My first introduction to Clayton was his comment on my post about cold climate seeds. On his recommendation I checked out the links in his sidebar. That’s how I found out he grows edible blue honeysuckle, a fruit that is extremely hardy. I thought my readers would like to know more about it, so I asked him to write a guest post.

Edible Blue Honeysuckle – A New Dream Crop for Prairie Berry and Fruit Growers

If you have been searching the internet lately, you may have come across this title on a blog about growing this very interesting fruit plant. The blog is my personal story about this tough plant which originates in the southern reaches of Siberia and the north of China and as far as the Kuril Islands north of Japan. Its botanical roots are in the Family Caprifoliaceae, Genus Lonicera, species caerulea. Edible blue honeysuckle fruit is also known as Haskap and Honeyberries.

Clayton stands with a 1.5 year-old Polish seedling

They were very enthused about the potential of the edible blue honeysuckle because of its hardy nature and good fruit production potential under difficult conditions. They also intimated in those early days that there seemed to be very little problem with disease or insect pests which are welcome traits in this day when less is more in terms of pesticides. All in all this seemed like an interesting plant to bring into the home garden and try. Currently I grow about three hundred of these shrubs, including ten named varieties and numerous seedlings in various stages of growth. I am also seeding to produce about two hundred to two hundred fifty more plants.

What Do Edible Blue Honeysuckles Taste Like?

The berry is a pale to dark blue, sometimes with a waxy overlay which makes it look dusty white. The flavour is described as a blueberry with black currant and black raspberry overtones. It seems the flavour is somewhat dependent on the level of polyphenols (antioxidants) and the soil types. They are certainly better well-ripened. The Russian types can be harvested all at one picking while the Japanese-area types tend to ripen over an extended time and are later by ten to fifteen days.

Clayton's wife created this Blue Honeysuckle Crumble based on a recipe for blueberries. Clayton says honeysuckles have more liquid so it was a little runny. The sauce would be great over ice cream!

How To Grow Edible Blue Honeysuckle

This is a plant that is, as I stated earlier, very hardy, so should be able to be grown anywhere where there is reasonable soil for gardening, a little protection from winds (better pollination and prevention of berry drop), and moderate rainfall. Cold hardiness is not an issue! The flowers are known to survive at -7C or 19F. They require very little, if any, fertilizing, but can be encouraged with a very light application of low nitrogen fertilizer, probably after the blooming season, applied at the base of the plant.

They do require a mate to pollinate so be sure you get two varieties. Some pair up better than others, so ask about this when you are purchasing plants. Do not be fooled into thinking you are getting a male and female plant. This is not the case. Rather, both plants need pollen from another plant to be productive and set fruit. One of your plants may not have as good fruit since the pollinator varieties are sometimes chosen because their pollen works better on the good variety. But fruit from both plants will be edible! They should be planted with a good spacing between so ask about the final size of the variety you buy and allow at least five feet between the plants. This will give room for maintenance and harvesting. Commercial growers are encouraged to allow eighteen feet between rows if you are going to mechanical harvest.

Since they bloom very early, as soon as the snow begins to recede and temperatures are constant at 5 to 8 degrees above freezing, the blooming pattern is already set. The flowers are insignificant so this is not an ornamental. The developing fruit will need protection from the birds. Robins and cedar waxwings will fly right into the area while you are putting up the net. For most areas harvest will take place about six to eight weeks after the bloom is finished. This is somewhat dependent on variety. Pest control is not an issue so general weed control will be the only real work while the fruit develops and on into the fall after harvest.

Where Can You Buy Them?

Finally, which varieties are available, and what do you buy? There are several varieties in the species and those which have come to the North American gardener are likely hybrids of those species. As was stated above, the key is that you will need two plants, usually not related to each other. The selection process has really already been done for you and most places (remember you’re not buying a male and female) will sell plants which are compatible in terms of pollinating each other. The best information on varieties for your location is the local Horticulture Department of your university or Dept. of Agriculture. In searching for information, I have noticed that most northern states and the provinces of Canada have some information. Also check out the local tree nurseries, garden centers, or online – you may have to look for Haskap, Honeyberry or Blue Honeysuckle since nurseries are not uniform in their naming. I refer you to a good article by Craig Larson on the different varieties. Try them – you might like them!

More Information About Edible Blue Honeysuckles

Some good sources for reference on the internet are Plants for a Future Database for the North American cousins, some of which do have edible fruit and Wikipedia which has a good coverage of the included subspecies. Of course there is much information now coming out of various Departments of Agriculture and Universities who are trying to improve on the materials which have come from those places mentioned above. You will find that some of the very earliest information on breeding and selection will be found in articles by Russian plant breeders as well as other member countries that were part of the former USSR. More recently, there is the further development of materials for the Great Plains of the North American continent and the registration of names by breeders and marketers. In this information you will find the names Honeyberries and Haskap. These are still the basic edible blue honeysuckle which has taken on a new identity.

