The Berries are Bursting!

Honeyberries, also known as Haskap, look like elongated blueberries but have a slight raspberry taste alongside the blueberry. They are good for Iowa because we don’t need to amend our soils for them and they thrive in lower areas. 

Here at Draco Hill we interspersed about 150 plants between Japanese Walnuts, known as Heartnuts. The swales and berms we built to hold water from torrential downpours so the earth can store it during droughts are great in theory but make it very difficult to manage the orchard. Mowing is very difficult and harvesting not much easier. This year we have an abundance of poison ivy growing everywhere, including on the berms we would usually lean against to harvest, so we’ll be using large tarps to protect ourselves. 

This what experimentation is about. We’re OK with it, because we don’t have to rely on selling our crop to feed ourselves or put a kid through college. We hope more people will understand that when we ask farmers to change their ways, those farmers have to calculate risks, including their investment (debt) in equipment. We encourage folks to come up with ways to reduce those risks so that more farmers will try new ways of growing table food here in Iowa in a climate-smart way.