Listen to our interview with Ben Shambaugh of Wayside Farm and Great Northern Berries. Ben has tried a variety of different berry crops over the course of his career. Come learn about these crops and hear Ben’s prospective on growing fruit crops, farm ingenuity and marketing these unique fruits.
Show Notes
Ben Shambaugh founded Wayside Farm in Sandwich, NH over 30 years ago. Since 2013 he has been trying a variety of alternative fruit crops under the Great Northern Berries name. Through trial and error he has found what works and what doesn’t for his business. Come join us and learn about their journey into producing honey berry and other unique small fruit crops.
Interviewer Nick Rowley
Produced by
retaliation for prior civil rights activity.
What is North Country Fruit & Vegetable Farmers?
University of New Hampshire Extension specialists interview seasoned growers in northern New Hampshire who share insights into creating a successful agricultural business.
00:00
Ben Shambaugh
Sometimes farmers are pretty stubborn and they look at the question where they can grow something first, and how to market at second. But fortunately, thanks to our development of our Great Northern Berries website, we came across people who are interested in honeyberries and interested in buying them in a big way.
00:26
Heather Bryant
Welcome to the North Country small farm and rural living podcast. My name is Heather Bryant and my UNH Cooperative Extension colleagues Olivia Saunders Nick Braley and I are launching a series of five podcasts this fall, the podcasts are COVID friendly answer to the North Country fruit and vegetable seminar and trade show that was started by our retired colleague Steve Turaj. Approximately two decades ago, we plan to release the podcast in the fall. And then in October, we will run a series of five interactive lunchtime discussion sessions, one for each podcast. During these sessions, we'll be able to dive deeper into each topic, you can ask questions of the people we interviewed and or each other. The topics will center around issues and ideas of interest of farmers and people who choose to live a rural life. Thanks very much for joining us.
01:18
Nick Rowley
Hello everybody. My name is Nick Rowley. I'm a Food and Ag Field Specialist with UNH Cooperative Extension. And today I'm here at Wayside Farm and Great Northern Berries here to talk about some alternative fruit crops. Ben, do you mind introducing yourself
01:36
Ben Shambaugh
My name is Ben Shambaugh. I live in North Sandwich New Hampshire, then farming since 1981, which I took up as a hobby then I started vegetable farming in the early 80s and belonged to the local Conway Farmers Market at the time, got to the point of raising about seven acres of vegetables and at some point along the way decided to raise some flowers for additional sales, pretty quickly growing flowers in greenhouses that I started constructing, overwhelmed and took the place of vegetable production which we discontinued in the early 90s. Since then, the business became full time and I've raised numerous kinds of annuals perennials and flowering shrubs. Since then, we have some good sized greenhouses we got up to about 22,000 square feet and now we're down to about 13,000 square feet of greenhouses. We this year will be discontinuing growing annuals. So, we're only going to be growing perennial plants. And in 2013, we decided to develop a more sustainable version of our agriculture here and started some small fruit production. We were interested in planting some crops that didn't need to be replaced every year. In 2013, we investigated growing a number of small fruits meaning fruits that grew on bushes and could come into production with within two or three years as opposed to trees, which we don't have the land for here in 2013. We did several things sort of simultaneously with the idea that in five years, we would decide whether that could lead our way into the future as we get to be older and wanting to haul heavy objects less often. So, we planted blueberries, highbush, blueberries, raspberries. And I developed some hydroponic strawberry growing towers. And we raised strawberries for a number of years and since we have moved out of that, so right now, since 2013, fast forward to 2021 we're growing. Right again, raspberries highbush, blueberries. We're growing a lot of honeyberries which was one of the crops we started investigating in 2013. There were several other crops that we looked into in those early days. Initially, I wanted to raise gooseberries couldn't come up with any varieties of gooseberries. That seemed like they had a high enough sugar level and could be picked for fresh market that are legal in New Hampshire area. So scratched that idea. We did plant a couple of varieties of elderberries, Sam Dahl and Sam Hill with the idea that we would get into production of elderberries if those 200 feet of row panned out and we planted 300 feet of saskatoons along the way Since gooseberries didn't seem to be a viable crop, the internet searches that I were doing came up with the prop of honeyberries. And after looking into that, and spending the majority of my spare time for a couple of months in the middle of winter, I learned quite a bit about the background of honeyberries what they are and where they come from. Subsequently, we planted I guess, about 500 feet of rows of honeyberries, that same year in 2013. Since then, we've expanded that and we can get into that later. But that's our primary small fruit crop at this point.
05:43
Nick Rowley
And when when you say gooseberries, just because I'm not very familiar, are those the same as currents?
05:49
Ben Shambaugh
They're related to currents. They both are vectors of the blister rust, pine disease, and their cousins, essentially gooseberries. The kind that are suitable for a fresh market are quite a bit larger and juice here than currents which are more suitable for processing.
06:09
Nick Rowley
Right! Is that why there's some question about the legality of some of the the varieties or species so those because of the pine blister,
Ben Shambaugh
exactly,
Nick Rowley
trying to remember it. I know in Maine, they’re prohibited, just you know, back where I come from,
06:26
Ben Shambaugh
and you can grow a few varieties of those, but they seem too mediocre to be commercially viable to me.
