Blackberry Blues

Pathetic Harvest

It's been two weeks since my battle of the barbs in the blackberry jungle. Last week, I tried to pick some berries. There were only three or four scrawny, sour little things. I left them in a bowl on a fence post that my husband banged into it with the lawnmower, knocking the berries into the grass. It was no great loss. They didn't look all the edible anyway.

Today I went out to see if my harvest would be any better. The picture says everything. Some berries consist of only 3 to 5 kernels (or whatever they're called). Other berries are covered with a grey fuzzy mold. The leaves on one of the plants have sprouted a speckled yellow and orange fuzz. It was very discouraging. Especially since I saw blackberries for sale at the Farmer's Market yesterday that looked like what my neighbor in Colorado used to grow.

It's amazing that the Blackberries can grow at all and get any nutrients from the soil through the tangle of roots from Mugwort, Wisteria, Vinca, Honeysuckle and countless un-named plants they compete with.

The weeds are back

The other day, I saw a chart about Blackberries. It showed six types. Four of which have no thorns. Every time a Blackberry bush grabs me, I remember that chart.

Raspberry Reality

All the weeds I cleared around the Raspberry bushes in May have returned. And the canes that bore fruit last month all need to be trimmed away to make room for the new berries that are starting to bud on the new canes. But it's been so hot, I keep putting it off. I managed to clean up a small section and spred some NY Times weed mat.

A Note to Frank and Linda

The Franklinia tree is in full bloom. The blossoms are beautiful and give off a lovely melony scent. I saw a peach colored butterfly sitting on one of the flowers the other day. It was just as happy to see a flowering tree this late in the summer as I was. 

Good? Bad? Ugly?

I look at -- and notice -- insects completely differently since I went to the Mercer Educational Gardens to learn about beneficial insects last week. Now I see all kinds of uniquely colored and shaped critters. I'm pretty certain that there are more varieties here than in Colorado where I mostly worried about grasshoppers and wasps (or hornets, I can't seem to get that straight). The problem is that I'm even worse at identifying insects than I am at identifying weeds and plants.

Here's some of what I learned:

• There are 100,000 species of insects in North America and only 10% are bad guys
• Most Hymenoptra (bees and wasps) are good
• The Bald Faced Hornet and the Vespid Wasp are bad
• The larva of a Firefly is a Glow Worm
• There are 20 different kinds of Lady Beetles (a.k.a. Lady Bugs)
• The Mexican Bean Beetle looks like a brown Lady Beetle but it eats beans, not aphids
• The Spined Soldier Bug is a good guy that sucks the juice out of bad bugs
• It looks like the Brown Marmalated Stink Bug that sucks the juice out of fruit
• The Ground Beetle looks like a Cockroach but is a good guy that eats Slugs
• The Damsel Fly is a Mosquito vacuum cleaner
• All Spiders are good -- they eat the night flying insects
• You don't have to order beneficial insects from a mail order catalog -- they will find you if you don't have a perfectly manicured yard
• The more plants you have with pollen, the more beneficials you'll have
• The best property for beneficials has a diverse selection of plants
• Linda, the previous owner of this property gets an A+ for building a garden that attracts beneficial insects

Today while I was weeding, I saw several kinds of tiny insects all over a pollen-laden flower spike and wondered if they were good or bad. The thing is, you need the bad ones to attract the good ones. I wished I had a super ultra macro camera that I could have used to take pictures of them. Not so I could try to identify them out of 100,000 candidates. But just so I could post on the blog. They had unique coloring and unusual shapes.

Bumble Bees on Milkweed

Some familiar looking flowers bloomed last month. They resembled a flower that was categorized as a noxious weed in Boulder open space because it was spreading and crowding out the native species. But here, the plants were carefully arranged around the bird feeder and grew to over 5' tall. The bees were crawling all over the blossoms and each other to get to the pollen. Now the flowers have gone to seed and the pods look exactly like the Milkweed that Boulder volunteers had dug up and tried to eradicate . My research says that Milkweed is highly prized because it attracts butterlies. I only saw bees crawling all over it.

I've seen some magnificent butterflies in the last few days. They're big enough to be photographed with  my macro lens but they refuse to stay still long enough for me to run in the house, find my camera, turn it on and get back in time to take a picture.

Volunteers

A pretty white pansy

A volunteer tomato that
popped up among the
raspberry bushes

Ageratum

One of the delights of wandering around the flower beds is finding annual flowers that self sowed from the year before.


