Mayhaw Man (Texas Country Reporter)

Mayhaws are wild berry-like plants that grow wild in the swamps. John has raised an orchard of hybrid Mayhaws and sells them to people to make jelly.

John Harrington
Orange, TX

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Video Script:: [Music] sometimes we were called nuts sometimes we call plant futures we're gonna pay the piper someday and we better know how to grow some crops on what we would call marginal land today John Harington is worried about the future now it's not one of those Millennium maniacs who thinks the world's about to end but when there are fewer farmers and more folks needing to eat well it makes a man wonder just how all those mouths will get fed so John wondered up an idea and he just may have created the food of the future may hell is just one of many many plants that I've hybridized through my lifetime we're looking for things where we can grow plants that will bear nutrition and vitamins for folks on the marginal land the lowlands the salty lands the lands that typically not be considered top agricultural land and the mayhaw is one of those plants that we can do that really meet the mayhaw it looks like some tiny little cross between a tomato and an apple but this is no Granny Smith and the mayhaw by any other name is still not a fruit I'm a hoe does not have fruit what you see here it's a member of the rose family and so what these are hips after it blooms a beautiful little bloom then it puts these little hips on and they're very similar to the rose hips on up on a wild rose what we've done is after we found the superior trees then we start those into our research and we cross pollinate these plants plant the resulting seeds and I have hundreds of trees that haven't bore yet that I'm awaiting to see if maybe one of them is better than anything that we found thus far he's called the mayhaw man and he may get credit for the creation of this crop but the mayhaw is nothing new in fact the mayhaw might have been a snack for the Southeast Texas dinosaurs my house had been growing since Triassic Jurassic Cretaceous times and they can do pretty well on their own they've been here for millions of years without man's interference but to maximize or optimize if you want to get to that side of production takes a few other skills and we're just now developing new ways to get these streets to produce in large quantities [Music] it's called pickin but shakin would be the better term in the spring when the mayhaws ride brute strength and gravity help harvest the crop I've set out to work with this trying to see if there was an industrial potential and I believe that there is certainly for a small production at this point in time right now every Meho that is produced here is so right off the place there's a seller's market for mayhawk now there's no roadside stand or even a little sign folks around here just know when it's May hard time and they know where to go to get up [Music] you must be mr. Harrington with the may halls we're selling the berries that to those that want to make their own jelly at home for some reason most people's palate says it mayhaw jelly is the best jelly in the world may how jelly I guess you have to experience is you can't describe a jelly that's better than most but it has a high quality a little bit of a twang to it harvesting the mayhaws more than one man's job but there's never a lack of volunteers especially when you split the bounty fifty-fifty some of my friends have come over that retired like I am and so they're picking them up on halves we get out and we pick them all up and they take half of them home and make their own jelly for free there's a lot of older people that have a lot of good memories of going and picking their own way how's that no longer can but still want to make jelly when we were growing up mayhaws brood down in kind of in swamps and in the summertime your whole family would go down there and we pick enough mejor I own you super jelly and that's about my experience with me hope mayhaw pickin time it's a tradition in Southeast Texas but no trespassing signs are getting more common down here and fences are cutting off access to the bogs making the wild girl in mayhaw only an old-timers distant memory but those memories are alive and growing and John Harrington's orchard and folks around here can still pick and pluck to their heart's content all in a place where the mayhaw is homegrown they all have a lot of nostalgia about what they did when they were kids but I find that we've made some very good friends people come by and pick up a gallon of berries from us here at our little farm and go home and they tell us how good their jelly turned out and everything we made a lot of friends so it's it's a hobby thing that that I enjoy [Music] you