Winter's End...

Winter is coming to a close soon, and we are finishing the winter work out in the field.

The workers are still pruning and tying, a few acres to go. They need to get it done as soon as possible. Those rainy, rainy weeks of December and snow in January were not conducive to field work, so we are a little behind.

Because we are a small berry farm, we usually hire just a few guys to do the pruning and tying. This gives them work all winter and helps us to get them to come back each year. A lot of farms have big crews in during the fall and get it all done in a short time. Knowing they have months of steady work is more attractive than working as part of a crew on a two week job – and then having to find another job. And for us it’s not easy to assemble a big crew for a two week interval, and then nothing more. The bigger farms have plenty of acres to keep big crews busy for quite a while.

A last unpruned row...

But sometimes our guys decide to work in potatoes and let the pruning sit. I admire them for trying to get as much work as they can. Potato work is a short season in the fall. However, sometimes it backfires on them when the weather gets bad. They spent a fair bit of the good pruning weather working elsewhere; then couldn’t work in the bad weather and now we have had to hire some extra people in to get caught up. So they lost some of the work that we had kept for them. A calculated risk for them, I guess. A little nerve-wracking for us when things are getting close to budding. You don’t want to be man-handling the canes when tender buds are beginning to appear.

Fortunately this winter we have not had any weeks of Faux Spring. You know, those days where the temperature is up in the upper 50’s, maybe even hitting 60° and all the growing things believe it’s time. But it is really not and a week later it is 20° and tender shoots are getting frozen.

Once pruned and tied, Randy takes the cane chopper down each row to make the old canes easier to decompose into the soil.

We are very glad that hasn’t happened this year. It was bitter cold that snowy week in January (9° the lowest) and that may have caused some damage, but it did not last as long as last year’s February winds. We don’t expect a catastrophe of 2019 proportions, where we had to cut down 10 acres of fruiting canes because they died.

It has stayed nice and cool overnight, lots of frosts, 40’s during the day – great weather to keep the berries from waking up too early.

But now it’s almost time, so the winter work needs to be completed.

We have a few acres of mature canes and babies left to tie.

It’s really satisfying to look at the field and see all the chaos of canes has been put into order. Now we start looking for swelling buds and tiny green leaves.

Cane chopper in action