One distraction when I’m working on the seed list is thinking about one berry to choose to add to our abundance, and how we haven’t finished this year’s draft of what will go where in the kitchen garden. Of particular thought is what to do with all the berries. We again didn’t cut back as many spent canes as we meant to from last year. I may try to amend that a bit when the temperatures aren’t in the negative range. We’ll see how the weather fares. I’m finally getting over the series of winter bug to bronchitis to sinus infection whirlwind this month, and I don’t want to tempt any of that back with being out in too cold weather.
The garage bed will be a big project for us this year. My partner wants a walkway through it, and we’re trying to decide if we still want to attempt some trellis along the garage itself before we pick the walkway distance from the long side of the garage.
It will likely mean bumping the current garage bed depth out more if we do plan to trellis there. In some ways, this will be terrible and great because I know there is cheap landscape fabric yet to be unearthed there. I made some headway with that last year, but there may be much, much more buried beneath oh so many berry runners. Hopefully in March I’ll be ordering some new leather gloves good for protection against thorny things which will make all the berry work a lot easier on my skin this year. There’s also a rock border mostly around it, but that’s been buried in sediment over the years too. Some we know where they are, some we added when we dismantled the former firepit, but we really don’t know how many we will have to work with just yet.
That bed is one of the oldest here, and I’m still learning what all is there buried under tall “weeds” and a carpet of berry runners. We have added a few companions in there, and the perennials seem to be holding, not sure about the reseeds from last year to this year though. They reseeded themselves last year, much to our surprise (bidens). We’re also still trying to decide if there might be a better spot for the highbush blueberry we have there. It’s doing ok, but somehow we feel like it should be doing just a bit better, if that makes sense.
The old red raspberry took a beating last year from beetle like bugs we did not have the year before. Yet we had a later crop on a different nearby cane that did ok. That far side of the garage bed is still thickly overgrown, which I think has contributed to certain plants that way (like one daylily patch) struggling.
So, lots of berries on the brain tonight, and still narrowing down one addition to the berries from a list down to five possibles.
