Making it not count

so most of the time you hear "make it count". Not me. When it comes to the garden at least. I am a bit of an obsessive personality and when my wife and I started the garden we had a few plants we wanted to get. The problem is that my list was much bigger than hers. It became so bad that she started keeping count. Now where making it not count comes in is anything off of her list reduces the lopsidedness (is that a real word) of the list so if she wants something that is secretly on my list but I make her think that it is hers it doesn't count against me. This so happened on the second item we got. A Meeker raspberry. My Wife loves raspberries and so do I. This worked out well. 

The middle pot is the Meeker. It is a summer (floricane) fruiting raspberry. This means that the fruit is formed on the previous years growth. This is early fall so I pruned out the stems as soon as the fruit for that stem was done. This helps keep the plant tidy and gives energy to growing new stems that will be next years fruit. This is a 2 year old bush. Also in this picture to the left is a Reka blueberry, to the right is a bluecrop blueberry, and the little one is an Amity fall bearing (everbearingraspberry. This means you get a small crop on 1 year old wood and another crop late into the fall on current year wood. This is just a start so we'll see when it's ready to produce. 

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.