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    Growing Berries for Food and Fun: Notes from the Northwoods
    Growing Berries for Food and Fun: Notes from the Northwoods
    Growing Berries for Food and Fun: Notes from the Northwoods
    Ebook203 pages1 hour

    Growing Berries for Food and Fun: Notes from the Northwoods

    By Sue Robishaw

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    About this ebook

    With her usual enjoyable conversational style Sue Robishaw takes the reader along the paths she has traveled over some forty years on their northwoods homestead to bring strawberries, raspberries, blueberries and grapes into their lives. Full of practical down-home information this is a book to be used. It is for those who want to grow their own fruit in their own backyard gardens, large or small. It is also just plain fun to read. Hers is an organic approach to growing and she doesn’t pretend to always have picture-perfect plots or absolute solutions. Yet she happily harvests an abundance of fruit even if some years are up and some years down, and she helps the reader to do the same.

    Along with important notes on preparing ground, choosing varieties, planting, caring, maintenance, and harvesting, the information on the protective cages she and her husband, Steve Schmeck, designed and built to keep the birds away from the strawberries and blueberries are invaluable. These are long-term structures meant to last for many years and go beyond the quick but often inadequate and temporary netting fabric often used. Whether for building your own from her descriptions and photos or to get ideas to design your own to suit your own plants this will be an important part of the book for many backyard fruit growers.

    The author draws on her own experience in her own garden to share what she has learned from both the successes and the not so successes. Along with many photos, she provides how-to information as well as inspiration to encourage the reader to glean from the pages whatever they need to be successful in their own berry adventures. While the goal is certainly to harvest healthy ripe fruit, the journey and relationship with the growing plants and the soil they are living in is intertwined throughout the book. Their homestead is in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, with a zone 3 climate, so her focus is often on how to get ripe fruit in spite of weather challenges. But there is also plenty of information that will be of interest and use to those who garden in warmer climates.

    This book is a welcome update to the many articles by Robishaw published in the past in “Countryside Magazine” (under ‘Notes from the Northwoods’), as well as in her earlier book “Homesteading Adventures” which covers their first twenty years on their homestead. Though “Growing Berries” is geared toward those who want to grow their own small fruit it is also an enjoyable read as a look into the gardening life of this popular homesteading writer.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherManyTracks
    Release dateFeb 26, 2016
    ISBN9781311753632
    Growing Berries for Food and Fun: Notes from the Northwoods
    Author

    Sue Robishaw

    Sue Robishaw has thirty five years of magazine articles and six books to her credit, mostly from the forty years she and her husband, Steve Schmeck, have spent building and living on their off-grid Upper Peninsula Michigan homestead. Her life is full of variety and interest. A large organic garden and orchard provides most of their food and unending topics for her writing. All of the pieces of her world are woven together in a way that suits her belief in the joy of life -- gardening, homesteading, hiking, writing, watercolor, music, dance, community, and designing and knitting colorful wool socks for warmth and fun!

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      Book preview

      Growing Berries for Food and Fun - Sue Robishaw

      I’ve had the joy and learning of some forty years of growing fruit on our homestead. From alpine strawberries (cute and tasty, lost out to larger fare) to a forty foot chokepear (awesome in bloom, largely inedible in fruit) it’s been an interesting and good journey. There are no absolutes here, and a good amount of trial and error. But we’ve been blessed with an abundance of fruit so many times that the years of lesser amounts seem insignificant by comparison. Every year is different and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I hope this book inspires you to get involved with some berries in your own life, however best suits you and makes you happy. I wish you the best in all your growing!

      STRAWBERRIES

      Ahhh, the fruit of poetry, of passion, shortcake fund-raisers, and delicious platitudes. How can you not love something with so much potential, so much promise. Why else do we put up with the decidedly tasteless pinkish chunks that get passed off as fruit in commercial fare, while we smile and nibble and oooh and ahhh, strawberries, this time of year! How nice. Of course we know better. They aren’t nice, and they aren’t truly strawberries. But we remember, and that’s what we see and taste. Real strawberries, fresh from your garden, under cover of netting, nestled in mulch, fussed over like the newest grandbaby, yes, there is your real strawberry. And worth every fiss and fuss it is. If you care for them, they will care for you. It is an honest and open exchange.