Some good reference sites

• Haskap Arrives in North America by Dr. Maxine Thompson
• Craig Larson’s Haskap Wine Blog
• University of Saskatchewan Fruit Program
• Haskaps and Honeyberries at University of Idaho
• You can follow my adventures with this berry here.
• A search for Lonicera caerulea will bring up many other sources of information and some great photos.

Clayton grows the edible blue honeysuckle as a serious hobby, researching and breeding these plants in the hopes of finding new cultivars suitable for marketing. His current favorite is “#51 in our seedling nursery #2.” Feel free to ask questions in the comment form. We are interested in hearing from anyone who has experience growing these berries–or eating them!

Even young children take gardening seriously and want to succeed. (Photo by Cadence Purdy)

I prefer to regard children as apprentice gardeners, gradually acquiring more skills as the years go by, working their way up (at their own pace and interest level) to journeyman and eventually master gardener. As much as possible, I like to let them choose their own projects, plan the execution of them, and solve their own problems. Here are three books, supposedly for adults, that do just that.

The Veggie Gardener’s Answer Book by Barbara J. Ellis serves apprentice gardeners well in several ways. It is small enough to be manageable in young hands, with a wipe-clean cover that can take visits to the garden without falling apart. The question-and-answer format makes it easy to zero in on a topic of burning interest or flip open to a random page and still grasp what’s being discussed. And it asks–and answers–lots of questions, everything from what are the easiest crops to grow to how can I make weeding go faster to how do I cope with a garden that got out of control? The first part of the book covers general gardening techniques and the second part gives advice on specific crops. There’s also a glossary, a bibliography, and a handy chart to help you determine how much to plant out of that generous seed packet. It truly is a “knowledegable gardening friend,” as the introduction suggests, a friend who doesn’t talk down to you, because the book was written for adults.

Wherever there’s plants, you know there’s going to be bugs, and Good Bug, Bad Bug by Jessica Walliser helps the novice garden determine friend from foe. The spiral-bound format of this book makes it easy to flip through, but it’s the index that makes it really useful. Look up the plant that has the bug on it, and it will give you all the pages that have bugs that frequent that plant. (By doing so I learned that sawflies were gobbling up my rose’s leaves.)

The bugs are easily identified by the photographs. Each bug gets a two-page spread that describes the damage it does and suggests preventive actions, live biological controls, organic product controls, and additional information when available. For example, adult cutworm moths are a favorite food of bats, so a good way to reduce cutworms in your garden is to encourage bats. Similar information is provided for the good bugs: who they control, and how to attract and keep them. All remedies are organic, but I especially like that the emphasis is placed on providing natural enemies of the pest and controlling environmental factors, before resorting to sprays and powders. If the bug in question isn’t in this book, it’s time to call in the grownups.

Don’t Throw It, Grow It!: 68 windowsill plants from kitchen scrapsby Deborah Peterson and Millicent Selsam is a good remedy for boredom all year round, but especially in the northern winters when outdoor gardening is impossible. This book goes way beyond avocado pits and carrot tops, teaching you how to grow not only familiar vegetables, fruits, and nuts, but also branching into herbs and spices, and produce from Latin American and Asian cuisines. You could get an education just finding some of these. Oops. Did I say education? Fortunately, since this is a book for grownups, there is none of that didactic, it’s good-for-you tone that ruins many a juvenile trade book.

Grow enough of these groceries, and you’ll learn many seed germination and plant propagation techniques–and have fun doing it. Did you know fenugreek was a legume? Did you ever consider growing beets for a holiday centerpiece? Peterson tells some funny stories on herself as well; her spirit of experimentation is contagious. I can’t think of a better way to relieve the winter doldrums than to go shopping in the supermarket for a plant to grow. As the author advises: “Always buy two of each–one to grow and one to eat.”

We have three apples trees. They came with the place.

One of three apple trees we inherited when we moved here. Photo by Justin Purdy taken September 2006

When we do get apples, we get a lot of apples, and over the years I’ve collected a lot of recipes to put that abundance to good use. Try them all. If they pass the taste test in Purdyville, you know they’ve got to be good.

Upside-Down Apple Gingerbread

We like this so much we quadruple the recipe and bake it in two 15″x10″ pans (4 quart capacity)
1/4 cup butter — melted
2 large apples — peeled, cored, and sliced
1/3 cup brown sugar, packed
GINGERBREAD:
1/2 cup butter — melted
1/2 cup molasses
1/2 cup sugar
1/3 cup brown sugar, packed
1 egg
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon ginger
1/2 teaspoon cloves
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
3/4 cup tea, brewed — hot

Pour butter into a 9″ square baking pan. Arrange apples over butter; sprinkle with brown sugar and set aside. (It seems like a lot of apples when you put them in the pan, but after it’s baked it always seems like you could have put more in.) For gingerbread, combine butter, molasses, sugars,and egg in a mixing bowl; mix well. Combine dry ingredients; add to sugar mixture alternately with hot tea. Mix well; pour over apples. Bake in preheated 350º oven for 45 to 50 minutes or until the cake tests done. Cool for 3 to 5 minutes. Loosen sides and invert onto a serving plate. Serve warm, and it would be a pity if you didn’t have some vanilla ice cream to help cool it down.

