Rain, rain go away

OK, OK, I get it already why the U.K. growers have gone to high tunnels – it is always raining here. The fields were so muddy that our entire group went to the English version of a Home Depot and bought knee-high rubber boots. It never seems to dry out here and with the clay soil it makes for a very muddy walk through the orchard. The good news is we are here to see high tunnels and it never rains under them!

Our first stop was to the Haygrove Kington Farm where they are using a VOEN system of covering sweet cherries. It is basically a large structure of steel pipes and wires built around a block of cherries. They use a special covering that has hail net on the bottom and a landscape-like cloth in strips that work like the gills on a fish to vent out the warm air. The good thing about this design is that you never have to raise up the poly to vent it like in a traditional Haygrove high tunnel, saving labor costs. The special cover lasts eight to 10 years compared to the poly that lasts two to three years.

The temperatures during the growing season under the VOEN are cooler so it minimizes earliness. The plot we were on was 800 feet above sea level and was a cooler climate so the sweet cherries are usually two weeks later than the other farms. They normally finish picking by mid August and are able to hit the late market. They always put bird netting on the ends of the structure to stop them from entering.

The trees are all Gisela 5 or 6 and planted in single rows nine feet apart with the trees three feet apart in the rows. They used a trellis system to support the trees with wooden posts along the row with a wire at four and 10 feet high. Each tree has a bamboo stick attached to the tree and wires with rubber clips holding it all together. The bamboo is not buried and is about one foot above the ground.

Blueberries and strawberries under high tunnels were on tap for the second stop at Withers Fruit Farm. The biggest obstacle to growing blueberries in England is the clay alkaline soils, not very good at all for blueberries that need an acidic soil. Farm owner George Leeds really wanted to grow blueberries so he decided to take matters in his own hands and grow the plants in buckets with a peat substrate and wood chips on top. He starts them out under 24-foot wide high tunnel with eight rows of pots (four on each side) and a drive middle. They are all fed by drip irrigation. The plants we saw had great growth and by the second year he is picking a crop with an average of two pounds of fruit per plant. His varieties include Duke, Bluecrop and Darrow along with others he is experimenting with.

In the third year he puts them outside because he is limited on the number of high tunnels he can put up due to zoning rules. (I will talk about that fight at another time!) The pots are put in rows eight feet apart with three feet between pots. A mini trellis has been constructed with wooden posts and one wire at about four feet high. He attaches a few of the branches to the wires mainly so the pots don’t fall over in the wind. As the bushes get bigger he thinks he will need to put a wire on each side of the plant to keep the young, tender branches from breaking off under a heavy crop load.

The strawberry system at Withers was amazing for this former strawberry grower who had to pick strawberries off the ground his whole life. They have invented a stand system to go inside the high tunnels. The stands are about five feet high and have two horizontal pipes running along forming a sort of gutter. Bags of soil are placed on the gutter and strawberry plants are planted and then watered by an overhead irrigation system while getting established and then later by a drip pipe running along the plants. A string runs along the top of the stand to hold up the leaves and allowing the crop to hang down at about four feet. One picker can harvest 110 pounds of strawberries an hour. Wow – this was an amazing system!

The last stop of the day was Lower Hope Farm where farm manager Andy Hunt gave us a great tour as British Air Force jets put on a thunderous show above the farm. The area is home to the British Special Forces and they farm is entertained by the jets every few weeks.

The Lower Hope has 60 acres of sweet cherries under high tunnels. To save money they grow the trees outside for the first three seasons and then cover them with the tunnels. The cherries are all planted on Gisela 5 and were a different planting system then the three-row system with a tractor drive on the right we saw at Haygrove Farms a day earlier. Hunt says he has gone to a row on each side of the tunnel with 10.5 feet between the rows for a tractor driveway. He said putting three rows of trees so close together makes it too hard to manage, however said he does give up some yield in the early years.

Tomorrow we head off for our last farm visits and a trip to a hard cider maker before going to London for our last night before flying home.




– Matt McCallum, Great American Publishing