This afternoon, when temperatures were at least a bit above freezing, I headed out to see my daughters’ hard work.
Wow.
Because these last haskap transplants are so much smaller, with tiny, over crowded root balls in tiny little pots, they are harder to see. So I marked every one of them with a garden stake, then raided our recycling bin for plastic bottles to put on top of them. Aside from improving visibility, they should rattle in the wind and potentially startle away critters.
I ran out of bottles very quickly.
The first image is the main “plot” where my daughter added three more rows of 10 haskaps.
The next two images are different views of the ones she planted around the fruit trees and the two haskaps we’d planted two summers ago.
The last image is the four that were left, because it was too dark to keep going. They will be planted where our original three haskaps are – the ones that have not been doing well at all, because the cross pollinating verities don’t bloom at the same time, and one of them just isn’t growing.
I counted a total of 140 transplanted haskaps, plus there are the four left to do.
There had been 95 already in the ground. My daughters – mostly my younger daughter, as her sister could come out only after she finished working on commissions – planted 45 haskaps last night.
That makes for a total of 144 haskaps that my brother and SIL managed to acquire, plus the 5 we already had previously.
Wow.
If they all survive – which is highly unlikely, given the state some of them were in – that makes for a grand total of 149 haskaps for our food forest.
Wow.
For the four of us, just a couple would be enough for personal use. Maybe 5, if we wanted to do really get into making preserves of some kind with them.
At least it would be, if we had any that produced. Of the original three, only the “Mr. Haskap” has been even remotely healthy, the first to bloom, and finished blooming before the “Mrs. Haskap” I got at the same time even got into full leaf, never mind bloom. The third one, a “Mrs. Haskap” purchased the following summer, remains stunted and exactly the same size as when we planted it, some 3 or 4 years ago.
The two that we got at the homesteaders event, planted in a much better location, had their second summer this year and didn’t seem to get any bigger at all. Much like our highbush cranberry, that have not gotten any bigger since we planted them at the same time as the silver buffalo berry that is doing so well.
If even a quarter of these haskaps survive and produce, we could potentially have enough to sell at markets within a couple of years.
If they survive and produce.
With how root bound they were, they have a rough start already. For now, though, we will focus on watering them often, even though none of them have any leaves left, to give the roots every chance to grow and establish themselves at least a bit, before the ground freezes.
Which, if the long range forecast is to be trusted even slightly, will be at least another 3 weeks, if not until December. As long as we still have daytime temperatures above freezing, the ground should only freeze at the surface overnight, and mostly thaw during the day.
My daughter really busted her butt last night! By the end of it, she was getting chilled and starting to cough, so she slept in today, and has been taking care not to come down with a cold or get sick, as much as she can.
In a couple of days, we will be doing our first stock up shopping trip. I am still banned from driving, and my daughters don’t want me to travel too far. For the things we need, though, we at least need to do a Walmart trip, so we are planning to go to the one in the smaller, closer city. They’ve expanded, but still don’t have the inventory the big city locations do, but we should be able to get what we need. There’s also a Canadian Tire across the street, where we can get our litter pellets.
Normally, on the last business day of the month, we would do our Costco shopping. That one will be postponed, probably by a couple of weeks. Yes, my daughter can do the driving, and we don’t have to worry about weird parking issues or insane city driving conditions, but it’s also about recovery and mobility for me. My 6 week recovery period is over at the end of November, so by December, we should be back to our normal driving and errands.
I am so looking forward to spring, when I can physically do the things I wasn’t able to do all this past summer!
… and to seeing how many haskaps survived the transplanting and winter conditions.
The Re-Farmer
