Fill the place up
Our alfalfa field the summer of 2003. Scanned from a 35mm photo.
How we got started.
We started planting, but with no real goal other than to fill the place up.
We started at the house and worked our way out, lilacs and fruit trees in the front. poplars and choke cherries to the west for shelter belt. Behind the house shade trees and a garden. We continued adding every year, anything that looked interesting or we thought would grow here. We planted elderberries, honey berries (we had never heard of them but hardy to zone 2) raspberries, black berries (won’t grow here, to cold), sand cherries (they are native to the northern US and southern Canada east of the Rockies).
We made a lot of jellies and jams, but you can only eat and give away so much. We like wine so we thought we could make wine. We made sand cherry wine; it was good for our first try. And that was that, we had the wine bug.
Anniversary trip
One year for our anniversary, we visited a winery in Miles City Montana, of all places. Tongue River Winery, the owners Bob and Merilyn are gracious hosts. We sampled their wonderful Montana wines and visited. By the time we got home we decided to plant wine grapes and yes, they do grow here. Wine grapes are grown in all fifty states with wineries to go with them. Montana has over 15 wineries most are on the western side of the state. Visit your local winery for wonderful local wine.
We planted 60 plus vines that first year just to see what would grow. They came through the winter wonderfully so we planted more, 250 this time. Then we had a normal winter and they all froze down to the ground. They came back up in the spring, we had hope that this was a great venture. The following year they froze to the ground again, our hopes were freezing just like our grapes. We have friends here in the Billings area that grow grapes successfully. How come we can’t? We did some research, some thing we should have done before we went down this path. We learned we are not in a good location to grow grapes. A very highwater table coupled with being the lowest point around. The cold just settles in, we are often 10 to 20 degrees colder than just a few miles away. We are keeping our grapes for the time being, ever hopeful we will be able to make some wine from our grapes.
Pivoting
After many disappointing springs, we decided it was time to change directions. We were already successfully growing a fair amount of fruit; we would go in that direction. Fill up the rest of the property with fruit and we would provide quality fruit to the people of Yellowstone County.
We planted; Haskaps, (commonly known as honey berries), raspberries (summer and fall varieties also some yellow varieties), currants (black, res and yellow), goose berries (pinks, reds, greens), aronia berries, service berries (also known as June berries), elder berries (just planted some European varieties to see how they do) and bush cherries. We decided to branch out from there and we planted sea berries, buffalo berries, artic kiwi and some rhubarb (not a fruit but treated like one).
We soon had more fruit than the family could eat so we started selling at the Gardeners’ Market Billings at South Park. We sold on Facebook. We did some word-of-mouth sales. Our refrigerator was full of fruit during the summer. We had our dining room table stacked with little fruit boxes and bags ready to be filled. We were running out of space. We could really use some extra space and a little store to sell our fruit. So, we did what any sane couple would do on the verge of retirement, we decided to build a building.