Meet Hamish Graham

This year at both Haskap Canada's AGM as well as at the University of Saskatchewan's Haskap Day (Day 1) Hamish Graham (Heavenly Blue Honeysuckle Orchards Ltd.) showed his video on the establishment of his haskap orchard, now tens-of-thousands-of-haskap-plants-strong. It is available on You Tube and can be accessed here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5Ar0H_65cQ. Hamish along with partner, Ray Getz, are clearly men on a mission. Thanks for sharing this with us!

Haskap Day 2: Truly A Fruitful Adventure!

Marty and Claire Elder write about the tour of their farm and fruit processing facilities near Outlook, SK, which was the featured highlight of the second day of this year's Haskap Days:

Our Haskap Days farm tour was awesome; about 40 people came to our farm on July 9th to see our orchard and processing facility as day 2 of Haskap Days 2011. There were people from B.C., Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and theUSA. We enjoyed having everyone and hope you all went away with a little more knowledge about haskap and the fruit processing industry! Despite the windy day that it was, we hope everyone was able to enjoy their day with us. If anyone has pictures they would like to share with us, we would appreciate that as we did not take many pictures that day. One "little person" who was here with their mom and dad left behind a brown hoodie. If the owners would contact us, we would be happy to get it back to you.

Thanks to everyone for coming to visit, and have a great summer!

Marty & Claire Elder
Fruitful Adventure
Outlook, Sask.

Meet Bernis And Jim Ingvaldson - www.haskapusa.com

Bernis Ingvaldson was a participant at this year's Haskap Day. She and her husband, Jim are currently in the process of planting a fruit orchard near Bagley, MN. She posted a wonderfully written article on her experience at the University of Saskatchewan Field Day last Friday on one of her websites. You can access it on PDF here:

http://www.honeyberryusa.com/info/2011HaskapDayUofS.pdf

In her write-up she includes links to her You Tube recording of the university's Joanna-3 Harvester at work:

http://youtu.be/QUC5OquV66E
http://youtu.be/2qhl0iKAgc0

The address for all her fruit-related sites are:

Honeyberry USA: The Honeyberry Farm (blog)
Haskap USA: Tracking Edible Blue Honeysuckles Across The USA (blog)
Honeyberry USA (commercial website)

VERY nice, Bernis!!! We'll be sure to stay tuned...

Haskap Day 1 Highlights - U of SK Field Lab

This year Haskap Day at the University of Saskatchewan began with registration, a brief overview of the day's activities, and then heading to the field for touring the various research plots, a mechanical harvesting demonstration, and background and tasting of newly acquired and potential varieties. We returned in time for lunch and then listened to several presentations in the afternoon covering: research, planting an orchard, and Haskap Canada.

Here's the university's new Joanna-3 harvester that was fired up for us and about to get to work on a row of haskap...

Formalities aside, Haskap Day at the Field Lab is a great chance to meet propagators, producers, marketers, and developers. In addition to the words spoken in the field, the afternoon always provides a wealth of insight. Some of them from this year included:

- pay attention in the future to the roles of polyphenols for marketing perhaps all aspects of the plant: quercetin, cyanadin, luteolin

- that 23 days is required from flowering to fruit turning blue

- that the first and longest phase of fruit production (cell division) involves linear fruit growth and high respiration, and that in the second phase (cell expansion) respiration drops and anthocyanins are metabolized

- that anthocyanins are easily degraded with heat (e.g. boiling)

- that perhaps watering is best correlated with berry ripening?

- that perhaps diurnal differences in temperature, UV intensity, and daylight length are correlated with increased antioxidants?

- whether the red leaves in some varieties are an indication of berry anthocyanin content?

- that berry formation is directly related to available sunlight...and pruning practices might need to reflect this

-that since light is used to set next year's berry crop, it may be important to prune plants after harvest rather than waiting until next spring?

- that roughly an average of 80,000 haskap have been planted over each of the past several years.