Leavenworth — I really enjoy making homemade wine. It is a fascinating hobby that mostly involves microbiology and chemistry. It also gives me an opportunity to meet local orchardists who have small farms filled with blackberry vines, apples, grapes, pears, etc.
I hope that more people who own a few acres of land will consider niche farming, or as we used to call it back in New Jersey, truck farming. I believe that there is plenty of market room for people to raise specialty crops from various plants to animals in this region.
In past years, I hand-picked my blackberries and was lucky to get 15 or 20 pounds. It was hard, sweaty work amongst fish hook brambles and I usually had to walk 15 minutes or more through uncut fields after driving hours away. This year I found some domesticated blackberry producers that maintain mowed lanes between long rows of blackberry canes that are tied to wire with drip irrigation. OMG. What a difference it makes in gathering fruit.
In two trips, two of us gathered 75 pounds of blackberries and were finished in time to eat lunch both days. There was no need to wear boots or rubber pants to fend off brambles, especially since they were thornless berries in mowed grass. I even picked while wearing sandals.
At the same orchard, I recently purchased 10 gallons of freshly squished apple juice to make apple wine and I also got some frozen Asian pear juice for wine making. There is so much available that I may not go picking wild blackberries anymore and I really don’t have to bring back any apple juice from my wife’s century farm in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, but we will do it anyway. About 50 people, mostly family, gather at the farm along Lake Michigan to pick apples, wash and sort them and then grind and squish them into nearly 100 gallons of juice.
These are nearly all heritage varieties of apples that were planted 100 years ago. The gathering is really a lot of fun and since it turns out to be a good feast, too, it is something that we look forward to every year.
Obviously there is no reason that similar activities could not be done in this area. We have plenty of fruits, especially apples and pears. In fact, the folks from whom I purchased the apple juice are considering having a harvest and squishing day.
The main difference is that their commercial sized crusher could not be handled by lots of inexperienced people like we do at the farm with the smaller home variety apple presses. Needless to say, though, doing things like having lots of friends over to pick grapes for wine making as they do in Tonganoxie, or picking apples or berries for wine making helps make a region more livable because it adds fun and makes for a great community experience.
I also have friends that make beer and they sometimes use local grains. A few years ago I planted triticale grain near the fort’s Front Gate to heal the land and also to feed the sheep. An Army major recognized the grain and asked if he could gather enough grain to make beer. I was impressed that he recognized it as triticale and I let him take as much as he could harvest by hand.
I believe that there are plenty of wine and beer makers in this region so that someone raising specialty crops for their wine and beer making could make really good use of their land.
We may not ever get back to the days of having millions of family farms because there are economies of size when it comes to producing enough food to feed the world, but, there is no reason that there could not be a lot of family-run niche crop operations in some place like Leavenworth County to satisfy even just the beer and wine makers. I personally look forward to discovering even more local niche farming operations around our area to satisfy my wine-making needs.