A Fruit-ilicious Landscape

Our landscape is going berries...blue-, rasp- & straw- berries that is. I spent several days this week adding more strawberries for plant bed edging and planting 4 varieties of blueberries in spaces most landscape designers would relegate for Spirea, burning bush, or some sort of evergreen bush.

I'm excited because I'll have beautiful spring flowers, delicious fruit and striking fall color from these newest additions to the front landscape. For now, the strawberry ground cover dwarf the baby blueberries, but that won't last. Soon, the new bushes will tower over the equally delicious ground cover.

To add the blueberries to the landscape, I had to amend the soil, since blueberries love acidic conditions. They were planted in a space where evergreen shrubs once grew and I added some decomposing pine needles as well as a slow release plant food formulated for acid-loving plants.


My generous neighbor provided many raspberry canes for our fence project...actually, she begged us to take some since they were taking over her garden. We've planted them along our fence in both the front and back, knowing that we'll need to keep an eye out lest they take over in our yard as well. But, it's a risk worth taking for the pure joy of fresh picked raspberries we'll enjoy every summer.

The strawberry plants were also a gift from our neighbor. We're not sure what the variety is, but they are very robust and are quickly filling in the empty areas where we want cover.
In addition to all the berries, our apple tree has begun to leaf out this week. We pruned it in February before the sap started running again. Now, we're enjoying a shapelier and healthier tree and are hopeful for a bumper crop of sweet-tart apples this fall.

Now that the fruits are pretty much taken care of, it's time to turn our attention to the vegetables. All I've asked for for Mother's Day is a load of compost. Hopefully they take me seriously so we can finish prepping the garden and landscape beds for this year's vegetable plants next week.