      You can grow just one variety of strawberry, but why not two or three or ten? The most I’ve had at one time was six, but then I’m sort of the conservative type when it comes to gardening. I’ve tried this one and that one, many varieties, they’ve come and gone. As I’m writing I have only three varieties out in the garden, safely resting under a foot or so of beautiful snow. I like these and they spread across my harvesting season nicely. But by the time you read this, who’s to say if I’ll have more, or fewer, the same, or different. It’s a good way to go. No one can tell you what varieties are going to suit you best so experiment and grow what you like and what likes you. The most important requirement is that you want to grow good strawberries, expect to grow good strawberries, are willing to grow good strawberries, enough that you’ll treat them with due respect for the wonderful creatures that they are. I admit I’m fond of strawberries. They were the first fruit, other than rhubarb, that I grew in my garden, and they’ve been a part of the scene now for almost forty years.

      Have I always grown great strawberries? Heavens no. I’ve grown some of the poorest looking specimens you can imagine. I’ve let my beds get so overgrown and full of weeds I had to simply start over. It’s simple. If you can’t give them the attention they need, grow rhubarb instead. But no matter, even at my worst there was always a little fruit struggling through to give me hope. So I learned to treat them better, and they treat me better and we eat a lot of strawberries now.

      Strawberries are generally considered a northern fruit, though some varieties dip into warmer climates. Plants and buds can be susceptible to winter (or summer) freeze damage in the coldest areas but mulch and snow give needed protection; blankets if need be. They have their preferences for soil type and texture, but it does no good to tell you that the preferred soil is this, if all you have is that. If you have soil that grows green things then you have a chance of growing strawberries.

      Strawberries do like sun and dislike overly dry or overly wet. I get a better harvest when my beds are farther away from the woods, where the squirrels and chipmunks thrive and sally forth to dine. A reasonable amount of observation and attention will tell you more than any text what your strawberries prefer on your land. As with most plants and animals, people included, strawberries grow best where they grow naturally. Here’s how I do it.

      STRAWBERRY BED

      There are numerous methods for growing strawberries but the permanent bed system works best for me. Get the grass and perennial weeds out first. No matter how you hope to the contrary, the strawberry plants are not going to crowd out the weeds and it’s a lot of work to go through for not much reward if you don’t get the bed clean first. Trust me, I’ve been there. If your soil is flat out worn out, plant and dig in green manure for several seasons first. Dig in whatever manure you can scrounge up. Of course you won’t put anything in your soil that would harm you if you ate it. Else why would you be going to all this work to grow your very own very best strawberries and then poison them and you? Of course you wouldn’t. The soil is the plant’s home, hearth and health. Make it good. Then let the whole plot settle down and re-establish its connections and build its ecosystem.

      My beds are approximately four feet wide and I maintain four rows of berries therein. New plantings with purchased plants are usually planted in the spring. If you are using your own or a friend’s rooted runners then you might do this later in the summer or early fall. If you have plenty of plants to start with, simply fill up the bed, spacing plants about 12" apart. Some varieties will want more space and some less. But you can easily adjust spacing in the future when you set new runners after you’ve seen how the variety grows. If you have any compost, dig in a bit with each plant. Water and mulch as you would any little transplant.

      If you haven’t enough plants for a full bed then put them only in every other row, or skip every other space in the row, or leave two spaces between. It might take a year or two to fill the bed, longer if the variety is a reluctant producer of runners, but it will happen. As the plants grow and send out runners, move the best ones to the empty spaces. Run them under the mulch and they will be more apt to stay where you place them. Gently push the little plant into the dirt so it can establish root contact quickly.

      MULCH

      Now you wouldn’t make your self live out in your garden bare naked in the hot sun and mosquitoes and blackflies and your strawberries will appreciate similar consideration. Most weeds will not be a problem in the strawberry patch because of the generous layer of mulch you are maintaining. I like loose hay best and we cut our own from our wild fields. It’s wonderful to work with if you can get it. If you can’t cut your own check around with local farmers. Maybe you can pick up some cut hay from the edges. Reasonably good baled hay works, too. Ask when it was cut, let them know you’re using it for mulch and don’t want weedy, late cut stuff, and get lighter, looser bales if you can. Moldy hay is cheap but check out a bale before buying much of it to see if it’s something you want to work with. We live in hay country so that’s the easiest to get here but certainly other natural materials will work, too. See what is available locally. Straw is stiff, not very pleasant to work with and not much nutritional value left in it but it will keep the weeds down and will add something. Sawdust is cold, hard to move, and hard for the soil residents to make a good meal of so go with something with more life. Save the sawdust for paths.

      Grass clippings can work if you have a lot of them. They pack down and rot quickly, which may be good for the soil but doesn’t do much for weed control. You want your mulch to rot, of course, but it’s nice if it stays around awhile to do the rest, too. If you do use grass clips, make sure they are weed free. Dandelion seeds have a way of staying around a long time.

      As the plants grow, pull the mulch up around them. And put enough on! Without burying the plants, of course. A scattering of plant material that barely covers the ground isn’t going to keep many weeds down and it’ll

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