Warm weather

Bud swell on our fruit bushes.

January arrived just like December ended:

Warm, warm, and more warm. We had daytime highs in the 50s to low 60s and nighttime lows in the 30s to 50s. These are April temperatures not January temperatures. Two weeks in to the month the high was 60 degrees and then two days later the high was 33 degrees. In the last week of the month, we had several days with highs in the low teens and lows down to negative 5 to 9 degrees.

People really enjoy these warm temperatures, but these wreak havoc with plants. They want to wake up way too early.

I have to admit that the warm temps had me wanting to get outside to start pruning and working the soil. But it is way too soon to start pruning the trees and grapes and most of the bushes. When you start pruning, you are telling the plants it is time to start waking up, not that it will really matter this year. I think most of the buds have frozen, except possibly the haskaps, currants and the goose berries. These are very tough plants and need a lot of cold weather to reset for another year’s production.

The fresh fruit season here is short, only about three months. This really limits the time we have to enjoy all our wonderful fruits in season.  As a lot of you know we have ice cream every year at our field day. We started this because a lot of our fresh fruit is not avaible on that particular day and we wanted everyone to be able to taste it all. We have also been making jellies and jams for the past several months.

 We have been experimenting with fruit chews (jellied fruit) and hand pies.  The primary ingredient in the chews is our fruit puree. Our fruit chews are closer to a fancy Pate de Fruits than to a traditional gummy. We are also working on hand pies, think a super delicious pop tart. These are made with our fruit as well. Both the chews and the hand pies will let our friends, meaning everyone, enjoy a beautiful taste of summer all year long. We hope to have both of these avaible in the farm store starting in March.

We thought it would be wonderful to be able to teach jelly making. To that end, we applied and received an educational grant from Montana agritourism. With this grant will be able to purchase the necessary items to have up to five canning stations. We will teach the classes in our shop. We expect to start offering these classes this march, as well.

February and March are conference time. We just returned from a great conference in North Dakota. We visited other growers and attended presentations. We talked raspberries with a grower outside of Williston, a couple growing elder berries south of Fargo and people and fruit in between. Later this month we will be attending the Montana Berry Growers conference in Missoula.

To wrap up January, it was both challenging and productive. Hope everyone is enjoying the longer days as much as we are.