 Hello, I'm Kathy Wieterholt. I'm the Fruit Project Manager here at the Carrington Research Extension Center. Welcome to our 2020 virtual tour. In this video, I'm just going to give you an overview of different plants that we have at the Research Center here. We'll jump around to all the different things that we have, and I'll explain a little bit about them. We're looking at black rot fungus here on a zestar apple tree. The spots on the leaves are the leaf form. They're called frog eye leaf spots, and let's see if we can take a closer look at them. They definitely have a little dot inside of them, and like I said they call them frogs eye. On the leaves, you can control this with a fungicide. This also shows up on branches as a canker, and will kill the branch eventually. That can only be controlled by pruning, but on the leaves and on the fruit, this can be controlled by fungicide. I just noticed these the other day. I've been gone for two weeks, and so it's really too late to control for these unless we get a lot more wet weather, although I am not exactly sure on the exact conditions that will allow the fungus to propagate. It has been very dry here in Carrington. We've only had about a quarter inch of rain in the last month, and only two inches total since the first of April. So just something to keep an eye on on your apple trees, and I want to also want to say this is the worst leaf I have found. Only about 10 to 15% of the leaves have a spot on them, and most have one to three spots. This is an exceptional leaf, and I'm not really worried about the tree. This is Aronia. We have 24 plants here at the research center. We've got some main varieties, a few seedlings. We have Viking, this kind of industry standard, and we have McKenzie, which was developed here in North Dakota. I'm just showing you the fruit here. It's actually looking like a pretty good crop. There's some yellow berries. I think it's kind of like the June drop in apples. Something's wrong with them, and they're just going to fall off. So it's no problem. We have quite a few fruits this year. I do want to show you some iron chlorosis. I think our soil pH is a little bit on the high side. We're near 8 here, maybe 7.8 at the research center, and you get a little bit of iron chlorosis. It's not too bad. It's really dry this year, so maybe I could apply some iron to help this out. But in general, we don't see a problem, and the plants don't seem to suffer from it. So yeah, we're looking for a pretty good crop. We are irrigating. We don't want to lose the crop. A few years ago, it was so dry that all the fruit fell off. And then the next year, we had so much fruit that it was ridiculous, and the plant couldn't ripen at all. So we don't really want to see that again. So we're irrigating a little bit, and hoping for a good crop in September. I'm here in the Hascaps. We have three kinds here. We have these Canadian ones in the background. They grow more wide than high, and they're very thick in the leaves. So it's kind of hard to get the berries out. These are the original ones from Saskatoon. They are borealis, tundra, indigo jam, and indigo treat. A little closer here, we have Japanese plants. These were planted in 2007. So they're pretty big. They're kind of rangy. We've thinned them out a little, so they're a little floppy this year. Here, let's look at the fruit on some of these older varieties. They are kind of small. But again, the cedar wax wings have done their job, and they have knocked off a lot of the bigger berries. But so that's the size of some of this fruit. And here's one of the newer fruits from the newest breeding about three or four years ago. So you can see the new fruit is a lot better. One particular problem for the Japanese Hascap is that the fruit tends to drop as it ripens. The plants bloom over a two-week period, and then they ripen over a two-week period, and then wind and the cedar wax wings tend to knock the fruit off. So we are looking for better plants. This is part of the specialty crop block grant that we have here. And we're looking for better plants that will keep their fruit in North Dakota. A little tighter, maybe not so big. The bigger plants actually will lose the bigger berries will actually fall more than the smaller berries. So these plants are from 2017, and it's their first year for a really nice crop. So we're looking at these, and we have more in the pipeline. We have quite a few more than working with the breeder in Oregon. Here's a shot of some of the fruit on this plant. I'm here with one of the new Hascap plants. You can see all of the berries that are on here. This is one of the most productive plants we will find. Just lots and lots of fruit up here on all of last year's growth. This plant is probably only going to be for homeowners and not commercial, because you can tell it's kind of soft. The branches are kind of thin, and they tend to droop with the high amount of fruit. We'll see what happens as the plants get older. But if they're going to droop towards the ground, they won't be conducive to harvesting for commercial purposes. But it is one of the most lovely and tasty berries out there. We're here looking at the Juneberries at the Research Orchard, and we have 100 plants. They're planted about five feet apart, and we have five varieties. They're all from Canada. They have the best elections for the most part. All just selections from the wild. Let's take a look at the berries here. Some of them are starting to swell a little bit. See if we can get this in the camera. Yeah, these are starting to swell, but right next to it, there's a bunch that aren't. Most of them look this way. Most are small. In this cluster, we can see some little leaf stippling on the leaf here, and that's from the lace bugs that are feeding on the backside. They suck at the tissue, and then it just causes this stippling. This little brown area by my thumb is from another insect that feeds on top, probably a sawfly, but maybe there's other things too. It looks like there's going to be a pretty big crop here. We have had about seven pounds per plant, maybe four or five years ago, and there's going to be really a big crop this year if we can beat the fruit flies. It's going to be a little later than normal because of the long spring, but we I'm going to start spraying for the fruit flies this coming Monday, and hopefully we'll keep them in control this year. It would be very nice to get a good crop of June berries. We all love them. We're looking at the cherries here in the orchard. These are the Canadian hardy shrub cherries. They