06:33
Nick Rowley
It seems like your journey into elderberry was fairly quick, too. So maybe we could just give an overview of what you thought of the crop and like, what you liked about it, and what you didn't like about it and why you don't, haven't gone down that road, further,
06:50
Ben Shambaugh
going back to 2013 again, and one of the crops I had skipped was we also looked into Aronia and subsequently planted some of them. Back to elderberries. We planted 100 feet of Sam Dahl and 100 feet of Sam Hill, which are European varieties developed from hybridizing American elderberries. They grew exceptionally well. We have everything that we grow on trickle irrigation. I do minimal amount of fertilizing, so they didn't grow well, because of the fertility issues. We grew them in fairly neutral pH soil and garden soil in full sun, and they got in that second year. So plant year one second year, they got to be up as high as 10 feet tall the canes on them and quite productive. We had them netted as well as all of our other small fruits for birds. But they were fairly easy to grow and fairly easy to harvest except they're a pain in the neck to get off the stems. So, we were harvesting the umbles with clippers or scissors very easy to go along and harvest pretty difficult to take them off the little stems and so we got to the point of Okay, so what are we going to do with these now and found that there wasn't anybody that wanted them. And we would have to sell them for a fairly high value to get the stems off of them. So year three we ripped them all out.
It didn't seem to have a place in my life to and I do almost all of the growing myself of all of the fruits. That's not my job description is to spend hours doing that. I should segue into the fact that what we were thinking when we developed our small fruit branch which we call Great Northern berries was growing the plants of fruit, small fruits that we liked and harvested ourselves so we could give people instruction in buying the plants while simultaneously selling the produce. Turned out that the fresh market sales here in North Sandwich, which is about 30 miles from Laconia, Wolfeboro, North Conway and Plymouth was awkward and not necessarily viable. So quite quickly. I started implementing harvest and freeze immediately marketing concept, essentially making our small fruit branch of our business into a commodity crop. I couldn't find a market for elderberries. That was dependable enough to Make it my worthwhile to harvest and clean them. So they're gone
10:05
Nick Rowley
with the aronia did you have a similar experience? Just not the market and just kind of too much work for the too much putting in for what you get back from the crop.
10:16
Ben Shambaugh
Well, we have continued to grow aronia. So, in 2015, I put in 50 plants in a small patch. And those have done moderately well they did pretty well initially and they haven't done as well in years since it may be because of bugs. There are some bugs that seem to bother that crop. Japanese beetles, for instance, and some kinds of caterpillars. Marketing them is really tough. Because they're so astringent, they're very high in acidity, and tannins, so much so that no one will want to eat them fresh. So, what are the possible uses for aronia? potentially in wine, and we do sell a lot of our fruits to wineries. It can be combined with other fruits, and it is an interesting addition but in itself, it's not that excellent. Nevertheless, I still have 400 additional feet of them that I'm growing that are highly productive. Last year, the bears ate them. That was the first time, so this year, we're going to fence for bears, but they're just loaded with berries this year. They, as opposed to elderberries have similar sort of umbels of fruit. You can harvest them quickly with clippers, but they peel off of their umbels very easily. They're fairly hard, not terribly juicy. And you can roll them off as though you were rolling marbles in your hand. Yeah,
11:56
Nick Rowley
sounds like much easier to harvest compared to the elderberry and I know I've seen people harvest them and use them for wine, too. And I think aronia and I could certainly be wrong about this, but that's a native plant to the northeast is that
12:17
Ben Shambaugh
yes, not as native as elderberries are it's I think more native to the central part of the country. I don't think I've ever seen one wild around here, but
12:29
Nick Rowley
it could be sorta kinda native!
12:33
Ben Shambaugh
Yes, certainly native to the US species.
12:37
Nick Rowley
Yeah, fruit I have seen is kind of like, like, pretty like dark purple-ish black. Yeah?
12:44
Ben Shambaugh
we have one variety that's very dark purple, and one that actually looks black
12:48
Nick Rowley
and I have eaten them and they are, say into interesting to eat by themself. But I see, I see aronia as an ingredient in a lot of juices if I recall, like maybe it's high in antioxidants. It's one of those fruits that are pretty good for you.
13:06
Ben Shambaugh
They say whoever they is that Aronia have the highest of those really good chemical components like antioxidants of any of the small fruits, and also that the darker the fruit color, the more of those components are within it. So yes, you see it advertised heavily as a health food in the Midwest. It actually in spite of it being so stringent, astringent is quite sweet. So, like other fruits, you don't necessarily notice the sugar content first when you eat it. Because sugar taste is in a different part of your mouth, then you pick up tannins, and so forth. So, at any rate, we test our fruit for Brix levels, to try to understand whether they're becoming close enough to harvest or not. And aronia is one of the fruits we grow with that can develop the highest Brix levels, but it just doesn't seem that way when you're eating.
14:15
Nick Rowley
And just to the listeners out there, Brix is a measure of the soluble sugar content of a fruit. Do you know off the top of your head you might not know this, what the Brix reading is when they're about ripe?
