can see how everything else did pretty much the same except for that squeeze theater, due to the whole restriction so when we look at this, you know, it, when we're talking about time, if you have just one flat. This probably will be the quickest. Now if we were to do 10 flats, and she did repeat so she could do statistics on this but if you had a number of flats that you had to do. Probably it would be switched around in which, especially for the small you would, the vacuum seeding is going to become much more efficient. We didn't test that so we can't say that but you know in in this study. The hand seating was the quickest. When we look at, then she looked at how many days it took to germinate those seeds. And, and so you see here again we have those four theaters, and that the hand seating was a day quicker to emerge in comparison to the vacuum seating when we got to medium size. The hand seating and the squeeze are the same and about two days ahead of the vibrating and the vacuum. And then when we got to the large seeds, again the hand seating, what turned out to be the best. And again, what Sarah contributed to this was the fact that when you do your hand seating, you go and you push it into the depth that you wanted versus these others. So if it needs to be covered by media, then you have to leave so much out of that seeding trade, and then you cover it over. So you're going to get a lot of difference variations, versus you can much easily much more easily when you're pushing each one down. Get that same kind of depth, thus be able to go and influence the germination. She also looked at the field part. And with this there was three cedars. This up in the top, yellow one is the JP or Jane JP one. The Earthway looks just like this, except for it doesn't have such a heavy wheel to it, and it's aluminum it's really lightweight. It also had various discs to change for the different size seeds. This is a glazer, and that small little wheel is supposed to follow and kind of press the seed down, and you're supposed to be pulling this, we found this thing to be. It was the second most expensive and it was probably the biggest waste of any money possible. I'm not going to she also looked at some other stuff but because of time we're not going to be able to do that. So here's where we did this we repeated it twice. And so you can see, let me go so what we did was what we have here is 123 different cedars. So this is radish seed. We did lettuce with the small radish was medium, and then beat was our large seed. And the fact that this is all emerged already probably indicates that it's radish busy emerge so fast, you can see the kind of differences. The next one is probably the lettuce and then right here at the end are the beats. And this is our second wrap and our third round. So, what did we find on this what we did was we counted the number of seedlings that emerged after a period of time. And I put this table together. For some reason I put lettuce in the middle it should have been on this side. Probably I did it on. Well, so this tells you when we looked at them nine days after planting with the glaze or having. Okay, I just kind of set this up when they're when their letters are different. That means statistically, they are different. And the others. There, we really didn't have a lot of statistical difference. Thus, we just had plus and minus which was the standard air of the differences in those times and with the emergence but here we're able to go and get some real statistical differences. The radish, the JP jet or the Jane JP one had the greatest emergence at nine days after planting, followed by Earthway and then lastly that blazer. When we go to that really small, the lettuce. Again, here we have that the Earthway and the JP one were the same. So even though we have those numbers difference statistically, they are the same. However, as you can see on this comment down here with the JP one, the spacing for each seed drop was two and a half inches so one third of the our row didn't have plants in it and it still came up similar to the Earthway. And then lastly, with the beats. The Earthway was the best my far the JP one, the little you what you did is you change this little kind of rubber thing for the seed size and this it just wasn't quite big enough and and so sometimes two seeds got stuck and it went come through versus Earthway had now there's I think eight different discs, maybe more for all a different size seeds. So it was way better than anything else. And the glazer didn't have anything that could even plant a beat. And so nothing actually got planted. That's nothing even emerged. So, if we were going to go and suggest anything, probably the, although I used all three of them. And I would say that Jane JP one that was so smooth that, but it was because we had a nice seed bed, and it's a heavier instrument in comparison to the Earthway, but now it was also more expensive so I would go with the Earthway, any time if you want to go in and not be bent over trying to go and plant that each of those seeds by hand. Okay, now we're going to move on to our pepper trial. And with this what we tried to do was, we wanted to see if there's a difference between nitrogen sources for bell pepper