What's in it for me?

Mowing and pruning, clipping and snipping, raking and staking, fertilizing and spertilizing? (Try it.  Nothing rhymes with fertilizing).  All of these were tasks that I loved but somehow lacked the desire to do on a regular enough basis to really keep things to the elite standard I was looking for.  I guess it all really came down to one thing.  What's in it for me.  I give them my blood sweat and tears and to what end?  I always had the idea that edible plants = ugly.  In my yard my first priority had always been to have a beautiful looking yard.  Suddenly I wanted more.  I wanted a return on my investment.  In other words "You best give or you be gone".  Fortunately I am not nearly as selfish with my human relationships!  My first call to action was to investigate if there were edible plants that were not hideous.  Turns out there are quite a few.  I first had to convince my wife to let me try a few things.  Growing edibles was her idea first but she just wanted a small veggie garden.  I was thinking on a much larger scale.  Total yard domination if you will.  First up on the list was Blueberries.  Turns out they love my naturally acid PNW maritime climate.  My beautiful wife and baby here in front of our lupins and 3 blueberries in the background along with a recovering Meyer Lemon in the yellow pot that didn't like its winter location.  I'm going to try something else this year for him.

We started with a Reka blueberry.  From there we got 2 evergreen (in my climate) Sunshine Blue, Bluecrop, Earliblue, Pink Lemonaid (A pink when ripe fruit with really cool slender glossy leaves with a metallic undertone), Spartan, Chandler, 2x Bountiful Blue(Also evergreen in my area).  If I was going to grow just one fruit bush from my first 2 1/2 years of experience I would say do blueberries if you have the acid soil for it or can do them in a container.  They give a good return young and can give 10-20 pounds in the right condition depending on variety when mature.  So far my best successes have been Sunshine Blue and Bluecrop.  Sunshine ripens over several months and gives me a large handful every other day.  It also seems to be less picky on the soil type and acidity.  Bluecrop was more all at once but fruited pretty heavy for a 2 year old plant.  The others still did very well.  No losers in the group.  I'll post updates in the years to come as to how they are coming along.  I know these are not the rare earth shaking crazy plants that I was talking about but I am doing these in order as to when I acquired them.  That way you can follow along with my journey.   

Just One Blueberry Bush

50 miles north of Seattle in a zone 8 garden far far away (or not so far if you live close by).......  2 years ago my wife and I decided to try to grow a tomato plant, and some carrots in our 1/16th acre property and an addiction was born.  I really desired to have a nice looking landscape but was getting bored of watering landscape plants and cutting grass and I find it much more rewarding to put work into something that will give back.  Not that I'm selfish or anything.  I just like to see the fruit of my labor (lots of pun intended).  So it all happened like this:  (My wife) Honey, can we grow a tomato?  (Me) Are they hard to grow. (My wife) I don't think so.  (Me) Sure.  (Me in my mind) Sure as long as I don't have to do much.  Well turns out those suckers really grow.  We got one to reach the top of our canopy in the back yard.  I guesstimate that to be about 8' or so.  It was a yellow pear tomato.  We had enough for ourselves, friends and the dog who ran around burying them in the yard and in the corners of the patio furniture.  I thought it was so successful and fun that we should add a blueberry bush.  I mentioned it to my wife and she said "I don't know if we have enough room for fruit bushes.  Do you know how big those things get?"  I replied with a very manly "Please, let give it a try."  She quickly gave in and actually bought me a Reka Blueberry.

I was very excited and content.......for a few weeks......  Next thing I knew I had a Triple Crown Blackberry as well.

It grew all the way to my roof line and back down to the ground. Fast forward to today and I have 65 different edible plants including blackberries, blueberries, boysenberry, chilean guava, chilean wintergreen, columnar apple trees, cranberries, wintergreen, currants, feijoa, figs, gojiberries, gooseberries, grapes, honeyberries, huckleberries, kiwi, lemons, lingonberries, luma, nectarines, passion fruit, raspberries, rhubarb, salal, and many varieties of strawberries.  This does not include my veggie garden of all the standards.  I even got watermelon this year (which is hard to get in my maritime climate) thanks to the variety Blacktail Mountain.  They are awesome.  I found out about them through Tall Clover Farm.  My daughter is my garden walking companion.  We walk the garden every day we can looking for bugs and weeds to pull.  This might seem obsessive but let me explain myself.  My purpose of this blog is to create a reference for myself and others who are growing rare and common fruits and vegetables in similar temperate climate and giving others a point of reference for doing the same on a small lot.  If you love the idea of growing something from another continent or things that you had no idea you could grow you are my kind of person.  I like to try to grow new things and if they don't make it that is okay.  I have a funeral for each bush that doesn't make it.  (Actually I'm just burying it so it will compost but I tell the other plants its a funeral so they don't get suspicious.).  I hope you join along and we can expand what is the norm for a zone 8 garden.