Weeds and Berries Part 2

Weeds and Berries Part 2. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

Tim Miller with WSU has spent some time in Scotland studying how weeds can affect the the quality and nutritional value of things like raspberries, black currents and others. He will be heading back over for the second round of trials in May.

MILLER: Anytime you do ag stuff as you know, you’ve got to have two years of data before you really have much sense for - do we have a trend going on or does it respond completely different this year? And if we see a similar type of results the second year that would be an indication that we’ve got something really going on here.

Of course there are many factors that need to be considered including the way the plants are grown in Scotland compared to here in the Northwest. A couple of years ago the British Isles went through a severe drought.

MILLER: It’s really interesting that you mention that because last year was one of the wettest record years. At least in the area where I was at they had five months that were in the top 5 rainfall months that they had ever had in their 30 years they’ve been keeping records. Completely opposite kind of weather than they had 2 years ago.

And he says those are the kind of questions they want answers to.

MILLER: Did the responses we saw, was that more due to weather conditions - presumably different this year. They’re already much colder than they were last year as far as the start of the year but since we’re having such different weather I wonder if that’s going to be a bigger role than say the weed that happens to be growing there. And hopefully we’ll kind tease out that information from the 2 years of data.

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