Grow Edible Perennials, Green Garden

For your perennial vegetables and fruits, pick a spot separate from or on the edge of (second best) the main vegetable garden. The easiest way to get a bed started is to stake it out the season before you plant. Cover existing sod with a thick layer of newspapers, magazines, or cardboard. A friend of mine declares that covering sod is the best use she’s found for cast-off issues of the Congressional Record. “They’re so thick nothing will grow through them,” she says. So they don’t blow away, pile something on top —hay, wood chips, sawdust, branches, whatever. By spring, the sod will have decomposed and added green manure to the soil without a struggle.

Raspberries

Raspberries can be planted right through the mulch and newspapers. Simply dig out a spot for each plant and throw some compost or well-rotted manure into the bottom of the hole before setting the plant. Space plants about three feet apart. Sink red raspberries an inch or two deeper than they were in the nursery. Black or purple ones can be set at the same depth at which they grew.

Always buy new plants when you start a raspberry bed. Old ones are too likely to carry disease.

“Be ruthless with raspberries!” warns one lazy gardener. Plant them in one long row. Whenever suckers try to widen the boundaries of the bed, pull them out! Never plant more than one row wide, or soon they will grow together and you won’t be able to get in to pick.

Keep a raspberry bed heavily mulched, six inches to a foot deep.

Raspberry canes are biennials. This year’s new canes will bear next year (although everbearing varieties will produce a crop on the tips of new canes in the fall). This year’s bearing canes will die after fruiting. Cut them at ground level and prune out all the weak new canes as well. In spring, you can top the year-old canes so they won’t flop over. Remember — be ruthless!

Prop canes by driving posts at six foot intervals on either side of the bed and stringing two courses of wire between them, one at about knee level, the other chest-high.

Don’t waste time on any but the two best varieties of purple raspberries: Royalty and Brandywine.

Strawberries Simplified

Growing strawberries always sounds complicated. To grow them successfully, you need a good system. This year’s producing plant will send out runners during the summer. For best fruit, limit the “babies” you allow to grow, probably to two or four per plant. At the end of each season, pull up the mother plants.

Set out new plants four feet apart when leaves of trees begin to unfurl in spring. The first summer, remove all blossoms so that the strength of the plant goes to sending out vigorous runners.

Keep strawberries heavily mulched, preferably with a weed-free material such as straw, salt hay, wood chips, sawdust, or pine needles.

Here’s how Closey Dickey put in a new raised strawberry bed. In late summer, she laid out a bed seventy-five feet long and four or five feet wide and covered it thickly with newspaper. On either edge, on top of the newspaper, she laid bales of hay, end to end. In the two-foot space between the bales, she piled manure, peat moss, topsoil, bone meal and greensand. From time to time until winter, she stirred this brew.

In fall’s crisp weather, her husband set 2″x 6″ pressure-treated landscape boards in the ground, against the hay, for a frame to keep grass out and mulch in.

In early spring, the Dickeys planted two rows of strawberry plants down the middle of the bed and snipped all blooms that first summer. Runners went into the hay on either side, which by now had disintegrated.

Each spring, Closey will take out two-year-old plants and let new runners become established. One year she will have two rows producing in the center, the next year one row on either edge.

Blueberries

Blueberries need an acid soil, a pH of 5 to 5.6. They are completely intolerant of limey soil, so if that’s what yours is, the laziest way to have blueberries is to buy them at the market.

If you have soil with almost enough acidity, dig in peat, pine needles, or cottonseed meal to increase it. Blueberries like soil high in organic matter. They have few insect pests. Plant them in groups to encourage pollination. (They’re not self-pollinating, meaning a single blueberry plant cannot fertilize itself.) Mulch heavily with pine needles.

Asparagus

Buy one-year-old roots. Years ago, gardeners dug a trench to China in which to set them. Lazy gardeners don’t bother to dig one that deep, but asparagus are heavy feeders, so you should get some nourishment under their roots at planting time. Dig ten to twelve inches deep and about a foot wide. Lay down four or five inches of compost or well-rotted manure before setting the roots so that they are about six inches below ground level. You can make a little cone of soil under each crown and spread the roots out over it. Set them two feet apart in rows four or five feet apart. Cover with two inches of soil and, during the summer, gradually draw more soil back into the row as the plants grow.

As tempting as it may be to cut and sample young spears, restrain that impulse. The plants need two seasons to grow and build strength before you begin harvesting.

“The secret to asparagus is to fertilize it lavishly,” explains a gardener whose succulent spears are known throughout her neighborhood. Feed first in early spring at the same time you cultivate, and again when you stop harvesting. After the ground freezes, load up the bed with manure.

Rhubarb

Rhubarb is attractive enough to use as part of your ornamental landscaping. It, too, is a heavy feeder. Dig a generous planting hole, fill it with compost or well-rotted manure, and set roots so that the uppermost buds are two to three inches below the soil surface. Add more rich organic matter each year. Be sure to remove flower stalks as soon as they form, so all the plant’s vigor goes to the edible stalks. The only other thing you have to do is harvest those luscious stalks and eat them. But don’t sample the leaves — they’re poisonous.

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