Backyard Berries, a Gardener’s Dream

Nutritious, delicious, and easy to grow, berries are the ultimate garden jackpot

Berries are easy to grow, robust, and dependable.(Arina Makarenko/Shutterstock)

Fresh strawberries for breakfast. Again. Ten days in a row. Can you have too much of a good thing?

Think I’ll head to the garden and pick some tayberries instead; my wife can have the strawberries. She loves to just eat them out of hand, while I use them to fancify my morning cereal. Tayberries are just as good for both purposes, as are loganberries, marionberries, raspberries, blueberries, and blackberries.

We have all those at our farm. Are we spoiled? Yes, indeed.

Berry season at Owl Feather Farm runs from May 10 to Nov. 1, starting with our everbearing strawberries, Albion (they go strong until October), and ending many moons later with lingonberries, the crimson Scandinavian cranberry cousins that are harvested in late October.

Here’s the big berry-growing secret: You can have them too, farm or not. Berries are easy to grow, robust and dependable, and take up far less space than you think.

Berries are packed with antioxidants. (DUSAN ZIDAR/Shutterstock)

No Such Thing as a Bad Berry

It’s difficult even to grow mediocre berries. Their sweet-tart taste, glistening sheen, and chiffon aroma provide the most profound palate experience in the produce world.

They’re also among the most healthful foods on Earth, nutritionists declare. Berries are high in antioxidants, which roam your system to hunt down free radicals (those are as bad as they sound). They have strong anti-inflammatory properties, help lower cholesterol, moderate blood sugar, and contain lots of trace nutrients such as potassium and magnesium, not to mention vitamins C and K.

“Berries—of all kinds—may well be the most rewarding foods anyone can grow,” said Lisa Wasko DeVetter, associate professor of small fruit horticulture at Washington State University and a researcher with WSU’s Mount Vernon extension station.

The key to success, she said, is to make sure you carefully pick a good site. Berries need full sun, good drainage, and—in the case of blueberries, cranberries, and lingonberries—acidic soil. If you’re planting acid-loving berries, DeVetter suggests having your soil pH tested and adding sulfur if needed.

Otherwise, make sure you put the plants in the ground in a spot where you will want them for a long time: “Properly sited and well established, they’ll produce for decades,” DeVetter pointed out. Indeed, there are blueberry stands in the Puget Sound area that have bushes more than 60 years old—still going strong.

They are fairly forgiving, as garden plants go—hard to kill, water-efficient, pretty much plug-and-play, once established. Fertilize once a year. They’re also easy to pick, if they’re in a raised bed (strawberries) or up on a trellis (cane berries), which they should be.

You can even expand your berry patch by making new plants. Simply guide the end tips of trailing cane berries, such as marions, back to the ground in fall, where they’ll take root. Snip free the mother cane, dig up the new plant, and presto! You’re in the nursery business. Most strawberries send out runners—some, such as the Albions I grow, send out many—that take root and form new plants.

Extra berries can be used for pies, frozen for smoothies or future baking, or canned into delicious jams and preserves. (Stephanie Frey/Shutterstock)

The Caveats

I make them sound like pots of gold at the end of the rainbow. But there are a few small dues to pay.

First of all, you have to wait for your treasure. Cane berries such as marionberries, boysenberries, raspberries, and tayberries impose a one-year interlude to start, as they all bear on second-year canes; the first bearing year will be the second year they are in the ground, and that year will be nice but not grand.

You do have to erect a trellis for them; I set metal posts in the ground about 10 feet apart in beds two feet wide. Then I string strong wire at five or six feet in height. Full production sets in around year three; after that, all you must do is maintain the beds.

For strawberries, this means thinning out decrepit plants as they age. It’s a myth that the plants are only good for a couple of years—I have some 5-year-old plants that are still productive. But strawberries make their own replacements on innumerable runners (left to their own devices, they might colonize the whole world), and it makes sense to replace about a third every year.

Cane berries need you to remove the dead, two-year-old canes after bearing, and this is where some stiff dues are paid: Marions, tays, and some blackberries have fearsome thorns, sometimes fierce enough to penetrate good leather gloves. Well, no free lunch, right?

A Gift That Keeps on Giving

Berries make superb pies, of course, especially the tart types such as marions and boysens; my personal pie favorite is loganberries. If you have canning skills, jams and preserves are super. The alternative for unskilled canners like me is a big freezer in the garage, which I stuff every summer with 20 to 30 gallons of berries.

Running out of room in your yard? There are few better ways to curry favor with family, friends, and neighbors than to give them berry plants for their yard.

The one better way to curry favor is to just give people berries.

“Here, have a quart of marionberries. Picked them just now. I insist. I have more. Really.”

Lots more.