Elderberry-Apple Pie

I discovered this in the 1974 edition of Farm Journal’s Country Cookbook. The elderberries we use (Sambucus canadensis) grow wild in the hedgerows.

2 crusts pie pastry
2 cups elderberries
1 1/2 cups tart apples — chopped and peeled
1 cup sugar
1/8 teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons quick cooking tapioca
2 tablespoons butter

Wash and stem elderberries. Combine elderberries, apples, sugar, salt, and tapioca, crushing berries with back of the spoon. Spoon mixture into pastry-lined 9″ pie pan. Dot with butter and top with lattice crust. Bake at 400 degrees for 35 to 40 minutes, or until apples are tender and crust is golden.

Tomato Curry

I usually make this with the last of the tomatoes and the first apples. The two seasons don’t overlap much. Add chickpeas for a one-pot vegetarian meal, or serve as a side dish with chicken.
3 tablespoons butter
1 small onion — finely chopped
1 tart apple — peeled and chopped
2 cups fresh tomatoes — peeled and chopped
2 teaspoons curry powder — *see Note
1 teaspoon vinegar
1/4 teaspoon pepper
1 1/2 cups cooked rice
salt — to taste

Melt butter in a large skillet, add onion and cook over medium heat, stirring often, till transparent. Add apple and cook gently 5 more minutes. Stir in tomatoes, curry powder, vinegar, and pepper. Cook, stirring often, 5 more minutes. Add rice and salt to taste. Heat well before serving.

Purdyville’s Carrot Salad

I created this recipe myself. We devour this much in one meal, but you will either need to use one fourth as much or serve it to a crowd.

1 cup walnuts — chopped
4 pounds carrots — peeled and grated
6 apples — peeled and chopped (use a sweeter apple, not a baking type)
2 cups raisins
32 ounces lowfat vanilla yogurt, or apricot-mango, if you can find it

Chop nuts in food processor. Set aside. Grate carrots in food processor. Put in large bowl. Peel apples. Cut in quarters. Remove cores. Slice with 8mm slicing disk. Add to carrots. Add raisins, chopped nuts, and yogurt to apples and carrots. Gently mix.

Apple Crisp for a Crowd

Try to enlist the help of the crowd that will be eating this dessert with the peeling and chopping that comes first. They will appreciate it that much more!

15 cups apples, cooking — peeled, cored, and diced
1 1/2 cups sugar — (1 to 1 1/2 cups)
1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon
1/4 cup flour
STREUSEL:
1 1/2 cups oats, rolled (raw)
1 1/2 cups brown sugar, packed — packed
3/4 cup flour
1/2 cup butter
3/4 cup chopped walnuts — optional

Combine apples with sugar, flour and cinnamon. Put in bottom of greased 15x10x2 pan (4 quart). Combine oats, brown sugar and flour. Cut in butter. Add nuts and combine. Sprinkle streusel evenly over apples. Bake at 375° for about 30 minutes. Serve warm topped with vanilla ice cream

Grandpa’s Improved Apple Pie

At my dad’s insistence, we started adding ginger to our apple pie, and we like it even better!
2 crusts Pie Pastry
3/4 cup sugar — (up to a cup, if needed)
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon ginger
1 1/2 tablespoons flour
7 large tart apples — (10 cups) (6 to 8 apples)
2 tablespoons butter

Preheat the oven to 425º. Line a pie pan with half the pastry dough. Mix the sugar, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, and flour in a large bowl. Peel, core, and slice the apples and toss them in the sugar mixture, coating them well. Pile them into the lined pan and dot with the butter. Roll out the top crust and drape it over the pie. Crimp the edges and cut several vents in the top. Bake 10 minutes, then lower the heat to 350º and bake 30 to 40 minutes more or until the apples are tender when pierced with a skewer and the crust is browned.

Visit A Way to Garden and Dinner Tonight for more apple-related recipes.

When we moved to this land, there were some grape vines already growing here. They were slipskin grapes, and if they weren’t Concord grapes, they certainly were similar to Concords. That’s not too surprising, since the hardiest grape species are slipskin.

But you know what? Those kinds of grapes are too tart for me. They really do make my mouth pucker. For me, there are only two things to do with these kinds of grapes: make jam and make pie. That’s right, Concord grape pie. It’s why these grapes exist, as far as I’m concerned. And your kids will have fun helping you make it.

Concord Grape Pie

This recipe came from an ancient copy of Farm Journal’s Country Cookbook, page 414. Serve with vanilla ice cream.