Last Monday I received my Master Gardeners application. It said that acceptance is on a first come, first served basis. So I mailed it back on Tuesday. They're very clear that the Mercer County Master Gardener Training program is not a garden club. It's a volunteer service organization to provide information to the public.

In fact, if I get accepted, I'll not only be required to attend classes through Rutgers University from September through March, I'll need to serve 60 volunteer hours in order to qualify as a Master Gardener. All that, plus picking berries and tackling unrelenting weeds. I hope I'll have time to blog.

The Blackberry Jungle

The fenced area where the raspberries are planted is roughly the size that my whole back yard was in Boulder. Only (only?) about one third of it is occupied by raspberries. The rest is blueberries that the birds devoured, a hostile tangle of thorny blackberries, and weeds. Lots and lots of weeds. Today, I tackled the latter two and made admirable progress. 

While the blackberry canes tore at my clothes and pierced through my gloves, I wondered if I was getting some sort of revenge. At the same time, I weeded away much of the other plants that were competing for nutrients that the bushes need to grow. I considered titling this blog, "The Blackberry, Vinca, Mugwort, Wisteria, Weed, etc. Jungle" but it didn't have a good ring to it. 

One of three wheelbarrows full

Hoping for easy pickings

These berries better be worth all the pain and suffering. They are puny runts compared to the gigantic succulent blackberries that would drip off my former neighbor Paulette's bushes. In Colorado, with the cold nights, the berries didn't ripen until September and sometimes a frost would come too early and there would be no berries at all, which made the years they did ripen all the sweeter.

I wrapped the remaining berries around tomato cages to try to make order out of the chaos and make it less dangerous to pick berries when they ripen. I might also have made it easier for the birds to eat them.

Biodegradable weed mat

Then, I put down cardboard as weed mat. The cardboard also highlights how much I actually accomplished. You might notice that the upper right side of the photo is still a tangled torturous jungle.

Just in case the blackberries don't turn out, I saw new blossoms on the raspberry bushes, so I can look forward to a second crop of raspberries before too long. 

Raspberries 2.0

The Meandering Gourmet

That should have been the title of the last post with a nod to the Galloping Gourmet, Graham Kerr whose TV cooking show we watched as kids.

Squash blossoms filled with herb
and garlic goat cheese

Baked 15 minutes at 425°

As promised, I made the baked, stuffed zucchini blossoms recipe that I linked to in the previous post but cheated a little by using herb and garlic seasoned goat cheese. It overpowered the delicate flavor of the blossoms. Several new blossoms have popped up, so I'll try it with blander cheese next time. Fortunately, the recipe is easy and fun. You put the cheese into a zip lock bag, cut off 1/2 inch from a corner and then squeeze the cheese into a little slit on the side of the blossom.

Tonight's dinner was more successful: my husband's Pesto made with basil leaves direct from the garden.

Beautiful New Arrivals

Hibiscus

Magnificent Lily

Morning Glories

Picking, Pulling and Pondering

There's no better time to think about deep issues than when you're weeding. And for the last two days, I've been thinking about the NPR piece that suggested weeds are under appreciated. 

These are the things I ponder:

Chleome--so pretty
and prolific

• Is poison ivy considered a weed -- or a hazard?
• Does poison ivy have any redeeming value? 
• How would that author like to have some in his yard? I've got plenty to spare
• If I eat organic food but use an herbicide to kill poison ivy, does that make me a hypocrite or a pragmatist?
• Can I consider blackberry bushes and brambles weeds when they are so overgrown, I can't pass them without their sharp thorns attacking me and attaching to my clothes?
• What is the value of uninvited wisteria vines winding their way throughout planting areas and strangling the plants that were put there on purpose?
• At what point does a gorgeous, deer resistant flower like Chleome that is a prolific self-sower become a weed? (I used to have it in Boulder and it was so overwhelming, I pulled it all up. Now it is everywhere in this garden).
• Why do I enjoy weeding so much? (My friend, "B" says that every weed you pull is a tiny victory. If that's so, I should feel like a champion by now).

Meandering and Savoring

Usually when I set out to do a particular task in the garden, I find myself drifting from one simple job to dozens of other unrelated pluckings, pickings and pokings. So when I go out to pick raspberries, I also weed small areas in assorted places, stir the compost, put down a few fresh pieces of newspaper for weed mat and collect limp daffodil leaves.

