Homestead berries
Mark asked me how many
kinds of berries we grow. Of course, I immediately got bogged down
in the fact that many things we think of as berries (strawberries,
raspberries) don't technically fit the botanical definition, while
others that people don't really put in the berry category (grapes)
do. Geekery aside, we're currently eating two kinds of
gooseberries, the last of the strawberries, the first of the
blueberries, and masses of black raspberries. Other "berries" on
the farm include honeyberries, red raspberries, blackberries, red
currants, grapes, and hardy kiwis.
Berries have a lot going for them on the homestead (ease of growing, quickness of bearing, and pure deliciousness coming to mind), but they do have two major minuses. First, there are the birds,
which we mostly coexist with (although we had to chase away a family of
blue jays this spring since the corvids were eating or damaging a full
half of our ripening strawberries!). Second, there's the fact that
it takes several minutes a day just to harvest the delicious little
morsels. When I'm feeling overworked and the sun is blazing, I
sometimes skip the picking chore, but I usually relax into a happy
end-of-the-work-day berry zen.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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