14:31
Ben Shambaugh
We can start harvesting them... with aronia the trick is to let him stay on the bush absolutely as long as you can, which means they're starting to fall off the plant. The temptation is to harvest them a week or two weeks before that because they're not falling off and they look perfect. So, the bricks starts at that level the two-week prior levels somewhere in the 12 or 13 range and can get up as high as 18. But is usually 15 or 16. When
15:05
Nick Rowley
In my experience, measuring bricks content, which was in muskmelons, variety trials, a lot of like really right melons for like 1213. And they were really sweet. So, I'd imagine, you know, just tells you how sugary these things actually are.
15:25
Ben Shambaugh
Yep. And just as a point of reference, I think the real one of the reasons that grapes historically have been used in wine production is because when they're fully right there, bricks can go up as high as the low to mid 20s. But nothing that I raise gets up into that range.
I have one other quick point about those. So elderberry would usually be harvested in August, more or less and the erroneous are sometime in September, depending on the year, so they're fairly late in the year, we were thinking in 2013, about mixes of crops initially that we could sell fresh, we discovered along the way that there was potentially a very good market for frozen raspberries. So, at this point, we have about 1500 feet of raspberries, half of them, two thirds of them are fall bearing raspberries, and the balance or summer bearing almost all of those raspberries, we pick and freeze right away. And we'll get into our freezing methodology shortly. Initially, blueberries had been high on our list. Turns out there really isn't very much of a use for them frozen. So we do some pick your own of highbush, blueberries. But being again, not near an urban center. What we don't sell to pick your own is not a terribly valuable crop for us. And we have systematically taken out 100 feet at a time of our highbush blueberries, sold the plants and put something else in their place. So we do still have a few 1000 feet of highbush blueberries, but they're not a big crop for us
17:22
Nick Rowley
are you doing pick your own raspberries at all are those all frozen.
17:28
Ben Shambaugh
The only reason that we do pick your own blueberries is because it's a dry crop. And it's pretty safe as far as developing some health safety protocols for letting customers in and trying to make sure that they're picking clean fruit and not leaving behind. We go in and pick after them. And that they're not potentially transmitting anything from one person to another. We right from the very beginning have given hand sanitizer and clean pails to people limited the number of people in our highbush blueberry picking area, we cover the blueberries with nets and fence them for wildlife. So we're trying to do a very safe and clean approach to pick your own. But also we're not spraying any of our crops, any of our fruit crops are all unsprayed and we'll get into some other aspects of that later. But we're very concerned that we don't want to be contributing to food safety issues here.
18:39
Nick Rowley
Yeah, that's a really good perspective. You know, growing a crop is one thing and sometimes it's the easiest part about farming a certain thing, and then there's all these other things that you know when you're just getting started, you might not necessarily realize are equally as important and maybe even harder than actually growing the crop and certainly that's the case with some, some crops and not all crops. And I saw your netting when I when I came in here.... bright green!
19:09
Ben Shambaugh
Yes, and it's a nice netting product. It's interesting to people driving by it's fascinates them. Nevertheless, we don't do pick your own in any other crops because either they are damp, damp crops. And so we don't want people picking wet things like overripe raspberries and transmitting potentially germs and so forth. But we also realize to keep ahead of SW D, the Spotted Wing Drosophila fruit fly without spraying we have to go in every single day and pick if we don't do that, and if we leave it up to customers to decide what's right and what's not. We're going to have overripe fruit on our plants which is going to be home to fruit flies so we can get away from that by picking completely and thoroughly depending on the weather every one to two days.
20:11
Nick Rowley
Because the alternative to that is when the numbers of SW D get high enough is spraying very frequently like three to five days depending on the time and the product and the pressure from the pest which is just incredible amount of material and time and spread.
20:32
Ben Shambaugh
We plant and harvest most of our raspberry from fall bearing raspberry plants which are also known as everbearing raspberry plants so every year, we cut our raspberries to the ground at the end of the season. We skip the early or continuous harvest of those ever bearings and they come in with a vengeance about the 10th of August and we'll keep producing until after Columbus Day
21:02
Nick Rowley
since you're pushing your harvest to that window like in late summer early fall that gives you kind of an advantage in the market because you have a product when other people might not have it?
21:14
Ben Shambaugh
It could be if we were in an urban area but again, we are picking and freezing. So usually what we do with that crop is to sell it all at once at the end of the season. Start taking orders for frozen berries, we sell them both retail and wholesale. And then when the production season is over, sell it all and generally we do sell it off so there's virtually zero waste
21:45
Nick Rowley
that's awesome and that's just like a really good example of in your business how you have found a crop and then found a way that it works for you and you know your labor force and all that and then also have a market with it.
22:01
Ben Shambaugh
Our specialty is honeyberries here and we might as well jump into that. So honey berries are a shrub, they're a shrub that's native to circumpolar regions of the world whether it's Siberia, Northern Japan, islands of Scandinavia, and Canada. Its botanical name would love be lonicera caerulea. So it's a honeysuckle family. They're also honeyberries are also known as edible Blue honeysuckles, haskap depends on what part of the world you're from and what common terminology as we use the word honeyberry for ours because that's where we were led when we were first investigating the crop.