production. We used urea as our standard that's a soluble nitrogen for source but it also if you get heavy rains, it can go and move below the root system and not be available and actually leach into the groundwater and those kind of concerns. In contrast, the ESN which stands for environmental immensely safe nitrogen and super you have different ways of holding on there like a slow release so they hold on to that nitrogen and keep it more into that area where you applied it. So we use six cultivars. We planted these, gosh, probably the third week in May last year. And if anyone can remember that fourth week in May, we got this frost. And it was more than frost. It was probably almost a freeze. And knowing that these tomatoes would not take that we went we we covered them up with a frost blanket we made these little hoops that would keep the frost blanket off of laying them down. And we were able to salvage everything it was and they would have been all toasted anything that was warm season with that I think it was May 26 for us would have been gone. So we're really happy to know that we were able to go and keep this alive. However, with all that cool weather that happened around that time, they just weren't doing anything so we gave them some soluble fertilizer just to go and get them going. And what we see here as I'm going to set this up so this is on our y axis this is called fruit number and this is associated with the blue bars. And again those letters, the capital letters are associated with statistics there. They're all yield it's in grams that is on the Z axis. And that's the orange bar, but really for you. You could see that when we look at fruit number. I mean, it was an amazing year last year. And that's for King Arthur average 27 fruit nice marketable bell peppers. Last year because we had so much heat. It was just amazing and then with the fertilizer and with the drip irrigation. It was really good. But you can see that that was not different for Olympus ninja intruder or Cal wonder, the only one where the number of fruit produced was better was in comparison to big dipper, which produced the fewest amount of fruit per plant. But if you put that in perspective at a graduate student looking at high tunnel versus field. A few years back. And in the high tunnel, we were at best we were like right around 18 fruit. And here on average here, you know, we had five of them above 20. So it was really pretty amazing. A year for pepper production. And then when we look at at yield, we can get and see that it really the are our best three were King Arthur intruder and Olympus and but they were only better than ninja and Cal wonder and big dipper. Okay, now when and this is going to be hard to explain but I'm going to, you know, if you were growing and selling it by weight, each pepper. This is really important versus if you are going to sell them on a just a number basis, because what this talks about is the fruit weight. Each individual fruit how much it weighed for these cultivars, and we had an interaction so the fertilizer didn't act the same. And what this shows is that, you know, if you were looking at Cal wonder, you would have been best. The heaviest fruit was when you used ESN, and the lightest fruit was when you use urea. But when something like Olympus, it really didn't matter much. Same with big dipper. When it came to King Arthur ESN was the best follow up but that was very similar to super you. And then came urea but in here intruder actually urea which is the cheapest and actually with the urea that was supposed to be a split application but because of that early nitrogen application, the plants look so green and lush, they didn't actually see that last amount so very much cheaper with the urea in comparison to the ESN or super you which already on a per amount of nitrogen basis you're paying more to have that nitrogen stick around. We're going to repeat this, just to see what's what. And this time, no matter how good the plants look, we're going to give that second application of urea just to see if it changed things up. However, and we've already gotten the seed started for this in 2023. Oh, that's next, I see my next slide. Okay, a broccoli. I don't know if we're going to go and look at anything further after this with with pepper, unless we have some real differences there. Our next one is peppers. And, you know, peppers. Boy, there's come out with a whole bunch of new all purple, you know, and all these health attributes and, and so we said well, you know, the last time we did this was in 2002. And I don't even recognize any of these cultivars anymore so we wanted to see just how the peppers would do. We have nine of these cultivars. Some of them are sprouting, some of them, you know, are just green but they have additional health attributes to them as as maybe a marketing tool but we want to see is that really true. So first of all, we said, well, to go and test for all these compounds. We can't have this many. So we wanted to do a preliminary test to see how they did. And of course, last year, we thought it was going to be the best year ever. And with cold crops. Of course you can see here, the peppers were planted behind me there. So we planted our cold crops first. There is, you