1 unbaked pie shell
4 1/2 cups Concord grapes
1 cup sugar
1/4 cup flour
2 teaspoons lemon juice
1/8 teaspoon salt
Oat Streusel (recipe below)

Wash grapes. Remove skins by pinching at end opposite stem. (That’s the part your kids will have fun doing for you!) Reserve skins. Place pulp in saucepan and bring to a boil; cook a few minutes until pulp is soft. Put through strainer or food mill, while pulp is hot, to removes seeds. Mix strained pulp with skins. Stir in sugar, flour, lemon juice, and salt. Place grape mixture in pastry-lined pie pan. Sprinkle on Oat Streusel or, if you prefer, you can crimp on a top crust. Bake in 425F oven 35 to 40 minutes.

Oat Streusel Topping

1/2 cup quick-cooking oats
1/2 cup brown sugar — packed
1/4 cup flour
1/4 cup butter

Combine first three ingredients. Cut in butter to distribute evenly. Sprinkle over pie.

Do you want to grow grapes?

Here are some resources to get you started:

• St. Lawrence Nurseries has a wide variety of grapes suited to cold climates. They are in USDA hardiness zone 3 and they grow their own stock. We have gotten several kinds of woody fruits from them and they have all performed well. They also have a better selection of books on growing grapes in cold climates than Amazon does.
• Growing Grapes for Home Use – a discussion of the best grapes to grow in cold climates and how to grow them, provided by the Minnesota Cooperative Extension.

Faithful readers of this blog will remember Rundy’s struggles with the brush mower, his love of fruit trees, and his fist-shaking frustration with animal pests. Those of you who are relatively new to this blog can read all his entries here. I am happy to tell you that Rundy’s first work of fiction, The Stuttering Bard of York, has recently been published. It is a spoof of the fantasy literature genre, and not at all like the writing on his own blog.

After contacting several publishers without positive results, Rundy decided to publish the book himself. You can read more about the process here. As his mother, I got to be one of the proofreaders. Yes, Rundy got a lot of input from all of his family as he worked on this book . . . the life of a writer can be difficult. And lonely. If you have enjoyed any of his writings, please email and let him know. His address is on both of his websites, here and here.

It was April. I had just come back from a cabin-fever-induced tramp over our field and through our woods. I had noticed this red-leafed vine growing all over:If our field is 5 acres, then this was easily growing on two acres of it. It lined the main walking path and carpeted the ground near my favorite sitting spot. And then I read Judith’s post about poison ivy. Uh-oh.

It’s a vine. It has three leaves. It has the lovely red fall color that is supposed to be characteristic of poison ivy, carried through the winter into spring. (We had had rather mild winter temperatures, and not too much snow.) How could it have grown all over without my realizing it was happening?

So I fretted about the difficulties of eradication, and braced myself for the onslaught of poison ivy rashes. Well, a funny thing happened on the way through the summer. No one ever got a poison ivy rash. Not even me, when I inadvertently ripped the vine out of the ground with my bare hands, while weeding around my gooseberry bush.

And another thing. While I had seen it growing on the ground around many trees, I had never seen the vine start climbing up a tree. And the vines have bristles on them. While looking for identification pictures on the web, I’ve never seen a photo of poison ivy with bristles.

And the fruit of poison ivy is a white berry. As my son showed me, this vine’s fruit is definitely not white. As a matter of fact, it looks a lot like a . . . blackberry. But it’s not a blackberry. Blackberries have long whip-like branches called canes. They grow upright, making bushes. The prickles are, as anyone who has picked blackberries knows, quite a bit more pronounced–and vicious. And a blackberry typically has more of those little round balls (drupelets) in one berry.

It turns out it’s a native plant called swamp or bristly dewberry (Rubus hispidus). It took me a long time to make a positive id, because there’s more than one kind of dewberry, and on some sites, the photos didn’t look quite like my plant. (In fact, I now think the largest photo on this site is not the correct plant.) And while some of the poison ivy sites I visited had a photo of blackberry brambles in their gallery of impostors, none had dewberry. It’s hard to search on the internet for something that you know what it looks like, but not what it’s called.

At last, this mother breathes a sigh of relief. Not. poison. ivy. But I sure did learn a lot. I hope you did, too.

Early summer is the time when I pass from the state of “getting behind” into the state of “being behind.” It is a time when there are a lot of beautiful things I might take joy in, but instead find myself wallowing in guilt or despair over unaccomplished goals. Nobody knows how to ruin a good summer like one’s own self.

My great point of irritation is my unplanted corn. It should have been planted two weeks ago, but one event led to another and it still isn’t planted now. My laziness, or incompetent time management, is to blame somewhere. This case symbolizes all of my self-criticism where sources of grumbling and complaining are ever before me. It is easy to let this kind of attitude grow and consume oneself. Summer becomes one long litany of “I didn’t get this done, and I didn’t get that done,” all misery and complaining until it comes that one looks back on summer with deep dissatisfaction instead of happiness. Summer becomes one long whine of “I didn’t get that done” and all enjoyment is lost.

This calls for a right perspective, something I have difficulty with. I have a schedule, and I want life to follow my schedule, and my nose gets bent out of shape when it doesn’t. I didn’t get my corn planted when I want to. I think I’ll throw a snit.

