New Perennial Fruit Plants May 2016

I've been busy in May! Working my butt off to get all the micro-farm chores done and prepped for our growing season. I do feel a bit behind, but in actuality I've made so much progress on top of the usual maintenance. Aside from all my edible garden space, I have an extensive perennial garden of both full sun and shade areas. I also have a cactus garden, shrubs and trees and grass to maintain throughout the season. In the past, the vegetable gardens have taken priority and received the bulk of my attention, thing is, they were the easiest thing to take care of.

This year I told myself I'd give a bit more care and grunt work towards my perennials and some more neglected areas of garden - and as a reward I'd invest in a few neat projects and add some more perennial fruit. Fruit picking takes me straight back to my childhood in Annapolis Valley Nova-Scotia.

I've always been inspired by Martha Stewart's amazing
high bush blueberry patch and arbor

On May 15th I bought 2 massive high bush blueberries from Terra Greenhouses in Milton, ON, full of blooms and first forming fruit, and at least 4.5ft tall. The inspiration behind the perennial fruit overhaul in the yard. I have had blueberry bushes in the past, but one hot summer they didn't make it. I have two remaining twig-like blueberries left that I'm hoping will take off once moved into a permanent blueberry location.

Look at all those blossoms! Hopefully I get at least a few quarts

Yesterday I bought some smaller bush blueberries from a President's Choice garden centre in town. I've said it before and I'll say it again - I love what they are selling over at PC (Lowblaws, Zehrs, etc). Perhaps a touch expensive, but they have great quality and they have some very unique plant introductions each year, some non-chain garden centres don't even have some of the unique plants PC carries. I'm not sponsored by PC - but if they want to hook a girl up, I'd be happy to try out all of they're stuff - especially the fun edibles! Maybe it was the packaging that drew me in, but wow I got some fun stuff!

Neat how they made the packaging with little labels you can cut out - I probably wont use the labels, but it's a cool idea.

The first thing I found was this funky unique-strawberry 3 pack. The packaging was clever and the varieties are super cool. There is "Heritage" an alpine/wild-like strawberry, seems to have longer wispy growth. "Pineberry" which is an increasingly popular berry, small, white and very sweet, almost tropical fruit-like, I already have a few "White Soul" strawberries and they are great, so I'm looking forward to comparing them. Last-off we've got "Framberry", apparently it tastes like a raspberry cross, it has very compact foliage and shorter growth. Excited to see what comes of this trio, might have to go back and get 2-3 more 3-packs! I think they need they're own space too because my traditional standard strawberries will probably choke them out and smother them with their size. My "White Soul" berries have their own dedicated pot - maybe I need a mini strawberry varieties raised bed? One upside to these smaller berries is that I find they are less predated then the juicy big berries from market varieties.

I also picked up two blueberry plants "Blueberry Glaze" and "Pink Popcorn". They are dwarfs in comparison to my recent Terra bushes, but overall it's a nice variety. Again I might have to make additional raised beds specifically if the high-bush varieties look bizarre beside the smaller bushier plants. I'm interested in a few other varieties like "Jelly Bean" which are larger fruit on a compact plant, "Peach Sorbet" which turns bright red and peach come fall, "Pink Icing" with pink tipped foliage and "Perpetua" a double crop mid-bush blueberry. Hell- if I had the funds, I'd have a row of 6 of each variety. If you really want your own fresh fruit, that's the way to go. One day, and I'll show you how I did it!

"Blueberry Glaze" a small compact variety with dark coloured fruit.

"Pink Popcorn" Blueberry - excited to see how this turns out

I have lumber ready to make some low 2x8ft raised beds of 4x4 posts for the blueberries and another for my gold raspberries. If the design works well, I plan on expanding for more fruit. I need to find some pine needles and I am getting a load of mulch in the next two weeks, things might actually look presentable (to my standard).

Examples of the fruit on each

More updates to come, we've got a rainy-stormy weekend ahead, so I'll actually be able to catch up on some indoor non-garden work and plan some blog posts. I'd like to thank thunderous downpours for the opportunity to force me inside for this post. Stay tuned for my rather spontaneous rain-barrel pond project post!