Field Report

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!

Wayne Spoo

Mobile: 336-406-4466

Certified Honey Producer

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
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 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.

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.

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.