Michigan Camp Meeting 2024: As For Me and My House

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Berry Bounty: A Guide to Growing Your Own Delicious Berries

Gary Hailig

Mike Messer

01 The Why of Gardening

02 Growing Strawberries

03 Growing Blueberries

04 Growing Grapes

05 Growing Blackberries and Raspberries

You are about to enjoy a presentation recorded at the 2024 Michigan Conference Camp Meeting held at Cedar Lake, Michigan.

We pray that the Lord will bless you as you listen.

Our Heavenly Father, we thank you so much for another beautiful day.

As we come close to the hours of Sabbath, we're looking forward to the rest and working on our relationship with you as people have been doing all week at camp meeting.

We pray that you'll bless this presentation and everyone here.

And with the knowledge that we learn, we can go out and grow some beautiful fruits and give you glory for our success.

Okay, so I don't think this 1 will take as long as strawberries, but what I'll do when we're finished with whatever time we have left, I'll answer questions.

If some of you aren't going to a class and you have other questions on anything that deals with horticulture, I'll hang around as long as you want me to.

So my Bible text today is Lamentations 4.9.

It says, "...those slain by the sword are better off than those who die of hunger, for those pine-away stricken for the lack of fruits of the field." And Ellen White had some comments too.

This is, I think it's a diary entry of some sort, and it said, the weather was warmer on March 30th, and she set out some raspberries, set out the raspberries, went to the Manchester's for strawberry plants, got some currant bushes, sent off 3 letters.

The next day she planted a patch of strawberries.

I guess somebody else was writing this for her.

2 weeks later, she wrote, spent most of the day making a garden for my children, feeling, feel willing to make some, let's try that again.

Feel willing to make home as pleasant for them as I can, that home may be the pleasantest place of any of them.

Boy, I wish I could have hung out with her and did some gardening.

So, notice I didn't say raspberries, but brambles, because raspberries are just 1 of the different brambles, and you'll see some of the others in a little bit.

There are quite a few of them, but we're going to talk about the ones that you may be familiar with.

It's both a perennial shrub and it has a perennial crown, which means that it survives from year to year.

And the shoots are what we call the fruit, the canes.

We have 2, one's called a primal cane, one's called a fruiting cane or a floral cane.

They have shallow roots, but they can spread all over the place.

I have mine contained in a raised bed that's about 10 inches high, and I put another raised bed about 3 to 4 feet away to the north, and there are roots, there are new raspberries coming up in that bed.

I hadn't filled in the bed with soil yet and put the things in that I wanted to, but I have raspberries in there, so I have to dig those out.

And there's lots of varieties which we'll talk a little bit about.

So I made this little chart of bramble types.

This is not all the bramble types there are.

So we have red and yellow raspberries, and their growth habit tends to be erect, and you can see the hardiness zone where they will do well.

Means that they're not hybrid crosses of any kind.

So we have black raspberries, we have purple raspberries, and we have blackberries.

And I'll tell you the difference between the 2 in a minute.

Then we have boysenberries, and boysenberries are a cross between loganberries, raspberries, and blackberries.

Now, Loganberries, if you move down a little bit here, it is the North American blackberry crossed with a European raspberry species.

And then we have, so they took a Loganberry and then recrossed it with other raspberries and blackberries to get boysenberries, and it's a really nice fruit.

They're a little on the edge of whether or not they're hardy, but in the literature that I was looking at, they said 5 to 9, so you should be able to grow them, but you know how Michigan's weather can be.

We can have 60 degrees today and freezing tomorrow, and that's a little rough on things like boysenberries.

Then you've probably heard the term dewberry, and dewberries are really blackberries, the trailing type of blackberries.

And then there's a Tayberry, and I didn't want to get ahead of that quickly, but the Tayberry is a blackberry crossed with a red raspberry.

But the Tayberry really isn't supposed to be hardy in Michigan.

Now with the new zones, we're now zone 6, at least in my area.

But you'll notice that this 1, the Tayberry, has to have a pollinator, which means that it cannot, the pollen cannot fertilize its own flowers, which other raspberries can do.

So that means you're going to have to have some other fruit there to cross-pollinate it.

Red raspberries on the left, then we have the golden raspberries.

