Great Cooks Radio

Today, Jill talks with Steve and Lynn from Jarvis Farms in Como Texas. They operate a pick your own family farm where you can get thornless blackberries, peaches, figs, and vegetables. They also have fishing, nature walks, and a lot more. They are busy all year round and Jill was fortunate enough to get some time with Steve so listen in and enjoy.

Read the full interview

Jill:

So I am here at Jarvis Farms with Steve and Lynn Jarvis. Thank you for agreeing to be interviewed. So tell me about the farm. How big is this place?

Steve Jarvis:

We have 111 acres. We have about five acres in blackberries right now. They are all thornless blackberries. That is our big main product. We produced about 6, 000 pounds of berries last year. We are probably going to produce about 10, 000 pounds this year.

Jill:

Wow. How many plants does that take?

Steve:

You know….

Jill:

Have you lost count?

Steve:

I have lost count to tell you the truth. You start going with plants and then you go into acres. Actually, we are a propagator of the thornless blackberry plants for Arkansas State University. We are getting reports of farms that are producing up to 10, 000 pounds per acre on these thornless blackberries.

Jill:

Wow!

Steve:

They are a hybrid blackberry developed by Arkansas State University, by Professor Clarke. We have those here on the farm. It is really nice picking. The berries are large. They are real sweet.

Jill:

They are sweet. They are good.

Steve:

That is our main crop that we grow. We also grow peaches, figs, tomatoes, squash, Israel melons, Cantaloupe, and Jalapenos.

Jill:

You have pecans in there.

Steve:

We do have Pecans.

Jill:

Do you have Pecan trees?

Steve:

No we don’t. We get our pecans from Texas. There is a farm out in South Texas and we get all of our pecans from them.

Jill:

I see that they are honey roasted and…

Steve:

Honey roasted and cinnamon frosted. That is right. We have those in stock at the store as well.

Jill:

Now, you just opened up your farm last year. How did the first year go?

Steve:

Very well. The big problem that we had was, we usually have approximately about 85 days of berry harvest. For 85 days, 62 of those days it poured rain all day long.

Jill:

Oh, that’s right!

Steve:

Last year was the rainiest year in 107 years in the state of Texas.

Jill:

I believe it.

Steve:

What is funny is the year before that it was the driest year in like 100 years in the state of Texas. So we have been through it all. We have been through drought and flood and we are still here.

To tell you a little bit about our farm, we started out, we have had the farm about 14 years. We had cattle, horses, and hogs. I had worked construction at that time as well. Due to market reasons, we decided to sell all of our hogs, cattle, and horses. We went looking for farms that had endured the ages and stuck around and that had been profitable for the families. We went and looked at orchards. That is when we decided to plant a few blackberries. We were introduced to the thornless blackberry plant. We liked that idea, but we had no idea what it would produce per acre. So here we are.

Jill:

That is the learning process.

Steve:

That is right.

Jill:

Now, you mentioned on your site that blueberries are high in anti-oxidants.

Steve:

Blackberries.

Jill:

Oh, I am sorry, blackberries. What did I say?

Steve:

Blueberries.

Jill:

Oh, I am sorry.

Steve:

Blueberries and blackberries both are high in anti-oxidants, probably equally as powerful in the anti-oxidant field for fighting all kinds of diseases. Most people don’t know that. But any of the dark berries, blueberries, blackberries, boysenberries, things like that. Any of those dark berries; it is the dark color.

Jill:

So you have people come out on the farm and pick. I saw your boys out there working hard. So what do you do with all the extra blackberries?

Steve:

What people don’t pick we retail. We have a lot of customers that don’t pick their own berries, so we pick a lot of berries for them. We retail on most of those.

The berries that are not retailed, we make a product called blackberry concentrate. We make it with sugar and without. It is real good to make blackberry milk. One tablespoon in a glass of 10 ounces of milk; very very good that way. Blackberry tea. We took lemonade and put blackberry in it the other day. That was very very good. Blackberry in 7-Up. You can put it over ice cream.

A lot of times, we put just a tablespoon in 16 ounces of water; just the middle of the day, it’s hot and you are kind of tired of drinking water, so you just add a little blackberry concentrate to that and away you go. It is kind of an energy boost.

Jill:

Now, how did you figure out to turn it into a concentrate? What did you have to do?

Steve:

Well, I got to thinking about George Washington Carver. George Washington Carver, early in the making of our country, he was a man who got all these farmers to plant all these peanuts. But the problem was they had no market for them. George Washington Carver, he said that God gave him the ideas, and he came up with 101 uses of the peanut. That is where peanut butter came from.

