Hey everyone this is Shannie from Baker Creek, and today we are in the Baker
Creek gardens, and I want to show you an absolutely stunning perennial fruit. This
is an incredibly cold-hardy crop. It's called goji berry. You've probably
heard of goji berry because it has been part of the superfood craze in the last
few years, but what I am really stunned by is just how adaptable and easy it is
to grow. Across North America it's hardy from zones 2 to zones 7, maybe
even 8. That is a massive growing range. it's incredibly cold hardy because it's
native to the Himalayas in China. So it can grow at high altitudes, it can grow
in cold, it's going to come back year after year, this beautiful robust vine,
and it's super prolific. Each of these tiny goji berries actually produces a
ton of seed, and they will grow true to seed. They're also self pollinating so
you don't need two varieties; you can get, you can save seed off of just your one
plant. So they produce tons of these little seeds. We're going to save them
over the winter, and then in the spring when we go to plant them, it's very
simple: we're gonna plant them pretty shallow, maybe an eighth of an inch deep
at most. We're going to keep them evenly moist, and we're going to transplant out
into full sunlight. It's about that simple. If you want you can try soaking
the seeds overnight the night prior to sowing them, but that's about it. Very
straightforward and easy to germinate. And you've probably never seen goji
berries in their fresh form. Typically at the health food store you only see them
when they're dried, like little raisins, but you can eat them when they're fresh.
They have a really nice sweet tomato flavor. Indeed you can dry them. Drying
them is super easy -- you just harvest them off the plant fresh and dry them for a
few days. It's really a game of waiting. It's patience. Just dry them out of the
sunlight for a few days. But you can eat them fresh, you can eat them dried and
there's a whole host of incredible recipes online, you just just look them
up. Baker Creek Deb Vlietstra got to visit a massive goji berry farm in China.
Predominantly the goji berries in China are grown in a region that's just north,
it's in north central China, north of the province of Ningxia, and so
Deb got to visit the farm where they were growing tons and
tons of goji berry across many many acres, and she reported that there were
several different colors of goji berries, and colors like not just red, but white,
yellow, even black. So we've got a beautiful range of colors. Traditional
Chinese medicine has used goji berry for over 2,000 years. So to grow goji berries
we're going to take some tips from how they're traditionally grown in China. We
plant our plants about three to five feet apart in rows that are at least
eight feet apart. These are pretty aggressive plants. They can grow to be
quite large, even sometimes ten feet tall. They grow best when they're grown up a
trellis. We have a cattle panel trellis here, just held up by a T post. Very simple,
inexpensive. So they're not quite a vine but they're not quite a shrub. They need
support. They prefer a little bit of support, so give them a trellis and
they're gonna do really nicely. They prefer to be grown in full sunlight, and
like I said they're cold tolerant, so they're going to go dormant over the
winter, and they're going to spring back to life in the spring. We're going to use
the more traditional Chinese method of drying these gojis to get the absolute
perfect dried goji. We want them to be moist yet dry and have a really nice
texture. We don't want them to get too crunchy or too tacky, and the goji berry
is densely nutritious. It's high in vitamin C, it's also got iron and
antioxidants; it's been hailed as a superfood.
There's a million creative uses for our goji berries and I'm just really looking
forward to bringing all this dense nutrition from the plant to our plate. So
now it's dehydration time. We've picked our fruits when the plants were quite
dry to get the maximum sugar content. We've rinsed them off and we've
thoroughly dried the fruits, and now we're going to transfer them to a
dehydrator. Let me say you don't need a dehydrator to dry goji berries
properly, but we will be using one just for the first two hours of the total
drying process. And what we're going to do is just use the actual dehydrator to
turn it up as high as we can about 165 degrees
Fahrenheit and that's going to kill off any potential pathogens or bacteria that
may be present on the fruit. It's unlikely, but
just to be safe we're gonna take this precautionary measure. We're gonna turn
them on to 155 maybe up to 165 if your dehydrator goes that high and we're just
going to do two hours of dehydration like that, and this is really just a step
to kill things off. If you don't have access to a dehydrator you can replicate
this step by putting your gojis out in a super hot sunny area, maybe your
greenhouse maybe a sunny window for a few hours just to initially kill off
anything on the surface, then we're going to move to a low and slow drying method.
So we let our berries dry for two weeks and here we have beautiful little goji
raisins. They came out perfect. We just put them in the open air like I showed
you guys and it was super easy, straightforward and now we have gojis,
little dried goji raisins for any recipe you can imagine. I really like them in
desserts, we're gonna put them maybe into some power bars or maybe into some
muffins in place of raisins. You can also put them on top of your smoothie for
breakfast or on top of oatmeal, and in China they're traditionally steeped into
tea or they could even be used in savory preparations. A lot of times wolfberry, as
it's called in China, will be put into things like soup, maybe a winter melon
soup with some spinach and garlic. So savory preparations, sweet desserts,
whatever you can imagine. Throw them in your breakfast, it's going to be a great
way to get this superfood antioxidant into your diet and like we showed you is
super easy to harvest and to dry. So I hope you guys get out and plant your
gojis, get to harvesting and find some really incredible recipes.