After doing some weeding and other assorted garden chores today, I went online to hear to an interview that was on NPR yesterday with the author of a book called, Weeds: In Defense of Botany's Cockroach. (I'm looking for a good reason to surrender some of the garden to the weeds).

As with all things gardening, one action lead to another. I saw a link at the bottom of the page to a story about weeds that you can eat. They call edible weeds "the ultimate locally grown food." But you have to be ultra certain about what you are eating. Poison hemlock looks a lot like wild carrot. And of course, you need to know where the dogs go potty. The article includes a delicious looking recipe for a frittata with wild garlic mustard. Dang. I pulled it up! Who knew? And I'm starting to wonder if all that wild garlic I pulled up was really "Ramps," a sort of wild leek that's all the rage with gourmets. (The argument for not weeding is getting stronger).

On to another link with recipes for cooking with weeds. Would you like some sauteed Dandelions with your Stinging Nettle Ravioli? (Maybe I'll stick to eating things I plant myself and hope the deer eat the weeds).

Zucchini blossoms begging to be
picked, stuffed, cooked and eaten

Then I meandered to another link with recipes for cooking squash blossoms. It's considered birth control to prevent growing more zucchini than you have friends to give it to. I had been admiring several blossoms in my garden earlier and nearly picked some. Many years ago, I bought squash blossoms at the Union Square Farmer's Market, dipped them in batter and fried them. They were heavenly. This time, I'll be making the recipe with goat cheese and basil (from my garden, of course).  With all the sun and rain, it has been growing like a weed (but not spreading like one).

While we're on the subject of Internet recipes, I found the perfect dessert to make with all the raspberries I've been picking. I had been lamenting that my Colorado friends who love to eat the pies I bake weren't here so I could bake a raspberry pie. I'm not interested in doing that much work for two people -- and consuming that many calories. Martha Stewart came to my rescue with a simple (but time consuming) recipe for Raspberry Turnovers made with puff pastry. They turned out picture perfect. But I didn't take a photo because we gobbled them up the minute they came out of the oven.

I'm Really Ticked Off

Some Thing's Been Eating My Garden

Before

After

Some critter couldn't wait
for this volunteer tomato plant
to produce tomatoes

Missed seeing the first Morning Glory
It bloomed despite having its leaves eaten

A nice Hosta snack for some critter

AND

Some Thing's Been Eating Me

All the classic signs of Lyme Disease
(I drew the white lines on the photo)

Last week my shoulder began to ache, the next day it started to turn red -- and ache more. A couple days later, I noticed a bite mark under my bra strap. By yesterday, the red rash had doubled and I spent the entire day trying to find a doctor who could see me when half the doctors in Princeton are on vacation. Today I was put on a full course of antibiotics. This evening, I went out and picked more raspberries. I hope the way I dressed was unappetizing to the ticks.

The pant cuffs are elasticised
and my socks go all the way
up my calves

Identity Crisis

We're in the Ivy League

Poison Ivy

Last week I went for a nice walk with members of the Princeton Newcomers Club. Since I was the newest of the newcomers, they set about teaching me how to spot Poison Ivy. One woman whipped out her Droid and Googled images showing its various colors and shapes. As we walked along the pretty tree-covered Stony Brook trail, I pointed out all the 3-leaved plants I thought were poison ivy. Half of what I pointed to were wild berries and brambles. (It's better to err on the side of caution in these matters.)

Can you tell the Poison Ivy from
the Blackberry Leaves?

The next day, while I was scrounging for ripe blackberries that the deer might have left me, I realized there was poison ivy mixed with the berries. Fortunately, Linda, the previous owner left behind a cleanser that gets the poison off before it can cause harm. And I used it immediately. (The instructions on the bottle say to clean your hands thoroughly before going to the bathroom.)

Those berries weren't tasty enough to risk a scratchy rash on my hands that I could spread all over the place. So I decided to stick with the raspberries and wild blueberries from then on.

Berry Surprised

Wineberries

It turns out there is yet another kind of berry growing among the Brambles in our yard: Wineberries. They're a sparkly crimson color and pop out of a kind of prickly "shell" when they're ripe. They have a unique berry flavor and leave a kind of sticky feeling in my mouth. Now I know why I have seen so many deer over in the vicinity of those brambles. Wineberry stalks are covered with nasty thorns and I'm not sure they're worth the pain. Why can't the deer content themselves with Wineberries and the blackberries and leave the flowers and other berries alone?