Sometimes we need to tell ourselves, “So what?” Is that truly important? Should that really be consuming your thoughts and your emotions? What difference does it make if the corn is planted two weeks late? What difference does it make if the corn is not planted at all? Who said you must plant corn? Will the world end if you don’t plant corn? And why should you even be in a bad mood and grumble and complain because the corn isn’t planted? What is this saying about you?

Thus I am offically telling myself to shut up and shape up. All these things are fleeting and without importance. They do not deserve to have me dwell on them in displeasure. I am a fool to ruin all the good things I could be enjoying now by grumbling about the unimportant things that aren’t going as I wish.

So, for some good things:

• Late in May we were hit with a hot dry spell. This worried me as I had visions of us scorching our way through summer. Any idea of a garden would be finished before it even began. But with June the hot weather broke and we recieved a good dousing of rain. The ground is now well saturated and the weather cool. The gardeners among us are happy.
• I am amazed by how green everything looks when the trees leaf out. After all winter it feels like I am a stranger seeing it for the first time again. My wonder is fresh again as I look at the picture of hills covered with green trees. We become deadened to it so quickly and forget the beauty of it like some common thing.
• The wild strawberries are in season. I knew in some distant way that it was time, but I first saw them when I went up the hill to do some chain-sawing on Monday. For me wild strawberries are like a memory of childhood. When I was a boy I could sit up in the field eating wild strawberries crawling from one place to another, always finding more. There could be a bunch of us up in the field, picking berries and hollering out to each other that there were lots at our spot and they were really good, everyone trying to find the best and the most berries. Sometimes we would try to band together and pick enough wild strawberries to actually make something with them. I think we might have managed, once or twice.

  Sitting out under the wide blue sky and bright sun with the wild strawberries was like a picture of summer itself.

  Wild strawberries are also a memory of childhood because they call back a time when there weren’t the responsibilites and obligations of an adult. That was the time when one could spend an afternoon crawling about in the field picking tiny berries and eating them without a greater concern in the world. Now I hardly get a chance to taste more than a few before they are here and gone while I hustle about. But the call of childhood memories is still strong. As I walked up along the tree line I had to fight the urge to stop, put down the chain saw, take off my gloves, and start crawling about eating berries. Everywhere I went it seemed I saw more and more, making it hard to concentrate on the work.

Sometimes I think more people need to experience hunting wild strawberries. Sure, it’s not great excitement. It isn’t the rush and clamor of life that so many people are accustomed to. But it is good to stop on occasion and enjoy the quiet and the small hidden treasures in life.

This entry was originally published on June 14, 2006 at Rundy’s blog, Letters From a Silverware Thief. Only his entries related to gardening are republished here.

Sometimes, it’s better not to think about certain things. Sometimes it’s better to pretend you didn’t see, to not think about it. Sometimes one might wonder how there can be such moral quandaries about mowing a field.

We have a back field of about five acres that runs up the hill to the edge of the woods. I try to mow the field with the DR Brush Mower every year to keep the field from going back to scrub. Normally I mow in the fall when other work around the house is at a minimum, but last year I was working on a house renovation project in the fall. Rather than let all the nasty scrub in the field get another free year to grow I decided I should mow the field this spring.

I mowed the field over the course of mid- and late May. I discovered that mowing in spring when everything is coming alive is much more psychologically difficult than mowing in fall when everything is dead. You see, it would be so much easier if I were just some blase suburbanite who thought everything “out back” was just so much to be casually mowed down. But no. I have at least a bit of a discerning eye and so I discover myself in the uncomfortable position of only wanting to mow some things down.

The problem with wanting to save “some” things in the field is that the gardener half of me turns “some” into a few more, then into more, then a lot . . . while the logical and laboring side of me is screaming “Will you just shut up! We’re trying to mow this stupid field. If you want to mow around every third cotton-pickin’ plant we’ll wear ourselves out and never get done.” Driving the DR Brush Mower in a straight line is pretty easy. Carefully mowing around things you want to save isn’t.

Every time I mow the field I end up engaged in some type of bi-polar war where half of me is trying to look at everything I might mow so that I can stop and avoid anything that might be “good” or “interesting,” while the other half of me is fuming that I am being stupid and I should just mow the field, not turn it into a wild/cultivated garden of 5 acres! In the end I reach some type of middle ground where I save some things and so assuage my conscience somewhat, while at the same time feeling stupid for being so impractical that I saved even so much.

During the fall this was easier. When things are died back it’s a little harder to see different plants, and what might be interesting or unusual. When I first mowed the field there were a lot of wild apple trees. I mowed down many of them, but to appease my conscience I engaged in a very labor intensive exercise of moving many of them into a neat orchard up on one hill. This was a very stupid activity because they were wild apple trees and thus it was probable their apples wouldn’t taste good and further the trees were large enough that it was unlikely they could be successfully moved. This latter point has proven true, and most of them have died so I wasted a lot of time and effort moving trees so I wouldn’t feel guilty mowing down other trees.

