2015 will go down as my one day harvest and as with all trials – another learning curve.
In their native Siberia, most of the varieties that I have are harvested from August 20th to mid September. The climate I have here at Devereux farm has such a mild winter that we have occasional frosts. Frosts that occur maybe over a period of two to four days but the cold does not stay in the ground nor penetrate deep into the soil. Air temperatures fall across the autumn down to freezing, so the sea buckthorn plant drop their leaves in October as one would expect. But then starting with the variety Klaudia – 7 to 10 days into January, leaf buds start to crack open. The plants do not develop into full leaf until late March, but they do come out of dormancy.
The consequence is an earlier ripening period. The varieties that I have are ripening in the following order. Starting July 11; Etna followed by Klaudia and Inya. Elizaveta with Chuiskaya a week later, Sudarushka into the third week of July with Altaiskaya ripening but with a few yellow berries still at the end of the month. My Jessel and Rosinka are still too young to be bearing berries yet.
The Latvian varieties, Goldrain, sunny, mary and tatjana I am expecting to develop over the next 10 days. They have yielded well for their first year. I expect these will be coming at the same time at the sirola and finnish varieties.
The next topic I have to cover is the reason why my Siberian bushes have only taken a day to harvest. Shrews living in the inter-row margins have come out at night and systematically taken the berries as they ripen. Some berries completely disappear, some are eaten half through; some are left as empty skins hanging on the branches.
I have maintained these inter-row margins in order to keep an area for insects that might be useful as predators for other insects. The plan had been this year to place compost along all the rows between the plants to suppress the weeds.
This did not happen because the compost thrower that is being designed for me is not ready. It will be for this winter. As it is coming with its own tractor I have relied on-ride on mowers this season rather than buy a machine that would have become surplus. As a solution it is just not adequate to keep on top of the whole site.
The nature of this issue is one of finding funding for a novel idea in an era of recession. Bank borrowing was the order of the day pre 2008. Grant funding focuses on priority and outcomes that will benefit the widest spectrum of beneficiaries. Funding from own business profit looks to a mix of priorities and trims development opportunity on absolute need not on desirable need.
I know that we will grow a successful crop of Siberian sea buckthorn berries, alongside german commercial varieties. The crop will be grown without the use of pesticides and it will be grown to optimise quality. This might not deliver the most profitable outcome now, but farming is about a yearly cycle that one tries to improve year on year throughout a working life. The fact that I do not have a crop this year of the size I wanted is a huge disappointment, but there will still be Latvian and german berries to harvest. The disappointment is however tempered by lessons learnt..
All was not lost however – there were Siberian variety berries to taste this year and they are special. Special enough to know that mastering the growing of these plants to give a viable crop is worth perfecting. It will just take another year.