One of the hardest things about selling our farm a couple years ago was saying goodbye to the blueberry bushes. I’d dug them up before we sold the house in my hometown and my husband tackled the compacted earth of the horse property we’d bought out on the Oregon Coast and planted them in the sun near our greenhouse and they were ridiculously happy in that spot. When we downsized to our cottage in the city, the soil just wasn’t having it for the two small blueberry bushes I bought - and so I kind of gave up while there.
But now in our bigger space up here in the Valley? I tried again and this past fall did what I affectionately refer to as “buying time” - i.e., getting the largest plants humanly possible at the nursery that were ~5 years old (and 5’ tall), rather than the little bitty 18” ones that wouldn’t produce in decent amounts until I was collecting Social Security! So we have three big gals as part of our “fruit forest” I’ve started - the Eberhardt heirloom (shown above and our first to bloom earlier this week), Jersey and Olympia (below, just kicking off this past weekend) - and they are happy as can be...
I’ve been gardening for so many years that I know pretty well what Larger-Plant investments are worth it, and the older blueberry bushes and fruit trees truly are. Other fruiting shrubs that grow fast like blackberries and marionberries, no biggie, but now that I’m 50 and my first two homes that I planted fruit trees are now producing years after my departure? I want stuff now, not in a decade! Plus it’s way helpful for landscape design - you can visualize a heck of a lot more what space you have and not accidentally crowd anything.
This summer’s agenda? Eating homemade blueberry ricotta pancakes while looking over our garden. Nothing better...
"I may never be happy, but tonight I am content. Nothing more than an empty house, the warm hazy weariness from a day spent setting strawberry runners in the sun, a glass of cool sweet milk, and a shallow dish of blueberries bathed in cream. When one is so tired at the end of a day one must sleep, and at the next dawn there are more strawberry runners to set, and so one goes on living, near the earth. At times like this I'd call myself a fool to ask for more." ~ Sylvia Plath
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