The fruits of fall

Fall is falling fast around here. We've had some below-freezing nights and are cutting firewood and harvesting the garden like mad (which accounts for my silence here on the blog -- I'll have a harvest update in the near future).

But it's not just the garden that's putting out fruit. The wild plants are producing abundantly before the first snow falls.

The rose hips (rich in Vitamin C) are very abundant this year.

The elderberries are ripe as well.

The wild honeysuckle put out some startlingly florescent-orange fruit.

Lots and lots of snowberries this year.

These are berries from our Virginia creeper vines. The wild birds gorge on them.

With the exception of the rose hips and elderberries, the other fruit may or may not be edible -- or only edible in small quantities. They taste yucky anyway, so none of us bother harvesting any of them (we have no shortage of fruit from the garden).

The fall colors have been especially vibrant this year too. Of course we don't get the explosive jubilee of the east coast deciduous forests, but the undergrowth turns lovely shades of orange, red, and yellow.

As I said, I'll have updates on our harvest and wood cutting in the near future. Right now we're too busy harvesting and wood cutting.

Berry berry good

I've spent the last few weeks working hard to get the berry beds up and running. I'm pleased to report (so far) -- success!

I started with the strawberry beds, two of them. After all these futile years of dying strawberry plants, all the hard work preparing the beds has paid off. My strawberries are doing wonderfully! I have pinched off dozens -- no, hundreds -- of blossoms. I'm not letting the strawberries produce fruit this year. I'd rather they put their energy into growth. But next year -- whoo-hoo, we should be buried in strawberries!

But then an interesting thing happened. Many years ago I attempted to get a berry patch started elsewhere, but didn't realize I chose the most weed-infested spot on our entire twenty acres, thickly infested with thistle, teasel, and other atrocities.

Oh my gosh, I tried everything to get those weeds under control -- black plastic, garden cloth, hand-pulling, you name it. Nothing worked. At last I gave up in despair and paid absolutely no attention to the poor berry plants. I just figured everything had gotten crowded out by the weeds.

Fast forward five years. While walking (wading, actually) through this weed patch a couple weeks ago to determine if anything was salvageable, imagine my astonishment to find several mature strawberry plants hidden among the thick grasses!

Five plants in all. So I dug them up...

...and transplanted them into the spiffy new strawberry beds, in place of a couple of the new plants that never grew.

Some had green strawberries.

One even had a runner, which is already taking root to form a new plant. (In about a week, I'll snip it free from the mother plant and replant it in a different spot.)

Meanwhile the topsoil we brought in sprouted a monoculture of some sort of weed.

No matter, it's an easy thing to pluck them out.

I just can't keep away from the strawberries! I go out two or three times a day just to marvel at my beautiful beautiful beds.

But what about the raspberries I transplanted a couple weeks ago? Most are doing very well indeed...

...but a few didn't make it.

I did notice this brave little sprout.

Fortunately I have a few hardy raspberries still clinging to life in the old weed-infested berry patch, so I transplanted enough to replace the other transplants that didn't make it. By the end of today, the raspberry bed was looking fairly respectable.

Now blueberries -- that's a whole different ball o' wax. I started by preparing the bed as I did the others -- newspaper, hardware cloth, then layered topsoil, composted manure, more topsoil.

Then I had to get blueberry bushes. Look no further than the weed-infested berry patch!

Back in 2004 I planted twenty blueberry bushes in this patch. With the weed issues, I couldn't make the poor things grow and finally abandoned them -- didn't weed, didn't water, just assumed they were dead.

But before spending upwards of $10/bush buying new blueberries, I decided to investigate and see if there was anything worth salvaging in this area.

Well there were! In fact, sixteen of the original twenty bushes were, if not thriving, at least alive! This astounded me because it meant they clung to life through staggering neglect on my part. Well, I'm going to make it up to them.

See the blueberry bush? Well guess what, neither did I unless I looked reeeeeally closely.

It took two days of getting some nasty scratches from the teasels and thistles as I dug up the blueberry bushes, but one by one I got them all transplanted.

Blueberries love acid soil, so I sprinkled azalea food around the plants and gave everything a good thorough watering.

It was a lot of hot, hard, scratchy, ant-infested work, but at last all the bushes were moved. If they survive the transplant shock -- and I was careful to keep as much soil around their roots as I could -- then these poor long-suffering bushes should begin to thrive at last.

Berry beds and buying antiques

One of the stalled projects we wanted to complete last year but didn't have a chance to finish was fruit beds. We needed a dedicated place to put strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries.

So last year (before the tractor died) we managed to heave the beams for the beds into their rough places. Last week we nudged the beams into their correct spots. Yesterday we completed the boxes. Whoo-hoo, progress!

We hauled some long boards into the garden.

Don cut them into four-foot lengths.

Some of the beams had rotten ends, so he trimmed them.

We squared up the beams evenly, then he hammered the end caps in place.

Now we have four nice squared (well, rectangle-d) beds, ready for hardware cloth and topsoil.

The next step will be to lay several layers of newspapers on the ground in the beds (to keep the prairie grasses from coming up) and overlay that with hardware cloth, of which we bought several hundred feet. We have a problem with moles and voles in this area, so hardware cloth will discourage the little critters from munching our plants from underneath.

Yesterday we also took a short excursion to buy some antiques. There's a junk / slash / antique cooperative just outside of town that sells an amazingly varied jumble of things for amazingly cheap prices. For some time now we've been coveting such things as extra scythes and other garden implements. They've been closed all winter and opened up for the first time yesterday. So we all piled in the car and took a trip. It's located in a converted old farmhouse with several outbuildings as well as many things just jumbled and scattered outside.

Here, for example, is one of the outbuildings. It's a treasure-trove around this place -- you never know what you'll find.

We ended up purchasing three scythes, an extra snath (scythe handle), several garden tools (rakes, shovels, etc.), and some miscellaneous kitchen items such as cast iron pots and pans, some grinders, etc.

It was kind of funny -- the sellers didn't expect us to actually use any of the things we bought -- they thought we were just planning on (cough) hanging them on the wall for decoration. Wrong! How else are we going to harvest the wheat field except with scythes?