After the apple tree episode there was the issue of wild blueberries. Our field is dotted with clusters of wild low bush blueberries. The berries taste good. The brush mower, which cuts at 4 inches, would brutally scalp these plants. So . . . mow them all down, save them all, or save only some? The practical part of my mind said mow the field and forget the blueberry plants. They serve no necessary function. The other part of me said wild blueberry bushes are heirlooms and produce a wonderful tasting fruit and I should save every last one. I eventually bargained myself to the position where I saved the larger patches but the very small patches I mowed over and reasoned it away to myself.

That was when I mowed in the fall and nothing actually had any fruit on it. This May I mowed when the blueberries and the strawberries were in full bloom. Now every blueberry bush could hold up its promise of fruit and say, “See? Do you really want to mow over me?” And what about the strawberries? And what about the blackberries? And what about currants? What about honeysuckle? And what about those other flowering things?

Stop. Stop. If I give everyone a free pass from being mowed I might as well take the mower home and forget about having a field. I had to draw the line somewhere. What about blackberries? I stood behind the running DR Brush Mower and looked at the patch of blackberry canes that had sprouted up in the field. I love blackberries. I could see in front of me the beginnings of a very large blackberry patch. But a brambly blackberry thicket was the very antithesis of a field. Was I going to have a blackberry patch or a field? One or the other.

Hard choice. I finally decided my mandate was keeping the field, not cultivating wild blackberries, and thus duly plunged forward. With every mowed down cane it was, “There goes blackberry pies! There goes blackberry jam!” Drive fast and don’t think about it.

Then what about strawberries? The field was covered with strawberry flowers. Some of the flowers were cut off when I mowed, while others were low enough that they escaped. Since approximately half the flowers survived when I mowed over them, I convinced myself mowing them was an acceptable “thinning.”

Finally, the blueberries. I found my previous decision to mow some and save others impossible. It seemed every blueberry bush I saw was laden with flowers promising a great blueberry harvest. Would I dare to mow any of them down? No, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Wild low bush blueberries are not the thorny brambly thicket of wild blackberries. The blueberry bushes were like a low ground cover and I was willing to have a whole field of them, especially when they promised a harvest.

Unfortunately, there were a lot of blueberry patches. They popped up everywhere, sprawling across the field and making me take large detours. Round one patch I would go, and then round another. Pulling the DR Brush Mower around in a turn is many times harder than letting it continue forward and by the time I reached the top of the field it felt like I was doing nothing but driving around in circles, simply mowing the little bits of grass and weeds in between the large blueberry patches. And I was exhausted. Instead of field mower I should just call myself blueberry cultivator.

The idea of tending wild blueberries brought up interesting questions. The most pressing (as I continued to carefully mow around every darn patch) was whether mowing over the wild bushes every few years was like pruning and would actually encourage better fruit production. I sure wished I knew because if true I would have mowed over a third of the patches right then and saved myself a lot of shoulder strain.

I also wondered what the different colored blueberry bushes meant. As I was carefully watching the field for every possible blueberry patch I noticed the plants had distinctly different characteristics. Some bushes had almost reddish leaves, others had dark green leaves, and still others had light green leaves. Then some of the bushes were very close to the ground while others were closer to knee height. Were all those differences merely indicative of plant health (if so, which could I guiltlessly mow down under the verdict of “unhealthy plant”?) or were all these variations a sign that I have a vast collection of different plant types? In that case I was obligated to save all of this disparate botanical treasure. In the end I peered at them all, wondered, and saved them all whilst fuming at my stupidity. (Why am I spending so much effort saving all these plants? They’re just plants!)

And what of the honeysuckle and currants you ask? Don’t ask. Sacrifices must be made for the greater good. The white and purple flower went beneath the churning blades of the mower and only pulp came out. I winced. I felt guilty. But I did it.

The field is mowed. I told everyone they had better really love the blueberries this year after all the work I went through to save them. And I told myself I have to come up with a better way of dealing with the blueberries. Driving my giant mowing machine around every little patch is fanatical and something I can’t keep up long term. The problem with compulsive behavior is that it’s so hard to escape.

This entry was originally published at Rundy’s blog, Letters From a Silverware Thief. After you read his blog, you will never think of chickens in the same way.

I, at long last, (so it seems,) have everything planted. It always seems I reach this state with less dignity and aplomb than I would like. Later winter and early spring are spent dreaming up all sorts of things that I’ll want to get done and complaining that I can’t do everything. Then, starting sometime around the beginning of May, my wishing starts to come back to haunt me. Things start to pile up and time feels as if it goes into some kind of warp as I hurtle down the roller-coaster of life. In short order I am practically running around like a maniac, going “I got to dig! I got to plant! I got to mulch! I got to mow! I got to prune!” . . . And much, much, more.

It’s not like I sit around all winter doing nothing, so of course the sudden flush of things that clamor for my time must compete with everything that I did before. This clash of priorities catches me right in the middle. I end up doing some things that really don’t need to be done, not doing some things that ought to be done, and generally getting flustered and disgusted with myself.

