The Berry Grower

Small Scale Organic Fruit Production in the 21st Century

Blake Cothron

• Publisher: New Society Publishers
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780865719651
• eBook ISBN: 9781771423540
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Small Business
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Dig into the fruits of your labor! Profitable, innovative organic fruit farming strategies and skills for modern growers of any scale

AN INNOVATIVE GUIDE for growing and marketing organic small fruits and berries, The Berry Grower offers intelligent strategies and solutions for successful small-scale, non-chemical fruit production in the 21st century. Coverage includes:

• History, innovations, and 21st century challenges in modern fruit farming
• Creating your own market farming reality
• Farm planning for efficiency and profitability
• Factoring in climate change, drought, and extreme weather
• Soil fertility, efficient weed management, and organic pest control
• Modern tools of the trade for efficiency
• Harvesting, fruit handling, and packing
• Fruit profiles including raspberries, blackberries, strawberries, currants, gooseberries, figs, tomatoes, and more, including new cultivars
• Innovative marketing methods and thinking beyond fresh fruit with multi-product strategies to maximize profit
• Learn from other experts through interviews with successful growers and marketers from diverse areas around the USA.

From the market garden and small farm to the homestead and backyard, The Berry Grower is the essential guide for both new and aspiring organic small fruit growers and seasoned farmers looking to produce high- quality organic fruits and products for local markets and self-sufficiency.

PART 1 The Basics

1 Why Small Scale, Small Fruits?

The fruits of Paradise dangling down from green leafy bowers, so heavily laden they nearly touch the ground; flowers humming with honeybees and ripe fruit dripping sweet nectar in the sun.... There is something about fruit that conjures up these archetypal images, in ways that kale and radishes simply do not. Ancient Vedic and other histories tell us the Earth used to hand us Her bounty in much, much greater generosity, with little to no labor on our part, and no doubt we accepted it much more gracefully.¹ Today we must toil and sweat to beg Her fruits from those somewhat laden branches.²

Why small fruit growing?

Organic fruit is delicious, healthy, and fruit sells! Through a modest planting of small fruits such as berries, figs, and tomatoes, you can not only feed yourself but, if you’re a market grower, you can stack your existing market table with piles of high-value colorful fruit. This alone can provide a strong customer draw and set you apart from other market growers. Strategically adding a small fruit planting to your market operation will increase your overall labor very little but will bring many benefits.

Likewise, converting your backyard from grass into fruit production is also a very rewarding process. As well as harvesting household fruit, there is also the viable possibility of marketing excess fruit—as well as the seeds, cuttings, and fruit plants themselves. These products are high value and in demand and can often be harvested from the same planting.

Although, in the first quarter of the 21st Century, widespread availability of USDA Certified Organic fruit in supermarkets is now fairly common, the quality is just not the same as locally grown and yet the price tag is still very high. Demand for high quality, ripe, hand-picked, local organic fruit is rising exponentially. This wide-open niche is there for the skilled, strategic market grower to fulfill.

However, I must advise some caution. Fruit farming is not something I would recommend most people take on as a full-time occupation. This book is not about becoming a full-time fruit farmer, nor is it about farming organic fruit on 50 acres. It’s about equipping yourself with practical knowledge so you can understand how adding small fruits or berries to your market farming operation, starting a micro-growing operation on an acre or less, or just growing in your backyard for fun and profit can be done successfully. I have placed home and market growing recommendations in Part 2, after each individual fruit is detailed. The techniques and fruits described will work just as well in a backyard setting as on the small farm and will have you set up for success no matter your scale or purpose with growing small fruits.

How and where to start?

You can start growing small fruits just about anywhere there is good sunlight and a little land. Even containers on a sunny balcony can be used for tomatoes, passionfruit, raspberries, and more. The average backyard can produce an amazing abundance of fruit, with enough extra to sell for a side income. It’s up to you to take the initiative and get started. If you have a small unused parcel on an existing market farm, you can start there.

