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FARM HISTORY Our farm was first settled in 1913 by E.P. Williams. He married Eva Deckert and raised seven children on the homestead five miles out of Fouke, AR. They built a beautiful farm house with several large towering oaks shading their home. Their third child was Alice Ruth Williams. Alice grew up and attended Magnolia A&M College in Magnolia, Arkansas. There she met and married Aubrey Enoch. Aubrey Enoch attended the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville and received a BS in Horticulture. In the early 1940's, he was acting director at the University of Arkansas Experiment Station in Hope Arkansas. From there, he moved on to other areas which included managing orchards and growing cotton in Hempstead County. In 1955, the Enoch's moved with their three children to northern California. They spent 20 years involved in California education. They decided to return to Alice's original homestead and their son built them a new house in the exact location where the original house stood. The same shady oaks still hover the farm house and barn. When they returned to Arkansas, Aubrey called the University of Arkansas and renewd acquaintance with the university staff. The result was a testing program for the university's blackberry development program. (Retirement is not in Aubrey's vocabulary.) Aubrey has raised "Comanche", Cherokee", "Choctaw", "Shawnee", and currently "Arapaho", "Navajo", "Kiowa", "Apache", and "Chickasaw" blackberries. Blueberry varieties include Tiff Blue, Premier, and Ozark Blue. The farm keeps three acres of blueberries and three acres of blackberries for u-pick. There is also 1/3 acre in plants and root cuttings for resale and mail order. The farm has had strawberries available for picking several different times. Unfortunately, it is too wet for our area to succed in producing strawberries year after year. Marketing is mostly word-of-mouth, newspaper ads, and online. Inquiries and orders for the farm's plants have come from as far away as Costa Rica and Japan. We had one customer who lived in a high-rise apartment building in Los Angeles. There is a lot of work to do on the farm and there is much family involvement. The Enoch's son, daughters, and grandchildren, have worked on the farm, and continue to support the farm, if and when they are available during the picking season. Granddaughter Georgiaberry and her husband Kandan Mobley helped Mr. Enoch increase production of the plant and root cuttings available to customers. In 1998, Georgiaberry saw the need to promote root and plant sales and created the farm web site. Since Kandan is truly a landscape artist, the Mobley's now run their own landscape service, Historic Gardens, out of Texarkana. Aubrey Jr. and his wife Brooke are maintaining and running the farm alongside Aubrey Enoch Sr. | ||||||||
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Contact us by email: plants@berryfarm.com | ||||||||
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