Let it be noted, however, that I did manage (even with all of my panic and disorder) to get everything into the ground. Not that this should really be a big feat, but for me it feels like one. The corn is planted. The squash is planted. The cucumbers are planted. I can compare this success to my past, or to my ideal of how things ought to be done. Compared to my ideal, I dug the garden and planted things in an atrocious manner. But compared to last year I’m doing good so far, so I’m feeling pretty pleased. Last year I planted my squash in extreme haste and I got my corn in even later than I did this year, and I didn’t dig the ground as well.

Work still needs to be done, most importantly mulching. You see, I have an uncommon method for gardening. There are probably as many methods of gardening as there are people who do it, but my particular technique centers around limited available time, and the fact that there are two aspects of gardening that I do not care for. The first is beating out sod, the second is weeding.

If you are not one of those people who beats the dirt out of the sod when you garden, you probably don’t know what I’m talking about, so I’ll explain. When removing sod to dig a garden a person can either turn the grass under, or slice the sod layer away and remove it to some other location to compost. Removing the sod entirely severely reduces the ability of the grass to grow back but it also removes the most fertile layer of earth. One solution is to beat all the good dirt out of the chunks of grass sod until only the bare roots are left, which is then discarded to compost. In abstract this is a brilliant idea, but in reality the amount of labor required for anything more than the teeniest garden is astronomical.

My father is not known for moderation, so throughout my childhood I was drafted (okay, sometimes I volunteered) for various gardening projects which (Dad being the frugal sort) almost always involved beating sod. Since our gardens were never small, this meant what seemed like an endless field of sod that needed to be beaten out. A job that looked like it would never be completed and, if memory serves me, might never have been.

All these long hours of beating sod in my childhood have left a permanent scar on my psyche and I have sworn off sod beating for the rest of my life. Beating the dirt out of a piece of sod is some of the most boring and futile labor invented. I would rather leave the sod in the garden than spend a minute of my time trying to make it give up the dirt that is clinging to its roots.

The second part of gardening I don’t like to do is weeding. I don’t loathe this so much as beating sod, but it is work that needs to be done over and over again, and I invariably don’t have the time to do it. I can either let some other task suffer while I chop up weeds that will grow back next week, or else I can not weed and instead feel extremely guilty as I watch weeds grow up and choke out my garden.

My gardening experience (and choices) would probably be much easier if I owned all sorts of mechanical equipment that would subtract most of the physical labor from digging and maintaining a garden. If I were rich and famous (or at least had a respectable income) I would have a rototiller and which would simply chop up the sod into oblivion. As it is, I dig my garden with a mattock.

A mattock is similar to a pick, except with a much wider blade. You might have seen a picture of some poor African farmer digging his garden with a mattock. Yes, I live in the United States of America, but I dig my garden like a poor third world African . . . there is some equality in the world. A mattock is a good tool, a useful tool, the best you can have for digging up a lot of earth without something mechanical . . . but compared to a hefty rototiller or a plow it is slow going. Hard, too, if you’re out of shape.

The current strategy I used to garden is this: I first take out the DR. Brush Mower and knock it down to the lowest setting on the mowing deck and scalp away the grass and weeds where I am going to dig. Then, if I am planting corn, I take a mattock and dig up the entire area. I don’t remove the roots of the grass and weeds, I simply break everything up. Then I plant. And afterward I mulch everything heavily. This last step accomplishes three things. It fertilizes the garden, it keeps down the weeds (no weeding), and it helps the soil water retention a lot (no watering). Mulching in the short run is extra work, but in the long run it saves a lot of work. It is a secert of gardening. If there was only one thing I could tell someone they should do in their garden it is this–mulch.

The type of mulch can vary. My preference is some kind of manure mixture. In years past when we still had goats I would take the manure and hay mixture and fork it down between the rows. This worked great to hold in the water and keep down weeds. This year I’m going to use horse manure mixed with sawdust because someone a few streets over has a huge mountain of it they’re trying to get rid of. This is a little risky as sawdust can make the soil too acidic, but nothing ventured nothing gained. I don’t have many other options this year, anyhow.

Corn is very demanding of the soil and the ground around here is mostly clay. I have learned a trick that helps corn grow around here . . . it is technically dangerous for the wellbeing of the plant but I have managed to pull it off without harm. The trick is to spread raw chicken manure in the dirt of the corn rows, or else spread it on top of the corn rows before the corn sprouts. Chicken manure has a very high nitrogen content and it can burn plants. That warning given, I’ve found that spreading it judiciously over the rows or mixing it in the soil gives the corn a much appreciated spike of nitrogen and I consider it better than using some chemical mix.

This year I planted more corn than I did any other year, and I planted it all at once. Last year I planted more corn than the year before that, but tried two staggered plantings. It didn’t work out. I got the first planting in okay, but time got away from me and . . . well, the second planting never produced any harvestable corn. This year I decided that being clever would have to come some other time, and I dug and planted everything all at once.

