Kehr Family Farm

The spring time weather is upon us and we are busy working in our berry patch.  We have been mulching around the bushes and pruning.  Would you believe that we prune away about 25% of our old canes to allow sunlight to the various parts of our bush and to keep the branches high enough to harvest?  It does take a while to get used to pruning so much of the bush but we know that when we can keep the number of berries produced by the bush to a lower number, we can get some beautiful berries with nice size to them.  We take care with each of our bushes to notice changes in the color, any winter damage, and canes that no longer support the weight of the berries.

We are sad to say that we had to tear out all our raspberry canes.  However, we are replanting them and anticipate an abundant harvest next summer in 2021.  We are also planing a row of blackberry bushes to see how that goes.  As always, we seek to listen to the needs of our customers and will try new things.  I would like to put in another planting of red raspberries but we have not had good success with them to this point.  That may be our next adventure.

We are also replanting new blueberry bushes in the places where older bushes have died.  There is one area of our patch where we believe there was a very large black walnut tree when the patch was just open field.  It seems as though berry bushes have a hard time growing in that area and we will keep trying to figure out how to best address this issue.

It is our belief that we are to be good stewards of the land.  We seek to do our farm work together as a family and to be kind to the earth, bushes and to each person that visits our farm.  We seek to control weeds and insects by closely monitoring the patch on a daily basis, pulling weeds, using mulch to help control moisture and weeds, and use the most natural products available.  We are happy to answer any questions you may have about how we care for our berry bushes.

So far, we are anticipating an earlier harvest since we had a very mild winter. I will continue to update the anticipated harvest date as we get closer to the time.  Check out our facebook page for up to date information.