Haskaps and Honeyberries: Spring Field Notes

nanking cherries are blooming, ahead of the wild plums and almost everything else. these and the haskaps, just as we've had a short amount of weather without frost. spring is a week late this year, will be interesting to see how softwood collection goes we might be a week later on it as well.

haskaps need two bushes to cross pollinate, different cultivars have some variation in the flowering time so you want them to overlap. yesterday I found nearly every haskap flowering at once. photos are berry blue, aurora, beast, beauty. but walking around I also saw tundra and I think indigo gem flowering. So if you're hoping to get the right set of cultivars for cross pollination, I would just get a variety.

boreal blizzard stock block. the larger bush was courtesy of our trip to the u of sask fruit program last summer, one of their field grown plants 100% known to be true to type. the small plants rooted from it are now planted out in a grid to create a decent mass of growth points to collect softwood. It doesn't need to be a 50ft row for our scale, just this 2x4 ft space can make hundreds of cuttings. there's a 50 cent royalty on each that goes to the fruit program to support continued breeding, happy to be a part of it.

haskap growing well in part shade right under the boughs of a spruce. upright form, pale yellow flowers. I was surprised by how well it's growing with the shade.

a couple beds of haskap and black currant, a good result from softwood propagated last year, they’ll be decent kind of gallon pot size by fall, exactly the size I want. If the cuttings are done early they seem to have a high percentage overwinter, late softwood may root but the plants often won’t survive, at least in my experience with a short growing season. My goal this year is to make all softwood cuttings before the summer solstice, and get everything rooted and hardened off as early in the summer as possible.

my attempt to graft haskap seems to be working, I removed the foil shading the other grafts since they don’t seem to be needed, it was just a precaution. this bush is in partial shade. and it experiences -3C for eight hours last night, haskaps shrug off the cold. excited to try and grow out a couple of these maxine thompson varieties, rooting hardwood was tricky with low success. softwood is easy.

grafting haskap. will it work? not sure, must be possible. I have three maxine thompson varieties, initially tried to root as hardwood but it didn’t respond, maybe a dryer 70-80% perlite mix could do it. haskap roots easily from softwood. anyway I have one scion of each as a backup to graft. I’ll also add some foil protection around these to keep the sun off them. when I grafted haskap onto wild honeysuckle last year it didn’t leaf out indicating the scions dried out, so will try bagging it. #propagation #haskap #grafting

my haskap grafts from the other day covered for the next 2 weeks with tin foil to keep them cool. This can help take for more sensitive grafts. I might use it on sea buckthorn as well.

haskap / honey berry grafted onto wild honeysuckle. There are a few species here, small and bushy rarely 3ft tall, another one that grows like a large shrub 8ft or more, also a vining type. Experimentally I’m trying cultivar haskap onto two of the species to see if they grow, there are some reports that there can be compatibility - they are all in the same genre. The larger bush form will be an advantage if it works, like making a standard with currants. #grafting

haskaps are the first bushes to leaf out in the orchard #haskap #honeyberries