And we did get most of our initial information from the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon and so Bob Boers is a specialist there since the mid 90s. He's been collecting, selecting and hybridizing honeyberry plants and he released quite a few of the varieties to commercial production in Canada. Initially that's where we got our stock. So honeyberry plant is fairly vigorous, upright, fast growing shrub. Depending on varieties, they can grow from about two feet to eight feet tall. They're long lived, they produce annual canes and the growth of branches and canes can be up to two or three feet of growth in a year. They produce very early in their lifespan so they'll start producing the first year after you put them in the ground. Bob Bors once said that he could collect seeds from his honeyberry plants from the fruit of that year, so dry the seeds, plant them in the fall or winter and harvest off those plants the next year. So in a one year cycle, he could have some viable crop I'll be at small. So in 2013, we investigated varieties and I didn't know whether I could grow them, I didn't know how to grow them.
I knew that I was once again looking for some small fruit crops that I could put in and that not everybody else was growing and that could produce a commercially viable crop without an extraordinary amount of inputs and without an extraordinary amount of labor. So these plants grow to about the size of a highbush please Plant, they'll fill out to that size in about three or four years, maybe five years, and they produce a fruit that is blue. It's not anything like a blueberry. Fruit. It's elongated, smallest varieties produce elongated fruit that might be three quarters of an inch long by a quarter of an inch wide. It's a juicy fruit has seeds in it, and the skin and seeds dissolve in your mouth, so you never noticed them. The largest fruits that we grow are a variety called Aurora, that happens to be my favorite. And their fruits can be up to as much as inch and a half or an inch and three quarters long and as fat as your little finger. So they're good sized. We'll get into characteristics in a moment. So what does it take to grow a honeyberry? As I say, I didn't initially know where to grow them or how to grow them. There weren't any people in northern New England that I knew of that were growing them, at least commercially. So most of what I have learned is through trial and error. I decided to plant them at highbush blueberry spacing, which is for here, four foot by 10 foot. They flower very early in the spring. So by the 28th of April, generally there are a lot of flowers on these.
26:38
Ben Shambaugh
And the fruit starts to turn blue, about a month later, but it's not ripe. And that's the mistake that lots of people make in growing honeyberries. They think that like a blueberry, which becomes sweet as their set turns blue honeyberries take two weeks to turn sweet after they turn blue. So they start to ripen about the middle of June. And we're generally done harvesting by the end of the first week in July. back to how to grow them they're a fairly pH neutral plant. So they're purportedly flexible to a pH between five and a half and seven and a half. And we're thinking of them here as growing in tomato type soil fertile. They like to have quite a bit of nitrogen in the beginning of the year. They grow fast, and we irrigate them. And we're trying to make sure that the berries when they become harvestable, when they're ripening aren't stressed by lack of moisture. So I've learned over the years that it's very important to push the water to fruit crops when they're in their final two weeks before harvest.
27:55
Nick Rowley
So that's like really when it's they're already starting to turn blue. And then it's like two weeks after that, that you're really, you're harvesting them, I've certainly made that mistake of harvesting them too early. I'm pretty sure they're still tasty, but maybe not as tasty as they could have been.
28:16
Ben Shambaugh
As far as harvesting them. We were able to in our second year putting good size plants in the ground. Again, year one I call the year you're putting it in the ground in the spring, in the second year to get a cup of honey berries off of each plant generally, so fairly quick to produce. In the third year, we discovered birds. One of the interesting things about honeyberries which is unfortunate is that they're about the first fruit out in the world to ripen in the spring. And they're a magnet to Cedar waxwings here. And there have been some years when if we didn't put our nuts on which we learned to do in the fourth year. They would come in in hordes, as you would have remembered from an Alfred Hitchcock movie swarms of hundreds who are not afraid of you either. And interestingly, they're a protected species so you can't use alternative methods, let us say
29:27
Nick Rowley
so yeah, and I know a lot of strawberry growers have issues with the cedar waxwings and I've seen some paint rocks red and put them in. Yeah, it's interesting. I don't know if it really prevented a lot of damage but it probably startled a few of them, at least!
29:52
Ben Shambaugh
Well as we were talking about in terms of the honeyberries turning color that's well in advance of the strawberry. harvests so they're on the honeyberries before the strawberries are coming, and netting is very important now Ill get back a little bit to growing of them, but over the eight, nine years, nine seasons, I guess that we've grown them in year seven, we ended up deciding that it was worthwhile getting a bird repellent device. So we bought a fairly expensive tape version, and there's chips and speakers, we're invested in a sound system, solar powered sound system, which made irritating noises to Cedar waxwings. In particular, it's very elaborate, nicely made piece of equipment, which had absolutely no effect on cedar waxwings. And we lost everything that year. Okay, back to growing methodology and so forth. By the time we got to our third season, I realized that I could grow this crop. I can do it. And I didn't know yet how I was going to market it. But sometimes farmers are pretty stubborn, and they look at the question where they can grow something first, and how to market it second. But fortunately, thanks to our development of our Great Northern Berries website, we came across people who are interested in honeyberries and interested in buying them in a big way. So I made the decision then to commit to growing honeyberries We leased a parcel of land in a hay field, and have subsequently planted 3000 honeyberries on another property with the idea that all of that would be a wholesale product and frozen at harvest.