know, we weren't concerned about the frost and we didn't have to and that just above shows those 2002. Here's a picture of the harvest. One of the three harvest that we had. And so you can see we had some purple ones we had some really large heads and we had some more the sprouting ones that had the smaller heads but you get more you keep on picking on those. And when we looked at the, the yield, you can see we had some really bad ones so we had three different harvest for our plants, and we had these three that basically did not produce a head. Now remember, last year was really warm and cold crops, broccoli and cauliflower. When that head formation, if we get above 85 degrees, you'll end up with a blind head. We had some huge plants, but they never produced a head on them. So you can see our top five. And, you know, green magic isn't one of those that is purple by any means but you get these burgundy for sure is red fire is I'm pretty sure check around that is Santa Fe I think it's green. But anyway, so what we're going to do is we're repeating this again we have these seats already started and going to see hopefully we have a different year in which we'll see how they really produce. I mean you can see even with some of these other ones that you know the just purple peacock wasn't you know that wasn't the greatest when when we're talking, you know, one out of three plants actually producing a head in our experimental units. What I'm also going to do and I get a little ahead of myself last time is that we have we have a grant. So starting in 2023, we're going to actually look at these health attributes that they have, and just see under North North Dakota conditions. What kind of differences we actually have in those health attributes those anthocyanins and synolics that are common with that purple color, just where those levels are so really excited for that research along with we're going to do this year. Okay, so our other one was with cauliflower and you can see there was even more available for cauliflower. This is the first time we even did anything with cauliflower. So in cauliflower we have everything from like cheddar, which has vitamin C or vitamin C to a bunch of those purple ones. And then of course like snow crown, we wanted some that were just our traditional for comparison as well. And here's just a picture of some of those deep purple really really purple. And when we looked at the yield course now we did have more of these. So you can see. Basically, these were our five best. And these were the are for worse that are all right down here after a third harvest really having hardly anything. And the main problem and it from what we saw color flower was even more susceptible to the blind head than than broccoli. So we're hoping to see some really hopefully for like the Punto Verde, that it again is really good, but that everything else moves up, which will make our exclusion keep for year 2023 more difficult but that'll be a good thing. And so again in 2023 we'll be looking at the health attributes of cauliflower as well. So the last thing I'm going to talk about is really the strawberries and this Mika has done this one, where we're looking at three different environments, these are day neutral strawberries so unlike June bearing strawberries, they produce throughout the year. You go and do a lot of runner removal so that they don't divert their energies into making little babies. And the only problem is if your temperatures get above 8590. It really suppresses any kind of flower and fruit production, of course, last year was extremely hot. What other thing we did wrong last year was, well, we wanted, we thought it'd be best to compare the three different environments and open field using these low tunnels or the high tunnel to plant them all at the same time. Doing that we're not taking advantage of that season extension early in the season with the high tunnel and somewhat with these low tunnels they're just low plastic they only go up about two foot, maybe a little bit more, and allow it to breathe but you know clear plastic really does a wonderful job of getting in the sun and trapping that to heat. So you can see the six cultivars that we looked at. And what we, what Mika found was that there was no difference between environments because we planted them all on the same day thus, we weren't really able to take advantage of the differences that those environments had. So this year we're going to do that. But with that, here on the total yield you can see that Albion was the highest and St. Andres was the lowest. That was on total yield for all the strawberries that that were there. Then when Mika adjusted that for missing plants, because some of them when we transplanted didn't go and survive. Now we see that Portola did much better. Well, slightly better I wouldn't say much better but did that was the highest yielding for total yields and then came Albion EV2 and Fort Laramie seascape and St. Andres were the worst. And when Mika looked in at the total soluble solids, what he did with that was he picked out three different Julian days. So 234 days from January 1, 264 days and 294 days. And he looked at the bricks or soluble solids. What we can see here is that at 264. Well, that was