So I said to myself, one of the things that I noticed that farms did that did not last, what I realized was, is they did not create a good customer base and they did not have a retail product. They depended on the commercial market and wholesale market. Now, we do wholesale some of our blackberries at the Dallas market, but most of our berries go right straight to the public; from field to public immediately.

The blackberry concentrate was just an idea I had last winter. One thing is, I saw pomegranate juice, those things like that coming on the…next think you know…

Jill:

It is very hot, the pomegranate juice. All the juices…

Steve:

All these juices. The next thing you know they will have squash juice in a jar.

Jill:

Ewwww.

Steve:

Maybe not. But the thing is, I thought, well why can’t you do that with blackberries? We are going to produce about 10, 000 pounds of berries, so we have the extra berries if we need to. They are high in antioxidants and they are very good. If you are in the South and you don’t like blackberries, that means you moved here from the North.

Jill:

That is right! That’s right! [inaudible 5:58] blackberry bush.

[laughter]

Jill:

I see that you also have peaches and fig trees. When are those going to be ready? When can I come back for those?

Steve:

June 15th we start harvesting peaches. July fourth is when our Fig production starts coming in. We usually have about a three week really heavy fig crop in July, and then we have a second harvest September 15th.

Jill:

Do you have a newsletter or a way for people to give you their email address and let us know and notify us when you are ready?

Steve:

Basically, you can go to my website or you can just email me at steve@jarvisfreshfruits.com. Or you can go to our website, and that is www.jarvisfreshfruits.com. Go there and see what is going on on the farm.

Right now, in the busy time of the year, it is hard for us to…It is daylight to dark and then some It is hard for us. What we try to do is set up the preliminary work. We set all that stuff up for our picking dates in March and April, and things like that. So check the website then and see what is going on.

Jill:

OK.

Steve:

We have fishing on the farm. You can come and fish. We have family rates where you can fish for $5 a person. We have channel catfish, large mouth bass, and hybrid bluegill brim. The brim fishing is really good in June, July, and August. My little girl is six and she caught a six pound bass here two weeks ago.

Jill:

That was here on the website, wasn’t it?

Steve:

That’s right.

Jill:

Oh, man. I was a little jealous when I saw that.

Steve:

The fishing is really good here. We have camping. You can come and camp. Then the tomatoes will start coming off. We will start harvesting tomatoes…well, we started picking today, actually; tomatoes, squash.

Jill:

Now, you mentioned something for the men folk.

Steve:

That is right. For those who don’t want to pick or do berries or anything, in the winter, we have duck hunting. You guys that want to do some duck hunting, you can call or check our website for pricing and availability. We do basically three hunts a week. We do one one on Monday, one on Wednesday, and then we do a back to back hunt Friday and Saturday.

Jill:

Awesome. Now let’s see, what else do you have going on? You have chickens running around here.

Steve:

We do have chickens. We have fresh eggs available. They are $3 a dozen. They are limited supply, but we do have those.

Jill:

Great. I noticed something about Angus beef.

Steve:

That is right. We have Angus cattle. What do now, we just started this year, we use no antibiotics and no hormones in our cattle. They are grass fed beef. Now, we do grain the cows when we pull them off, for two weeks, before they go to slaughter. We slaughter in November and you get your beef in December.

Jill:

OK.

Steve:

The only thing we sell is hamburger. We grind everything into hamburger. It is $5 a pound. You book now and then you get your hamburger in December.

Jill:

OK. That is good to know.

Steve:

What you can do is you book your hamburger; we actually take credit cards: Visa, MasterCard, American Express. So you actually can call in, order your beef, pay for it on a credit card, and then in December we will call you with your order and how many pounds of hamburger you want.

Jill:

All right. Great. Now, as far as the jellies, preserves, and pecans, we can all find that online.

Steve:

That is correct.

Jill:

So if we are too far from the farm we can just go to your online store.

Steve:

That is right. We ship every Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. We ship products all over the United States. Also, we have the blackberry plants for sale. We have four varieties of the blackberry plants. They are $8 per one gallon pot. What you can do, if you want to put a few blackberry plants in your yard, you can put….One blackberry plant, when it is three years old, will produce about 30 pounds of berries. So that will kind of give you an idea. So 10 plants in a yard…

And we also have fig trees available. We have them all the way from a one gallon pot all the way to a 50 gallon, which is a three year old fig tree ready for production. So if you want to put in some edible landscaping, we have all that too.

We have blueberry plants, blackberry, fig, peaches, plums; all those good fruit things if you want to put some of those in your yard.

Jill:

Awesome. That is great. You guys got it going on all over the place. You have got the whole thing covered. This is great.

Well, thank you so much for taking time out for me. We appreciate it. I just love what you are doing.