32:09
Nick Rowley
Do you have to prune these in any sort of way to promote either like ease of harvest or fruit size or anything like that?
32:17
Ben Shambaugh
Yes, so harvesting is a fascinating crop in that one, it actually starts to ripen. And you can tell just like with other crops that the berries start to fall off, they're dead ripe that you can actually shake the plant and all the fruit will come off. So it didn't take me long to realize that that was my method of harvest because I need to do it all myself at that point. And I am not going to be picking one berry at a time. So what we ended up doing was buying from Italy, all of shaking pneumatic shakers, so I have a portable air compressor gasoline air compressor on a big tired wagon that we pull out in the field with 200 foot pneumatic hoses on drums, and we can pull that out down the rows of our honey berries and shake them off the plants. Okay, so shaking off the plants, great idea works quite efficiently, fully loaded, fully mature honeyberry plant with potentially upwards of 10 pounds of fruit on can be shaken in a matter of two or three minutes. So what do you do with that when it's on the ground? Well, that's obviously not the point and they don't really want it to get to the ground. So we started with envisioning nets and right now I'm using version seven and version nine of our berry harvesting nets. The one that we use most to on really big plants very large plants is basically a piece of netting fabric suspended on a three quarter inch EMT type of electrical conduit frame that I've bent and welded to behave as a sled you slide underneath and around the stem of the plant roughly five feet by six feet with a handle on it and you collect the berries on that there's a little bit of a throat that is cut out of this frame so that it goes around the base of the plant and that has to be caught with a supplemental utensil if you will. And two people from both sides of the row can harvest a plant very quickly that way and then the net is tipped on its side and the berries rolled into a ball some sort of a harvest Luck. That works quite well. So when we have middle sized shrubs, and most of ours are in this range and this is segue-ing into your question about pruning our my vision of the best shaped plant for pruning is what's called a vase shape, meaning that it's a little bit open and narrow with the bottom tapers as it goes up and then as a fountain, it opens up over the top, so it could be sort of ice cream cone shape more or less and four to five feet high is ideal. So it takes quite a bit of pruning to get some of the species that we grow. And some of the varieties because we grow from hybrids of a couple of different species subspecies of these honeyberries to get them to behave in a shape that makes it easy for us to harvest them. It involves pruning the outside branches, thinning the inside of the plant so that sunlight gets to the middle, and limiting the overall amount of plant growth so that you're not dealing with jungle. In order for me, being a elderly sort of fellow, to harvest the canes off to prune and get rid of excess growth, I came up with an Italian battery powered lopper. So, with a lithium battery in a backpack, and a trigger device for a lopper on a two-foot handle. You can operate that all day long without a recharge and without bending over onto your hands and knees to get underneath the plants. So, on plants that are four or five years old, I may take as much as a third of the plant away. And I need to do that at least every other year. They're we're growing right now about 4000 plants. So that's quite a bit of work to do, but it generally is done in the fall.
37:14
Nick Rowley
This pruning technique, is this something that you've just kind of created based on your knowledge of pruning?
37:23
Ben Shambaugh
it's something I develop myself basically because of the harvesting nets that I have come up with. So I described the version five or so and that's looking like a sled. The one that I use for the middle size shrubs which is what we're using in our other leased orchard is a kind of an interesting gadget. It's 12 feet long. It has tandem wheels on it and is pulled by electric golf cart. It has a rail down the middle between the tandem tires that's 12 feet long and 610 inches wide that accepts six fruit lugs. So, the fruit lugs lay down low on top of the axles front to back one end to the other. And then on either side are 12 foot long nets that go down and are on arms electrically controlled arms so the arms can be dropped down with a push button to an electric motor. They're positioned right at the base of three plants on one side or three plants on the other because they're parallel nets and then subsequent net on wheels comes up the backside of each of those rows and you push it along. It's a hand pushed thing it interlocks with the first net so this is solar powered and it has it relies on batteries and it does nothing more than pick up the berries from potentially three plants on each side as you drive along. That's one of the hardest things is to get the berries up off the ground. Most of our berries are produced on plants with a production of average of three pounds but it can go up to as much as 17 pounds on a few plants that's quite a bit of berries. And if you're picking them up from the ground level all day long, it's hard on the back
39:31
Nick Rowley
so the berries get shaken off but is they're a lot of debris and like twigs and leaves that come too that you have to sort out?
39:38
Ben Shambaugh
so I've been working on and developing how to grow the plants how to shape the plants how to get shake the plants shape the plants then shake the plants and collect the berries. So now the berries are harvested off the plant. What we do at that point is we put them into a refrigerated trailer that I made out of a box trailer with insulation, a generator on the front and an air conditioner in it so we chill the berries as quick as we can. When we are done for the day over at the orchard where most of our production goes on, we bring the trailer back to the farm. berries are quite cool at that point. So they're hard. We take the lugs out which usually have about, oh, say 10 pounds of berries in a lug average. And with a leaf blower Makita rechargeable leaf blower. By tipping that slightly that lug you can very effectively blow out almost everything out of that lug and flip it around, blow it again. So you do that three times. And in about a minute. It's very clean. It's not perfect at that point, but it's very clean. At that point, we take them out of that harvest lug, put them into ventilated freezer lugs and put them in a walk in freezer. So when they're in the walk in freezer, we could have 60 lugs that need cleaning. So there are 60 lugs that are frozen. In the mornings we take them out and we hand pick in case there's something like a beetle that's got by or not usually sticks or twigs, they are very clean as far as that's concerned, but there might be immature fruit. It doesn't take very long to do that. And it's done again with hands that are hand sanitized, and very clean situations. We do that five or 10 pounds at a time put them into FDA approved, large bag we freeze them in again. And then later on package them into either five pound or 25 pound cardboard boxes,
42:00
Nick Rowley
So you're putting them in these totes, and are you selling them all wholesale?