probably right in the middle of the summer type thing. I should look up the exact dates. Some of these like EV2 and Fort Laramie tended to be sweeter. Earlier in the season when we don't have as much sun for ripening and increasing out with the sugars is all with heat and sunlight. So a little bit lower than when we went to 294 days we're getting more into fall. It drops down again. For some of these, some of these other ones, you know, like seascape. Basically, it is maintained throughout the seasons what we got to a little bit later in the season. So we see do I have time do I have time. No, I don't. Okay, so this other stuff is on available for you to see. I think Tom made the notes that way, because you can see we did a lot of research in other things. And with that I'll just say, thank you. And this is, you know, I'm always looking for ideas of how I can help you. So if you want certain kind of research conducted, you know, send me an email or or if you have certain horticultural questions that you need, you know, a non bias, I'll set it up into that we aren't being biased in our judgment it isn't it's not going to be just a demonstration, we're actually going to set it up so that we take into consideration location in in planting row, as well as how soil can change but I'd love to hear anything more, as far as things that you guys are looking to have answered in the future. So with that, Tom. Thanks Harleen and we do invite the questions from the audience. One question we had Harleen was had to do with this person raised peppers, and their peppers had thin walls on the fruits. Could that have been related to the drought, or what do you think. It somewhat well yes somewhat I think it's all physiological. And again, you the partly genetics, but nutrition can also influence that, as we saw with the nitrogen on that. So, yeah, this person also mentions that some some of the peppers like you mentioned genetics. This person had some Hungarian cheese peppers and jalapenos that had fantastic cell walls but some of the bells had a problem. Yeah, and, and those you know those hot peppers really like heat, even better than bell bell peppers so they, I had some chilies and gosh those just went crazy. So, why did you test cal wonder that's a terrible variety that's no disease resistance Harley, what are you doing there come on. Yeah, well, it's a cheap one that you buy at the garden center because the garden center wants to buy the cheapest meat so don't buy a cal wonder. Yeah, but, you know, it's available all over so even that Johnny's. So we said, Okay, we're going to, you know, more as the standard. Just because, yeah, it, it's been out there forever. Yep, it's. Yep, very good. I was just my personal. I never buy that at a garden center that's just that was, that's the past. Anyhow, how about, what do you think the difference like you did nitrogen trials, would miracle grow have similar effects. Okay. And it would have had similar. Well, it probably would have similar effects in that, you know, we wanted to get away from a grower gets busy in the summer. So instead of the spoon feeding with miracle grow in which you'd have to go and have an injector for the drip tape and all that kind of stuff. We wanted to see a one and done or, you know, come with a split application but not that you had to go and figure out okay, you know how much to mix up and then and and do a hose on or any kind of. And when you get bigger like that then you have to start worrying about safety and back siphoning and and all that. So we looked at using these solids granulars as a way to avoid some problems with more of the spoon feeding with miracle grow or something like that. I think next year your topic here to your 300th extension publication presentation by then should be how to grow peppers because anybody get 25 fruits on a plant that's, that's pretty incredible I gotta say, 36 was the highest 36 Wow that's amazing. Yeah, and you don't did you stake those plants. Wow, that's quite a fruit load there. But we were in the southern part of abstract so it's surrounding kind of see we got trees on the west trees on the south and the apple trees all on the north so it's really in a nice kind of protected area where it doesn't get a lot of wind. Yeah, if we were in more of an open field condition yeah we would have done a leave on them to go and make sure that they didn't break over. You know you mentioned about some of your. We just got a question. Get top your peppers to get them bushier if you pinch them. No we didn't. How about you mentioned you had some cauliflower plants that went blind. What does that mean, or what causes blindness. So blind head is when, when that color flower is starting to form the head, you get to higher temperatures and they are sensitive to actually not forming a head then because the temperatures are too high. I had some color flowers. I swear they were probably almost three and a half foot tall leaves this wide and not a head to be found so frustrating. That's a hard that's a hard crop to grow. Yeah, I think so with our stressful conditions we have here right. Okay, I think we're just gonna let it go at that. Thank you for sharing your results and you look forward to more results in the future. Thank you.