The concept of an event came about because I really needed some advice about pruning my plants. Kirsten Jensen has been a delegate at several International and Euroworks conferences that Matt and I have attended. As a berry and fruit agronomist in Sweden she is highly respected by the European sea buckthorn community. It is an unfortunate truth that the UK does not have expertise in sea buckthorn, so inviting Kirsten to come to the UK to look at the plants at Devereux farm was an obvious choice.
It is part of working with sea buckthorn that knowledge transfer comes naturally. Every two years there is a Euroworks conference which attracts 80 or so delegates from across northern Europe. Everyone interacts and exchanges experiences. Many do compete with each other, but there is an open discussion which in some people’s minds could qualify as open innovation – the art of co-operating and hoping that the result will be partnerships and innovative product development.
When Kirsten agreed to come to the UK it seemed a golden opportunity to use her visit as a focus to bring together those that are actively working with sea buckthorn.
As Kirsten agreed to provide a presentation on growing sea buckthorn it seemed right to develop the meeting as one for prospective growers. The result was a really good mix of interests. Growing; product design and manufacturing; agronomy; import with people coming from across the country.
Running this type of event for the first time creates pressure in terms of hoping that the event is worthwhile. Will speakers fill the day and keep interest throughout.
The result though I think was positive all through.
One of the elephants that I wanted to let loose in the room was to look at the economics of growing the crop. As we have not harvested a crop yet, we have not hard figures on outputs, but we are starting to accumulate costs of production. The stark fact is that, as with growing wheat in a global market in 2015, growing sea buckthorn as a commodity requires a good yield; management that is in control of pests and diseases; and a minimum use of inputs. This this scenario there may be a profit, but in the UK we are still looking at hand picking. Hand picking is fine if the labour is free. The model for an orchard may therefore be up to one hectare ( 1000 plants). Over that and harvesting requires bought in staff to ensure that the crop can be picked when ripe. If minimum wage is £7/hr and economic living wage closer to £8 – then add tax and national insurance and possibly an agency fee for finding staff and costs accelerate to over £10/hr. Talk is that hand picking rates are around 2-3 kg per hour if a plant has thorns and all of a sudden these berries are expensive.
Establishment costs again depend upon scale. Ideally the site needs to be drained. Weeds need to be bought under control. Any pan under the top soil needs to be broken. pH needs to be adjusted. Try to establish without these and you risk slow growth disease and even loss of plants.
Most of Kirsten’s farmers are organic. She advocates the use of a Swedish manufacturer fungus based biopesticide for the control of disease. This can be used as a drench when first planting, or as a spray to reduce the risk of fungal diseases. Her presentation showed impressive results following multiple applications on diseased plants.
She is a great advocate also of clean rows. No weeds around the plants – and for this, the use of a finger weeder. For me I have one field that has the plants growing in grass. The main field now has weeds in rows being surpressed by green waste mulch. There is still an issue with broad leaved weeds along the edge of the mulch and a finger weeder will solve this.
Establishment costs also depend upon the source of plants and whether they are one or two year old cuttings.
Planting, as with harvesting can be at no cost if you do it yourself, but if not, digging two year old cuttings into clay can be hard work and with the cost of a cane and some mulch and fungal control costs could rise to £1/plant. Of course not everyone has clay.
Kirsten also advised digging deep into the soil so allow the tap root easy access into the water table.
The use of a mechanical post hole digger is useful for this.
Having established plants then comes the management.
Growing sea buckthorn takes attitude. It requires accepting what sea buckthorn is. I have grown my plants as young plants needing to grow on to maturity. Hence my german plants now have a stem that is 2-3cm across. After our meeting we went to the farm to look at the plants. The principle issue I had wanted from Kirsten’s visit was advice about pruning. The fixation that berries grow on old wood creates an idea in the mind that old wood is good wood and that age creates better yield.
That is fine in the wild, but farmed plants are not in the wild. We are looking for high yields not high plants.
So the advice to me is that I have to reduce the size of my plants, cutting out mature branches to bring on new growth that will provide the crop in two/three years time. It is a form of coppicing. It accepts that the plant has real vigour to replace woody growth and that the old just grows longer and moves berry production further away from the stem. The plant grows bigger and bigger and in my windy conditions with wet winters that de-stabilise the soil plants grow too large with the risk of them blowing over.
I also have to remove secondary stems from these aging plants so they need serious management which will impact on harvest until the new growth comes through to replace the old.
The next query I had for our Swedish agronomist related to why two mature plants had died last year.
These were planted in 2009 and in full berry but in June/July there leaves desiccated and the whole plant died.
The answer was quite simple.
I had in the previous winter had a muntjac deer come through the site and it nibbled the bark of the plants. in some cases this was more than nibbling, it was chewing around the stem. As a response I used some old spiral tree guards to wrap around the stems to prevent the deer from doing any more damage. In hindsight I should have taken these off.
The plastic allows fungi to develop between the bark and the guard. It was this that infected the plant and killed it.
So to prevent deer attack again I am going to need to use wider shrub guards or rounds of netting secured with canes into the ground. Muntjac are not a big problem, but one hungry deer in the middle of winter can do a lot of damage.
The next issue relates to one of the principle characteristics of sea buckthorn.
The frankia bacteria on the roots that fixes its nitrogen.
When one grows young plants there is a natural concept to give it extra feed to ensure that it has enough food and water. This might provide vigour but with vigour comes two problems. First the plants become lazy. the frankia do not establish as the plant does not feed them so the ability to reduce one’s inputs is lost.
For me that means that the use of chicken pellets is both wasting money and reducing one of the principle reasons why one can call sea buckthorn a sustainable crop. Over feeding the plant to lose the frankia is just a waste.
Kirsten in her presentation showed us some ways to rejuvenate the Frankia and that needs to be a principle management job for this year.
Overfeeding and watering also impacts on encouraging disease such as stigmina causing branch die back.
Some water in times of extreme hardship seems to be a good thing. Routine water maybe is not so good. I need to check this against german work as irrigation is an aspect of creating high yields. Probably this is still controlled irrigation against a scenario of lack of water, rather than routine watering whether it is or is not necessary.
The final point that has come across from Kirsten’s talk on managing sea buckthorn is the fact that the cut and freeze harvesting method is not a matter of pruning off viable berry bearing branches. It is a matter of pruning to encourage new growth that is a must for the viability of the crop in the future. Hand picking is an option if numbers of plants are small and facilities unavailable, but for me I see cut and freeze as the way forward. Accepting this will allow for expansion of my crop because I can see improved harvesting rates. It is possible that in this field of harvesting mechanised options both exist and will probably expand. This is key to developing the crop’s viability in the UK for the future.