I was having a little difficulty motivating to go plant the berries I’d ordered, but I poured myself a glass of Sunday evening white wine and went to do it. Twenty minutes later, I’d harvested another handful of raspberries, saving some for Kevin and plopping some in my wine, and also planted:
– 3 marionberries
– 3 blackberries (“Black Gem”)
– 1 raspberry (“Double Gold”)
– 1 strawberry (“Ozark Beauty”)
– 1 white pineberry
– 3 blueberries (blueberries need multiples to cross-pollinate, which I didn’t know the first time I tried planting one — “Sweetheart,” “Bluecrop,” and “Blueray”)
All from Stark Brothers, which is where I got my elderberry and grapes last year. I still need to amend the blueberry soil with some acidifier, and water them all in, but the tomatoes are getting watered now, so I’ll move that over in a bit.
In other news, the grapes I planted last year have put out a few clusters of actual grapes — still very hard and firm, but exciting, the elderflowers are swiftly turning to elderberries, so if I want to make elderflower liqueur with the remaining flowers, I better hop to it, and my first tiny harvest of gooseberries are ripe — Anand says they taste like a cross between the tartness of a raspberry and the explosive juiciness of a grape, so there you go. He likes them.
I’m honestly not much of an edible gardener compared to some in our neighborhood, but I figure we go through the berries pretty damn fast (as Anand enters his teen years, he’s become a fruit-eating MACHINE), so I might as well double down on them and maybe that’ll help with the berry budget going forward.
They don’t seem to require much care, either — some watering the first year, but after that, they seem to be managing with the water that falls out of the sky. As long as I tie them up once a year, so we don’t get battered by thorns trying to walk down the nearby path, they do just fine on their own.
