Country Life Section C • lyndentribune.com • Wednesday, October 11, 2017
Wake berries give farmers versatility Wake Haven is newest raspberry variety from Northwest Plant Company By Brent Lindquist brent@lyndentribune.com
WHATCOM — The seasons can be unpredictable, and so local berry farmers like to have as many options as possible to deal with whatever the weather throws at them year after year. For that reason, Lynden’s Northwest Plant Company is hard at work creating new varieties of raspberries for farmers to plant and then reap the benefits. The company’s newest variety is the Wake Haven raspberry, which can be planted about 10 days earlier in the spring. “It spreads out labor, it spreads out equipment, and it just allows a grower to get started sooner and spread the risk out over the season,” Northwest Plant owner Julie Enfield said. Northwest Plant first began work on the Wake Haven raspberry way back in 2008, when it was selected as a seedling. It spent one to two years in the seedling stage before Northwest planted it in a six-plant plot. Measurements were taken and the trials were expanded out. “It’s a long process,” Enfield said. The Wake Haven and its counterpart, the earlier
Wake Field, are both designed to help phase out the long-running Meeker variety, which gained strength in the 1980s following its introduction decades earlier. Enfield said the Meeker proved to be suitable for machine harvesting, which became a very important transition of the industry. However, the Meeker is vulnerable to root rot and raspberry bush dwarf virus (causing the fruit to become crumbly), and it’s a softer berry, meaning it does not hold up well to a significant amount of rain. It also molds rather easily. Northwest Plant’s varieties are higher-yield options that last longer and are less susceptible to the issues faced by the Meeker. “That’s the objective of this breeding program,” Enfield said. “Looking for varieties that are better than Meeker. We compare everything we evaluate to Meeker. For us to release something, it has to be better than Meeker.” The Wake Haven was released on limited acreage in the spring of 2016, and it saw a larger-scale release in 2017. “We kind of worked the bugs out of the propagation issues,” Enfield said. “We’re sold out for 2018, but we’re taking orders for the fall of 2018 and the spring of 2019.” Northwest Plant Company works in partnership with the Plant and Food Research Institute of New Zealand. Visit http://www. nwplant.com to learn more about the company.
Northwest Plant Company’s new Wake Haven raspberry is the company’s second offering for growers looking for a replacement of the Meeker variety.
Dairy • C2 Gardening • C3
Second year of Whatcom Farm Circle for kids Nov. 1-2; also Farmer Rally LYNDEN — The second year of Whatcom Farm Circle, a fun and informative field trip for local third graders, will be on Nov. 1-2 in the Northwest Washington Fairgrounds’ Expo Building. “Last year was our first year doing it and it went extremely well — so well, in fact, that we had an overwhelming response to our letter to all school districts in the county and we opened up another day,” said organizer Jewel TerWisscha for Whatcom Family Farmers. For the students, it’s a half-day of cycling through several stations learning about local food production, farmland, the food chain, how dairy cows make milk (no animals present), how fruits amd vegetables are grown, how farms rely upon natural resources and also how they create wildlife habitat. Sponsoring participants include Washington State University Extension, Whatcom Family Farmers, Whatcom Conservation District, Whatcom Farm-toSchool and Washington Ag in the Classroom. The event is free, as the presenting is done by the groups. Then the Farmer Rally in the same Haggen Expo Building is the evening of Thursday, Nov. 2, with a social hour at 5 p.m. and dinner and program at 6 p.m. The Whatcom Farm Circle for school children emerged in 2016 as the longrunning spring Milk Makers Fest at the fairgrounds phased out.
(Courtesy photo/Northwest Plant Company)
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