42:08
Ben Shambaugh
we've had potentially four or five decent years of harvests last two or three of them are quite good. And so we still haven't caught up with the demand. I haven't explored all the different possibilities of ways that we could sell them. What we have done is we were fortunate to stumble on some wineries initially, and they've been supporting backbone of our production. We've also used honey berries, and had them added to and made into ice cream for our own sale. Honeyberry ice cream, which is excellent. We make a lot of jams ourselves and sell them here. Quite a lot of honeyberry jam, but we do about nine or 10 different types of jams. My wife was previously a baker and we have used them in the past in baked goods that we sold here. We're not doing that anymore. We're trying to figure out how to get our business world into box so that we can have a life outside of farming and we've reduced some of the aspects of our business but, and baking baked goods has been one of those. So, there are certainly many berries could certainly be used in juices. We sell them retail to people who come to the farm and what they use them for is as many people might use frozen blueberries, taking them out of the box, or the bag in the freezer, their own home freezer and putting them in smoothies or on ice cream or making cookies with them or whatever. But when we sell our fruits, they're all loose, so you can take a handful or a cup out without having to thaw anything. So it lasts all winter. I'm still eating some auroras from last summer on my cereal every morning. It works very well that way, but we sell to. We sold to restaurants who've used them mostly in some sorts of dessert products. We've sold them to distilleries, breweries, and wineries. It seems like there's enough of a market there for us because there aren't a lot of other people selling these. How big is the market? I really don't know. And I don't and I haven't explored shipping these any distance. We could sell them far and wide. I've had inquiries from as far away as Chicago in southern Canada, wanting to know if we had wholesale quantities of frozen berries to ship them and we just don't so I think there's a great deal of potential. Could people sell them and repackage them? Certainly, we've had a good deal of luck initially taking frozen honeyberries and vacuum sealing them in half pound or one-pound bags. And people love that. We don't any longer do that, because it's time consuming. And again, we're quite a remote rural location so we don't have enough product and customers to sustain that. So, we're really going for what's the easiest way to sell all of our crops. We do a frozen honey of frozen berry sale in August where we sell pre ordered quantities of our frozen all the frozen berries we grow. And a lot of retail customers order and buy them that way.
45:49
Nick Rowley
I've had honey berry jam Actually, I have some in my fridge right now. actually kind of funny story, Dave Handley I made it. He's an Extension small fruit specialist and pretty good jam maker too. But when I first had it, I, I thought it, it reminded me a lot of blueberry jam. And then I and I opened up another jar of it, and I don't quite think that anymore. It's I think it's unique. Maybe what it is, is delicious.
46:20
Ben Shambaugh
We talked earlier about brix. First of all of probably our highest Brix level has been 16 or 17 on honeyberries. Incidentally, that level is higher than we ever get off raspberries or blueberries or strawberries. So people don't always recognize the sweetness first, though, because it is tart. It's a tart fruit not unlike a sour cherry. In that the longer you keep a sour cherry on the tree, the sweeter it gets, and the less you notice that tart. However, the flavor of honeyberries, which I described as being somewhere between a blueberry, a raspberry, Blackberry and a plumb, and sometimes with cherry in there, the flavors of the different varieties vary considerably. And the tartness of those varieties vary considerably. So some of the varieties we grow are much better for fresh eating. Some are much better for jams, so we don't use the best fresh eating ones in our jam production. Aurora which is by far and away the nicest Fresh Market. honeyberry is not one I would use in jams. And some of the most tart ones, even though you would think they don't taste great are the most interesting in jams.
47:50
Nick Rowley
So do they all tend to produce right around the same time? Can you, you know switch up varieties to expand that window of harvest?
48:00
Ben Shambaugh
Generally, honeyberries are categorized as being early or late season and there are a few varieties that are called mid-season. If you were going up to Canada, that difference between an early and late season is far more profound than it is here. And if you went to the south of their range, which I tend to say to customers, they're not going to do really great below southern New Jersey they're probably very tight together there. We’re in Central New Hampshire in a sweet spot for growing honeyberries we have the best of both extremes, we don't have the heat and humidity and warm winters of down south and we don't have the extraordinarily cold winters here. But they're very hardy. quite sure they're hardy to zone two. But the difference between an early and late here is that an early would start to be harvestable about the middle of June in an average year and a late would start to be harvestable at the very end of June here with some crossover. There are a lot of people who would suggest that you need to cross pollinate different early seasons with different late seasons and the few that are mid-season can cross pollinate either end of the spectrum. But you do need more than one variety to pollinate honeyberries, so you have to have at least two berry varieties and they have to be in flower at the same time. We found that most of the late flowering and fruiting varieties are not as desirable to us as the early or mid-season varieties, principally because of SW D. So, they will come into the picture, the beginning of July or so around here, they don't really get to be terrible but and I've only seen them get into our fruit one year, but it was in the late season varieties. Right now, I'm not continuing to plant new varieties and experiment because we've got our hands full, but we've got 25 varieties in the ground, people are still coming up with more varieties. And the majority of what we have in the ground is early and mid-season. You can generally look at a plant and tell whether it's harvestable or not. And some of the earliest early seasons are only a few days out from the next early seasons.