The amount of digging was more than I wanted to do in one day. Technically, I could do it in six or eight hours, but by drafting Lachlan to help me I managed to get the initial digging completed in something like three hours. Good for me, but he will probably end up having psychological scars about using mattocks. After that I had to hoe out all the rows, plant the corn by hand, and cover the seeds back up. Every step in this process, exercises the lower back. Mattocking exercises a lot more than the lower back, but even after three hours of that I wasn’t feeling too bad. But then I had to spend more time hunched over hoeing out the rows, and even more time after that hunched over dropping the seeds into the rows. I am young, but I’m not invincible. By evening it was difficult to stand erect.

The corn is planted, but I still need to spread the chicken manure and then mulch. This will probably be a full Saturday of work, but with that the corn should be effectively taken care of until harvest time.

***

For the curious, we did get a frost the last day in May. So many warm days in May and then at the very end a cold snap. Both the apple trees and the lilacs were done blossoming so they weren’t hurt. Alas, but my grape vines were coming on with full vigor. The frost was, thankfully, light, so rather than being completely annihilated the grape vines were more like . . . seared.

I’m still not sure of the complete extent of the damage. Some vine portions wilted and leaves died but the real question is what is going to happen to all of the wonderful little grape clusters that were starting to come out. Everything had the appearance of being the first great harvest since I planted my vines and now . . . I might have lost it all. Time will tell.

I should count my blessings.

My two plum trees arrived yesterday. I have been very pleased with the condition and packing of everything that I’ve bought from St. Lawrence Nurseries. The plants are always well wrapped and in good condition. I can tell a lot of personal work went into packing the plants. So far I’ve bought grape vines, a cherry tree, an apple tree, and now two plum trees from St. Lawrence Nurseries. These plum trees are the largest trees I’ve received from them. They both stood at around five feet with good root systems. A good deal for only $6.50 each.

I never know exactly when my shipment is going to arrive, so every year it feels like the package arrives at the most inconvenient time. I always have something planned for that day. When my plum trees arrived yesterday I actually intended to plant them that very same day. But then I got cold feet. I went to check out the various places I might plant them, and the more I thought the more complicated and dubious the whole procedure felt. Putting in a fruit tree isn’t like planting a garden. You can’t say that next year you want it someplace else. Or that ten years from now you want it someplace else. A fruit tree is permanent until dead. With the weight of “You’d better plant this in exactly the right spot because you’re not going to get another chance” hanging on my mind, I ended up seeing problems with every place I thought of putting the plum trees. The problem with living on a hilly, very wet, narrow piece of property is that there isn’t very much good land for planting. We have fourteen acres but standing in the middle of the property you can throw a stone to either edge. The land is narrow and goes way back.

So I waffled, came up with all sorts of problems, and finally decided I would ask Dad if he had any opinion on where the plum trees should go. I doubted he would have an opinion, but I figured if there was anything stupid with my ideas he might at least see the problems. This put off planting the plum trees, so I stuck them in some water and left it for the next day.

Dad had no opinions and saw no problem with what I suggested. I was neither no better nor no worse off than before. Indecision, indecision. Somehow, it felt like the more I thought about it the harder it was becoming to decide where these plum trees should go. But they had to go somewhere.

Today turned out to be a very nice April day. The weather was sunny, but windy (April has been pretty windy this year), with temperatures in the mid 50 F. range. This afternoon I went outside with a measuring tape and did some more measuring. No great ideas came. So I dragged Mom outside for a second time and picked her mind some more. The two biggest problems I struggled with were the aesthetics of how the trees lined up and how I could satisfy good aesthetics and still leave room for a tractor path running up to the back of the property.

There was no perfect solution that either Mom or I could find. In the end we settled on locations that will, hopefully, look aesthetically pleasing as the trees grow and also leaves space for a tractor path. I was less than entirely pleased but after all my measuring, re-measuring, and looking at things I’d come to the conclusion that the perfect solution I was looking for simply didn’t exist.

Once the agony of deciding on locations was settled the actual digging of the holes went without a problem. I have a lot of experience digging holes. A strong back and a young body does wonders for digging by manual labor. Going at an easy pace, I managed to dig two holes 36 inches wide and about 24 inches deep, and fill the holes back in, in around two and a half hours. The ground I was working with was not pure clay for the first twelve or so inches and there weren’t too many rocks, so over all it was pretty pleasant work by hole digging standards.

I watered and mulched the two plum trees and they look pretty spiffy now, planted out in the back yard. So long as nothing terrible happens to them (think deer and rabbits) they should do very well, I think. Looking into the future, the real question is whether I will actually ever get any fruit from these plum trees. It is possible that late spring frosts will always kill the blossoms and I will end up having put years of work into two plum trees that will flower wonderfully but never produce a piece of fruit.

Well, we don’t think about that too much right now. It was a calculated risk that I decided to take and at this point hope springs eternal. Besides, I had fun planting them, and I know I will enjoy taking care of them. It is better to look at it in these short terms.