This bird lays fruit

There are some fruits that were doomed from the beginning by name alone. One of them being the gooseberry. It really is a shame though. I have a Hinnomaki Red gooseberry bush. Mine is going on its third year and has grown to be about 3' tall and 4' wide.  It is sandwiched between a Hosta and a Hydrangea so I do have to keep pruning this group.  

Fruit is born on older wood so if you are going to prune existing limbs do it immediately after fruiting so it can have some new growth in the current season. Otherwise you will end up like me and accidentally prune out most of your crop. Another way is prune out the oldest canes when you have a good 5-7 canes going. The one downside to this plant is they have some massive thorns so do be careful but when these guys are ripe you will forget all about the javelin spears covering them. This is the first year I let mine truly ripen and I was shocked how good they are. Mine were ripe in mid July. The skin had a touch of tartness and the flesh is very sweet. To further condense the plant it can be grown as a cordon or espaliared against a fence.

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.