I’ll share a small fruit marketing story from 2014–2017, when my wife and I were vegetable market farming in Appalachian Kentucky. In March we planted about 150' (46 m) of row of fall (everbearing) Caroline red raspberries, divided into six 25' rows. Six months later we started bringing ½ pint clamshells of raspberries to our quiet, small-town farmers market with decent organic food demand, in Berea, KY. We marketed them for $5 each, which was the current grocery store price. We could not bring enough. Every week we sold about $150–200 in berries, which at the time was a substantial boost to our overall weekly income. We also propagated and sold the plants, bringing in additional income. Picking the berries only took about 4–5 hours a week, which we did on the two days leading up to Saturday market (Thursday, Friday, and also Saturday morning). We carefully graded the berries by hand and chilled them immediately after harvest. We only took to market the A+ and some B+ grade berries (based on size and appearance). Picking earlier than three days before market would have been too long of a storage time and could have risked the berries molding. The other days of the week (Sunday–Wednesday) we picked the berries and sold those through other outlets (a health food store and our home delivery service). This brought in even more income. Also, note that the raspberries were not yet even close to their peak production; this was only season one and they were being grown on marginal ground. Had they been on fertile soil in their peak production, the yields would have been 2–4 times heavier.

Overall, it was a tiny expenditure of land (150' of row), capital (about $150 in T-posts and plants), and labor (4–5 hours a week picking and packing). And yet, during berry season (July–September) the raspberries boosted our income by some $600–800 per month. Not bad! There’s no way a large commercial farm could get numbers like that on 150' of berries. A small planting like this could easily fit in many backyards and, I’m sure, a lot of you out there would enjoy eating homegrown raspberries and earning $800 a month in additional income throughout much of the summer, while providing organic fruit for your local community. Before we move into how to do it, we first should understand a few challenges to growing fruit and why small fruits make big sense.

Understanding current climate challenges

With climate change, you can be certain of one thing: uncertainty. Continually altering weather patterns make it necessary to be ready to deal with unexpected occurrences. These include lack of (or too much) rain, colder (or hotter) than average temperatures, as well as altered spring warm-up times (often earlier). Below are some detailed accounts of how climate change events have affected our plantings.

In the winter of 2015–16 we experienced what some refer to as a “polar vortex” event, wherein our winter lows were about 10°F (6°C) colder than the extreme low for USDA zone 6: −10°F (−23°C) extreme low. Wind chill took it below −10°F. This affected marginally cold-hardy plants and some growers lost trees and plants.

In the autumn of 2019 to spring of 2020, we witnessed unprecedented climatic things happen in our local area. First, we had a severe late summer to early autumn drought wherein there was very little to no rain for about 8 or 9 weeks, with temperatures in the 90s (32–37 in °C) almost the entire time, and intense sun. That is not common for KY, although it had been recorded previously. Many half-century-old pine trees turned permanently brown, and many small tree saplings in front yards died also. By late September rains returned and then we had an unusually warm autumn. This delayed the hardening off (lignification or production of wood/bark) of many of our fruit shrubs and trees, which stayed very green into October. Then, all of a sudden, it dropped to 20°F (−7°C) one night in mid-October. This shocked and damaged these plants as they had not begun the process of hibernation, nor lignified their wood, in preparation for freezing weather. Winter set in shortly after.

Winter that year was mild, never going below about 10°F (−12°C: USDA zone 8 conditions, whereas it’s normally Zone 6) with daytime temps around 40–50°F (4–10°C). Spring came on very early, with early March warming up to 70°F (21°C). Very pleasant, but far too early for it to be that warm every day in our region. W...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Part 1: The Basics
• Part 2: Getting to Know Your Fruit Allies
• Part 3: Harvesting, Marketing, and the Future
• Appendix: Jivamritam
• Notes
• Resources
• Index
• About the Author
• About New Society Publishers