get about seven or eight feet tall, about the same width. They are very hardy, zone two hardy. The ones right near us are Juliet and the ones down the row are Romeo. I have to say I'm preferring the Romeo right now because they don't have all the suckers that Juliet has. If you look here, I've just mowed these off. These is just covered in suckers here. So that could be kind of a problem if you like to keep it tidy. And if you don't want branches to refill in your row, so you can keep it open for spraying for fruit flies. Romeo does not seem to have much fruit this year, although it blossomed quite well. Juliet, I would say Juliet has a moderate crop. Here's the fruit on it this year. It's going to be pretty nice fruit. We have not been able to get a cherry crop since about 2012 because of all the fruit flies here in at the research center. We have a brand new sprayer. We're going to try out this program this year and see if it can help us get a cherry crop. I love tart cherries and I hope you do too. They really make the best pie. We're here in the grape vineyard at the research orchard and I should call it the old grape vineyard because about three-fourths of the plants have been removed. Grapes take a lot of effort to take care of and we have so many other plants that are quite important to learn about here in North Dakota. NDSU at Fargo, Dr. Harleen, Hatterman, Valenti and her program is learning so much about grapes. They have huge orchard spaces. They are looking at what grapes do best in North Dakota. There is a whole breeding program that is trying to breed better fruits for North Dakota. So our program is really redundant. I want to show you the fruit here. It's looking really great. But once you do your pruning and you get this fruit, is your work done? No, it is not. These grapes require you to remove the lateral shoots to get the best fruit. You just snap them off when they're this size. This exposes the grapes to more sunlight and then they'll be tougher in the later summer when the sun is really hot and it's dry. They'll turn better color with the sunlight. So there's that thing. You won't do this just once though. We just did it today on July 3rd but you are also going to do this like one to two more times during the summer. In addition to that, we have all these suckers that are growing on the ground. These should be removed. They're just taking energy away from the fruit and it's best to cut them off or pull them off and then spray out all these weeds because the more heat you can get to the plants the better they will develop. One final thing that we can do for the grapes is comb them and this also takes a few times. These these are growing kind of across the plant but really you should try to make your canes grow vertically. So you should go through and pull everything that's crossing and growing sideways along the plant. Pull it out so that it grows up and down and hangs toward the ground. You'll have to do this a few times and it's a lot of work. Grapes, not as romantic as you think they are. I'm here looking at the Black Current Variety Trial at the Carrington Research Extension Center's fruit project and I just want to show you that we have taken out half of the trial. It just seems that people have not been able to get used to using these uh places that use fruit like jelly makers or wine makers still aren't so sure and maybe their customers don't really know about the fruit. I again say it is one of the most wonderful fruits on the planet. It's very helpful for you. It's tasty. It's just that we don't know about it here in the U.S. One of the world's most popular berries. Take a look at some of the berries that are developing here. Here's a nice cluster. Look at those. We've been irrigating a little this year because it's very dry. Some of the berries are getting a little bit of color on them and we'll be harvesting these at the end of July maybe early August. We're looking at hazelnut plants here. These hazelnut shrubs were planted in 2007. We got them as seeds uh rooted seeds from University of Saskatchewan. They're just a cross that was made nothing special um as far as selecting for nuts. They were just crossed to see what would happen. Some were going to be hardy, some weren't. Some were going to have a lot of fruit and big fruit. Some weren't so we were seeing the results here. These small plants were cut down this spring by me because they had eastern filbert blight. I've just noticed it in the last couple years and I didn't really realize what it was at first so cut those to the ground to remove the source of the inoculum. This nice plant here is uh it's about 10 feet tall. It has not had any blight and it has not had any winter kill. It's also a pretty good producer of hazelnuts so let's look a little closer at the nuts that are developing here. I think you can see that they are there in their frilly little coatings and there's quite a few of them on here this year. We actually have plants that are developed by Dan Johnson. He's been breeding them for over 20 years here in North Dakota. They don't really seem to have many nuts this year. It was really a crummy fall last year for everything so that may be the case of why they don't have any nuts. We had 20 inches of snow October 9th, 10th, 11th and then it melted got nice for a while and then went back to winter so a lot of a lot of woody plants were affected by this strange weather last year so all right this is hazelnut here at the research center. We're looking at one of our bigger pear trees and I've killed the central leader and I've kept it though so that I can use it to make better angles on those side branches there. One of these side branches is now going to be the leader of the tree and this will help keep it a little shorter and more manageable. We've got spacers in there to keep these branches downward a little and I just want to show you that I have painted the trunks white on these pear trees also the apple trees because they get sunscald in the winter. They warm up during the day in like say March and then at nighttime they cool off and the sap freezes and cracks and I'll show you that this was a big mistake on this tree that I didn't have it planted. Right in the center there it's got a crack that shows you the exposed trunk and it is healing so I hope this tree can recover and go on to a productive life. I think it can. We have two more specific videos on Hascap and Aronia and I hope you can watch those too. Good luck with your fruit growing this year and take care and we hope to see you next year. Thank you!