They're basically the same botanical plant, just different colors.

Then the purple raspberries, they're not as large as the red and the yellows.

Then we have blackberries, and we have blackberries that are starting to ripen right now.

The birds have spread them all over my yard.

And then there's the boysenberry right here.

And I bought some boysenberry jam on Amazon.

Amazon's a great place to find stuff that may not be in the local store.

If you haven't tried it, you really need to try that.

As you can see, they look like a cross between a blackberry and a raspberry.

Then there's the Tay berries, then there's the blackberry there, and then the Dewberries, you can obviously tell they're blackberries.

So as I mentioned before, in the first year, most of these berries will produce what's called the primal cane.

It's a vegetative cane, doesn't flower, and then you'll have the floral cane.

Now we do have something called ever-bearing raspberries, which means that they will flower and produce fruit on the floral or the primal cane the first year they come up.

And then they will die back a little bit during the winter and they will produce a second crop the following season.

And we'll talk a little bit more about those.

So, some examples of cultivars, for instance, latham is a common 1, and there'll be some more a little bit later, And some of the fall raspberries are what we call ever-bearing raspberries.

2 really good ones are Caroline and Heritage.

Caroline's a bigger version of it, but it's quite flavorful also.

And so if you were to plant, say, caroline, when those first primal canes come up, it'll produce its first crop late summer going into the fall.

Those primal canes will die back a little bit and then they'll produce a second, what's considered an inferior second crop, but you still get a second crop.

Whereas if you were growing latham, it's only going to produce once, so you get the primal cane the first year, no fruit, no flowers, and then on that same cane the second year it produces its flowers, and after that it's done.

And then blackberries, we have what we call the erect type, which they tend to grow pretty much straight up, and then we have the trailing type, which they will flop all over the place unless you put them on a trellis.

And then there are what we call semi-erect, which is kind of a cross between the 2.

But most of our blackberries are summer-bearing blackberries.

But there are some new cultivars out of Arkansas, and I'm not sure if they're hardy in Michigan or not, where they actually will produce some blackberries on the primocane, which means they're like everbearing blackberries.

So the way to tell the difference between a raspberry and a blackberry, you'll notice that when you pick the raspberry, it has a hollow core.

Whereas when you pick the blackberry, and usually you have to pinch it off the stem, the core is not hollow.

So you can just look at any of these fruits and tell which 1 it's more like just by looking at whether the core is hollow or not.

And they love the spread and they'll spread quite a ways.

And what ends up happening, if you don't keep them under control, you'll have a raspberry thicket.

And it's kind of hard to pick something like that.

And we've already talked about this, about the fruit buds and all those sorts of things, so we don't really need to keep going on that.

These are some other cultivars that grow well in Michigan of the summer raspberries.

And the summer raspberries come in around July, about right after the strawberries, too.

So, can be is 1, and these are some of the characteristics of each, lathum and titan.

And you'll notice that lathum is very hardy.

It's an older cultivar, but it's going to give you good staying power, whereas Titan is a little less.

Larger fruit, good yields, but they tell you the quality is fair.

So the berries may be a little soft, they might not be as flavorful, whereas Canby's good fruit quality and Latham is fair, but still raspberries have pretty good distinct flavor.

And you can tell the difference between, say, something with fair quality and, say, if you pick heritage, which is really a good raspberry flavor.

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Series

Berry Bounty: A Guide to Growing Your Own Delicious Berries

05 Growing Blackberries and Raspberries

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Seminar 3

Planting by the Blueprint - Trees

47m

Berry Bounty: A Guide to Growing Your Own Delicious Berries

03 Growing Blueberries

58m

Gardening Tips: Preparing for Eternity in the Dirt

03 Organic Herbicides and Pesticides Made at Home

28m

Growing Specialty Crops

Small Fruits

52m

Special Interests

Berry Basics for Beginners

1h 24m

Session 4

Blueberries

1h

Level 2 Home & Market Gardeners

Berry Good Strawberries

48m

Special Interests

Guiding Principles for a Successful Orchard Part 2

1h 23m

Intensive: Organic Blueberry Production

Organic Blueberry Production - Part 5

43m

Intensive: Bagging the Bounty

Bagging the Bounty Part 2

44m

Sound Doctrine