If you have a picture we can
post send it to me
at info@blueberrysite.com
We are closing for the season.
7/13/2023
We have decided to close the field for the year.
Not enough berries to support another opening.
Sorry this years crop did not live up to all our
expectations. We appreciate your patience as many of you continued to
visit with us this year.
Our final evaluation of freeze damage was nearly
70% of crop loss. This set back has not slowed our efforts of
restoration of the field. We have over 1500 plants in our
nursery beds and an additional 1600 plant cuttings being
propagated. A small portion of these will be planted in our
field this fall and the remainder will be available for
purchase. More on this later.
We had Wayne Spoo, local Bee
keeper, with us Saturday. He brought some of his local honey.
A word from Wayne.
Blueberries are one of the most popular berries in
America and are native to North America. To get all
those berries, each plant can produce thousands of
flower buds, each with a potential blueberry with
successful pollination. Blueberry pollination
requires a lot of heavy lifting on the part of bees.
Many types of native bees can do a small part of the
work, but the largest part of the pollination work
is done by the honey bee. The honey bee goes from
flower to flower, collecting the nectar and
spreading the pollen from one flower to another and
giving us two things: Blueberries and honey!
The honey you get from Hat Creek Apiaries likely
contains quite a bit of pollen from the blueberries
at Sprinkles Blueberry Farm. Our hives are located
within a mile of the farm, and honey bees are known
to forage up to at least 2-3 miles from their hive
location. Here is a photo of one of our hive
locations.
In addition to the blueberry nectar and pollen, our
honey is made from the nectar and pollen from red
and silver maple, willows, holly, many ornamentals
and fruit trees, redbud trees, dandelions, red and
white clover, tulip poplar, black locust, black gum
and whatever other plants are growing within a 2-3
mile radius of the farm.
Hat Creek Apiaries honey is premium honey that has
been certified by the NC State Beekeeper
Association. As stated on their website (realnchoney.com),
you can be certain that the premium honey you buy
from us is exactly what the label says:
Real 100% honey made in North Carolina with no
additives or flavorings! Unscrupulous individuals
often purchase bulk honey from other regions or
countries, labeling it as their own, or adding other
cheaper sweeteners like high fructose corn syrup.
You can trust RealNCHoney certified honey to be
exactly what it says it is: raw honey produced by
honey bees foraging on plants from the fields,
woodlands and swamps of North Carolina. Hat Creek
Apiaries is one of many certified honey producers on
the NC Certified Honey Producer Registry list.
Stop by our table during your blueberry picking time
and take home some great tasting honey produced by
the beekeeper and the honey bees at Hat Creek
Apiaries!
Pickers were lined
up (Thursday) when we opened. You are
watching the web for updates and that is very helpful for
getting berries picked as they ripen.
Early pickers had easy picking and later pickers
were already having trouble finding ripe berries as we
approached the 12:00 noon closing.
We have determined that our actual loss due to
the late freeze was most likely in the 70% range.
We certainly do not expect that to continue and
hope next year will bring that expected yield that we all need.
We do have later green berries that will be
ripening over the next days and weeks. We will be closed for
several days. Keep watching for the next open date.
Got a lot of pictures for the
gallery adding below in "Pickin & Grinin" gallery.
Weather has not been kind to us this year. The
farmer's lament is " well there is always next year"!
We opened 12 days
earlier than last year which surprised us all. Thank you to all
who faithfully watch this page and responded on short notice.
As this was the 3rd
year in a row that we had early bloom freeze I am looking
closely at possible reasons and solutions to the early bloom.
Possibly the
conventional practice of Pruning in February along with our
aggressive nutrition and irrigation regiment may be partly to
blame.
Summer pruning has
been a technique found to delay blooming by nearly two weeks. We
may give this a try. That means we will be starting pruning as
soon as Harvest is over. This is also when we need to start our
propagation.
Please either
bring small cash denominations or be prepared to use Zelle for
payment.
Picture taken of 4 year old Tifblue on 6/16/2023
Picture taken of 4 year old Tifblue on 6/16/2023
taking juice sample for BRIX test
BRIX test result 6/16/2023
juice sample of ripe blueberry see Video on BRIX testing on this page
Berries are all over the field in several varieties. If you are new ask
me how to pick the ripest berries or watch the videos on the Helpful
Hints page.
We now
have nearly 2000 bushes in production this year, nearly 800 more than
last year the freeze thinning has served a good purpose. By reducing
crop load the remaining berries are enjoying more growth vigor.
We expect even larger
and sweeter fruit.
We are fine tuning our
drip irrigation and fertigation program and the bushes are responding.
The new 8 minute Video on this page shows how we can monitor plant and fruit health by SAP analysis
using a field refractometer. I will go into more details later as to why
our soil sample reports may not have shown us that our irrigation water
pH of 7.5 could be a problem.
Between the bushes we
planted in our field and the ones sold we have already sold out of our
nursery bushes for this year but are making plans to increase our
propagation efforts. Lots of good things just around the corner. Keep
checking in.
We have recently been
certified by the North Carolina Department of Agriculture as a
Registered Nursery.
I'm sure we can all
agree that we are living in interesting and challenging times.
High fuel cost and
fertilizer costs are challenging for farmers.
We are expecting to
see significant production increases as our new bushes mature and
realize we need to increase our number of pickers. For this reason we
will not be raising our price on u-pick berries this year. We will hold the $2.50
per pound price this season.
Our picking buckets
will hold over 1 1/2 Gallons. So that you can gauge your Weight and price
here is a picture of our bucket marked with Lbs and price.
If you are interested in the process of
restoring our field please view the YouTube Video on
the home page of this web site. I have spent about two years collecting
video shots that demonstrate how we propagated our bushes from our
existing best producers. I will share how we prepared the field for the
new planting and see our new fertigation system in operation.
We
are so thankful for your support which confirms to us that our ongoing
restoration work to expand our production is important.
We are
better able to get
through the dry spells with our drip irrigation as well as better manage
our fertilization with the Dosatron injection system.
We
are now using a Dosatron liquid nutrient injection
system into our drip irrigation.
Dosatron precision injection feeds nutrients at calibrated rate
during irrigation through the drip lines
The results so far have exceed our
expectations. We have been able to better manage both timing and
quantity of the fertilization. We are anxious for you to see the
improvement.
Results
of our new bush plantings have been a surprise as well.
15 months after field planting these first 300 bushes were taken as
cuttings 20 months ago are 40" tall
Not recommended but did not have the heart to strip berries off these 15
month old bushes