50:53
Nick Rowley
And you mentioned you are getting most of these from of the University of Saskatchewan breeding program?
51:03
Ben Shambaugh
I can't remember her first name right now Thompson at the University of Oregon, who's done a lot of work with the Japanese varieties of honeyberries, which are seemingly all late varieties I've grown, some of them, they don't seem to have berries as big as the nicely sized ones from Canada. And a lot of the Canadian varieties are cross hybridize between early and late from Japanese to Siberian stock, it becomes a little murky as to exactly what their ancestry is, but you can tell the ones that are closest to their pure ancestry by their different plant shape and leaf shape. Turns out for us, a lot of the Japanese hybrids don't have the right plant structure. And I'm chopping down a number of them and discontinuing them because I just can't train them to be upright enough to get a net underneath doesn't mean that a retail customer might not like some of those varieties, which tastes good. But some of them are inclined to be so drooping and low spreading meaning maybe two feet high and five feet across land on the ground. And the berries even will get moldy and hand powdery mildew on them from that lack of circulation. So definitely, for our purposes, more upright plant form is
52:43
Nick Rowley
are you selling any potted, like to home gardeners and stuff like that are you taking selections from yours, and you're selling them out to consumers,
52:59
Ben Shambaugh
just like a lot of other plants in the world. Many of them are patented or proprietary. And we try not to step on other people's feet. There are some varieties that have less defined ancestry, I would say that are essentially named varieties of wild forms that came from Siberia that are not proprietary. They do propagate very easily. Whenever I try growing a plant, I try to propagate it as well, because it helps me understand how to grow them. But don't make a short story long. We do sell a lot of honey berry plants we have people coming from Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, Massachusetts, here because a we have a good selection and because we know how to grow them and give recommendations on them. A lot of people that come that far have had bad luck buying from nurseries, who've given them information that is not accurate and they've had failures. So yes, we sell most of our plants in six-quart pot. Our honeyberries sell at $20 a plant and they're generally a two-year-old plant when we sell them. And we usually have about 15 or so varieties for sale. I could give a quick list of the ones that I recommend to retail customers if you would like
54:38
Nick Rowley
yeah, if you if you would. Just I would think if you want to give a quick list of any one you'd recommend for any reason I think would be would be fine. That'd be awesome. Okay.
54:51
I have a list of about 12 which are sort of our favorites here both for taste and growing. Cinderella, polar jewel, Blue Moon, blue forest, Blue Bird, blue Nova, berry blue, Aurora, Borealis and tundra so about half of those are evolved from Canadian varieties and half from the west coast. Most of our young plants we buy from other people who are wholesale vendors have plugs essentially, A plug is for all intents and purposes too small to have success putting in the field or in a garden, you need to put them into something that will generate a root ball of at least a four-inch pot before you put them in the ground I've tried and the best success rates I've had been with two-quart pots or putting in the ground because they can dry out very quick in the spring. And they need all the moisture they can get in the spring. You can almost discontinue irrigation once you get to the early fall because being native to areas so far north they start to go dormant as early as the beginning of August here. So, the leaves are starting to turn right now just barely. But by the end of August, they may have lost their leads. And a lot of our customers have been very worried about that. But it's a natural phenomenon.
56:43
Nick Rowley
Have you ever received these bareroot are they always come in pots when you order in from the nurseries?
56:52
Ben Shambaugh
I have ordered them as what you might call two to three year old bare root shrubs which have a woody top and they might have two or three branches of foot to 16 inches tall. And I've had very poor luck with those. I don't ever buy them that way anymore. I've had a lot of luck with ones that are in two or three inch pots. You can both get them shipped and perhaps locally. Again, I would up pot them before trying to put them out in the real world. They're quite susceptible to baking dry when they're very young. I have also bought some bare roots of plugs because Canada has different requirements for shipping out plants with soil on them or without just like Europe. I bought some plugs from a nursery in Western Canada, British Columbia and bought them a few times that deep pot, two and a quarter inch pots and sell them they're rude and I've had very good success with those. I think the key is that you want to keep these plants actively growing and anything that makes them stall is going to cause mortality that you've
58:15
Nick Rowley
You tried propagating these, were you doing that from seed?
