Weeds and Berries Part 3

Weeds and Berries Part 3. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

Tim Miller, WSU researcher has been working with berry growers in Scotland to find out how weeds and herbicides affect fruit quality.

MILLER: One of the things I found interesting, too is that they do raise their raspberries quite differently than we do. It’s all in these high tunnels. They will sometimes have rooted raspberries in those tunnels into the ground but sometimes they’re just in these small plastic pots and they keep them there for a couple three years at which time they just kind of harvest the fruit off of them and keep them going.

He says they get about 6 weeks of hand picked berries off these cultivars.

MILLER: They really are fairly tightly managed compared to what we do in most of our fields here. We may cane burn the first crop of the private canes coming up to kind of improve our yield as well as manage some of the new growth of the raspberry but they’ll do it two or three times typically to just maintain a good picking canopy.

Miller heads back to Scotland in May to continue the research that he hopes can help not only berry but perhaps grape producers.

MILLER: In a way we’re looking at slightly different systems although they still have the same herbicides that we use in the raspberry over there that we could use over here. Even in that case, we see a response on something that’s a very tightly managed system it will be interesting to see perhaps what’s going on over here and if there are some changes we might want to recommend to enhance that final fruit quality.

That’s today’s Fruit Grower Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.