Fruits

Our Strawberries did very well this year and now they are played out.  Now we just have to keep them weeded and healthy as they grow new shoots and daughter plants. Paul has constructed our new raised bed frame for another strawberry bed.  We will be filling it with good soil and getting the daughter plants planted from the other bed this summer. 

We picked our first cantaloupe on July 15.  I am excited to serve it for breakfast tomorrow.  I personally don’t care for it but Paul and the girls love it.  They are small but look healthy and good. 

The Blackberry vines have not done well this year.  We had an initial harvest but some virus has hit them and all of this year’s canes are dead.  I think it must have been a type of blight judging by the look of it.  These canes will be pruned out and burned in the burn pile.

We have two figs that are just surprising us.  One we planted last spring and it produced figs last year.  This year it is absolutely covered. Paul is so excited.  The other fig was planted about 4 years ago, but bless its heart, it kept getting hit with the weed eater.  The root system must go all the way to China by now.  But we finally have plenty of growth on the top.  Thanks to a barrier that we have erected it hasn’t gotten attacked this year – yet!!  (Love you, Honey!!!)

Our apple trees are growing well.  Paul removed a cedar tree that was within 30 feet of them and so the cedar rust is minimal this year.  We have two more cedars to cut down and hopefully that will help.  A dear friend suggested that I spray them with baking soda water.  She said this should help with the rust so I am going to try this soon. 

Paul’s Concord grapes are doing great!!  The Japanese Beetles have thought so too.  But I think they are about through now.  We have quite a bunch of bunches on the vines and they are turning purple.  There will be more than enough for making jelly and fresh eating.

The blueberries are being harvested.  We have gotten enough this year to actually do something with.  The birds were beginning to be a problem but we covered the shrubs with some netting and that ended it.  Personally, blueberries are not my favorite fruit – but the girls love blueberry muffins, blueberry pancakes and blueberry syrup.

Sarah’s Strawberries

This year I have requested the job of tending the Strawberries. My dream is to one day have a U-pick Strawberry Farm on my own land. I decided it would be good practice to start on a smaller scale, a.k.a our family patch.

As Gardening season approaches there is a lot of prep work to be done. Since this is my first year to have responsibility of the strawberries, I have a lot of work to do both in my mind and in the patch! I am starting a Strawberry Notebook where I keep all the info I come across. I have found the internet to be a big help here because there are tons of sites on growing them in Alabama, as they tend to do well down here. Mom also has lots of book and pamphlets that she has gathered over the years, so I have quite a collection.  I am going to document what I am doing in regards to the patch here and share what I am learning!

Background

 Our patch will be in its third year this season, so a few plants will be ready to be replaced, but many will still produce, as some breeds produce up to 5 or 6 years before they need to be replanted. We are also going to build a new bed this year, giving us 3 good beds. With the 2 we had producing last year we got about 4 or 5 gallons of berries. New plants usually don’t produce until their second year so production may be less this time since some of the plants need replacing.

What to do

Okay, lets see. The old patch must be weeded first. The beds we have are raised beds.  Mom tilled the beds down to about 2 feet and then we built borders of 2 by 10’s.  Then we filled the rest of the bed with compost from our compost bed. We laid black fabric weed cloth down to keep weeds to a minimum, but some have grown around the base of the plants where it is open.

All the ‘daughter’ plants must be removed for replanting. I have to take up any useless crowns making room for the new young plants, get some fertilizer into the soil and trim dead leaves and stems.

Well, its time to get started! I am so excited about this and I can’t wait til planting time