58:19
Ben Shambaugh
No Bors does. It University of Saskatchewan does propagate from seed and cross pollinates and develops hybrids that way. I would be quite sure that if you had an area that wasn't managed that there probably would be seedlings under the plants. We don't have that generally because we are harvesting everything that will come off the plant and we have mulch underneath our plants. We use a four foot landscape fabric as a permanent mulch and then we mow in between the rows so it's quite clean and I haven't noticed a lot of under seedlings. I'm sure you can do it. What you would get is totally unknown unless you're controlling pollination process and I'm not sure it would be worth it to tell you the truth. We do it from cuttings. We raise a lot of unrooted cuttings in this business and get unrooted cuttings from all over the world and I have developed a good successful very high success rate routing technique so I could take cuttings off honeyberries, and I did initially from time to time because I want to find out you know biologically and structurally how they behave. But no I don't do that because I do respect the owner's rights if you will of plant development.
59:55
Nick Rowley
I was just curious about the potential for it to become too invasive. Just because some honey suckles can be slightly invasive, in my experience with growing honeyberry. Which is pretty, very slim compared to yours! I never saw any seedlings come up under my bushes, and maybe that, you know, they were getting eaten by birds or me or whatever, but I never saw any popping up.
1:00:22
Ben Shambaugh
I have seen them occasionally. And I've seen occasionally the wild species of honeyberries in the woods around here, not related at all to the edible ones, but you're closely similar species. I've never heard from any of the networks that I'm connected with that they're invasive. I know some of the honeysuckles certainly can be most of those I believe are vinning type honeysuckles. But there is a lot of Lonicera tatarica, I believe might be the name of it, that I have found around here, and it's vigorous. But this is not closely related to that doesn't seem to have similar fruits. So that's all I know.
1:01:20
Nick Rowley
I think that bush honeysuckle, you see in the woods that’s the tatarian honeysuckle, it's the one with the red berries. Yeah, and those I don't believe are even edible. So Well, I think this is getting to the end of my questions. Is there any other you know, besides birds, and maybe some SW D that come in on the later producing varieties any other, big problems with growing honeyberry that you've seen,
1:01:58
Ben Shambaugh
they don't seem to be susceptible to any insect problems during their harvesting window, at the very end of their, the late berries. maturation, if you will, Japanese beetles can come in and eat those berries. I haven't had that problem myself, except very occasionally. Certainly, there can be some beetles that eat the foliage on the honeysuckles. But it's late in the year and doesn't seem to diminish their productivity. They produce on fresh growth in the spring. So, they'll put on new branches and new shoots at the base of their leaf intersections from the prior year. And they produce leaves and flower buds at exactly the same time. And nothing's getting into that cycle at that point in their development. As I say SW D may come into later varieties, especially further south hasn't been a problem for me. And that's one of the reasons I love it. We don't spray for anything, you can sometimes see mildew on some of the leaves. Generally, that's during the middle or latter part of July. Again, the plants have already put on all of their growth by that time, they're almost at the point of going dormant. And whether you could describe it as sunscald which turns the leaves kind of a bronze or actually manifests powdery mildew, which can be a great powdery shade. Either those can come in at the very end of their foliage season. I've never had a problem with them. diminishing fruit capacity or weakening the plants to things do weaken the plants though. I was out of town last year during September and we did have some drought damage in some parts of our field even though most of the plants had lost their leaves at that point. And I don't remember what the other one was. But there's one other issue which is pollination because they flower so early in the year, which is starting the end of April. One year we saw no pollinators around which is unusual because usually the bumble bees come out of the ground at exactly that time. And so you have to get them pollinated before the middle of May. And so subsequent to that year when there weren't enough pollinated I buy bumble bee hives. So these are class bee hives that are put in the orchards. Usually about the first of May. It's pretty cold but Bumblebees get up early, then they work late in the day, and they'll work in the cold. So people always ask us, why don't you get some honey bees, and they are too, if they don't coincide with this crop very well.
1:05:17
Nick Rowley
Any last notes about the honey berry crop?
1:05:21
Ben Shambaugh
I would say I'd encourage people to try them. I encourage people to taste them first, which I didn't have the ability to do when I first got into it. Because there are a few people who say, they really don't like that flavor. It's a little, they might describe it as bitter. It's quite possibly because it wasn't ripe. Yeah. But try some if you can get ahold of some that are fully ripe, they're delicious. It's an interesting and deep flavor compared with some of the other fruits we grow. You sort of feel it in all parts of your mouth, I think it's very easy to grow. doesn't have a lot of bugs or disease. But be wary of birds
1:06:04
Nick Rowley
This has been great. And thank you once again for taking the time to meet with me today. It's it's apparent that you have a lot going on down here. So, I really appreciate it.
1:06:15
Ben Shambaugh
Oh, thank you.
1:06:18
Heather Bryant
Thanks again for joining the conversation about agriculture in the North Country. And be sure to check out our web page extension.unh.edu forward slash north where you can find this podcast information about the North Country fruit and vegetable conference, and instructions for participating in episode discussions. The North Country fruit and vegetable Podcast is a production of the University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension in equal opportunity educator and employer. views expressed in this podcast are not necessarily those of the university its trustees or its volunteers. inclusion or exclusion of commercial products in this podcast does not imply endorsement. The University of New Hampshire US Department of Agriculture in New Hampshire counties cooperate to provide extension programming in the Granite State. Learn more@extension.unh.edu