The Berry Time of Year!

Just about my favorite food!

Yep, when I made my list of 10 favorite foods, berries were right up there.

It might seem a little late in the year for berries, but not for this variety!

A few years ago I dug up some berry roots at a friend’s house because they were aggressively leaving his garden and sprouting up in his lawn. I transplanted them into our garden. Now they’re taking us over, too! But this is good. It was almost our only crop this year. They grow great even with neglect.

It’s an Everbearing berry. I find them to be very tasty—at least compared to the other single-harvest berry that I have a few canes of.

Martha still complains about lack of flavor, though. The trick is to let berries warm up to room temp. Keep em in a frig to store em a few days. Then set em out to bring out the flavor.

I like berry tending. They’re robust and take large scale treatment. Every season you cut out the dead canes that bore that year’s fruit. Then in the spring you cut the new canes down to half height and thin as needed. I’ve been thinning and adding new rows with the ones I’ve thinned out. A little weeding is helpful, I’m sure.

They get 2 crops—but the heavy one is in late summer. I find that my 50 feet of canes gives me about a quart a day for several weeks in the fall!

Now, black raspberries are treated differently. I think in the spring you tip them and cut back the laterals to a foot-long then you keep tipping them for the next few months til they produce in early-mid-summer.

I notice that next to my berries, my 2 lame golden delicious apple trees have a couple dozen wormy apples. Enough for a couple pies. My dad likes the variety and gave them to us as gifts, which was nice, but they require lots of spraying. Now, even disease-resistant organic apples require lots of chemical spraying, but they’re natural chemicals. Nature-based? They still need to be concocted, I’m sure. Still, I think one needs to be careful around them—poison ivy is natural, too, and isn’t even concocted (and concentrated, etc.). What do they spray with, some kind of copper spray, I vaguely recall. Well, maybe there are some strains that really do shun the diseases pretty well on their own. Well, we missed that boat!

When is the best time to plant a tree? 20 years ago! The next best time? Today!

Sigh…