Today lets talk about the dormancy of fruit trees and berry bushes.

Most of the United States does have a winter where fruit trees and bushes need cooler temperatures for a period of resting. That is one way to think about dormancy. It is a period of rest. Just like for humans winter can be a period of rest from taking care of all kinds of gardens. The gardens don’t need to be weeded, watered, picked, or pruned. Also, the final harvest is all preserved or put in the root cellar for winter eating.

Some fruits need hundreds of hours of cooler temps to be in a dormant period. Once the dormant time is starting to lessen up and you start to venture outside as the weather starts to warm up from the winter cold. This is when you start looking at telltale signs that your plants and trees made it through the winter with any possible damage that they might have suffered. For me, I start looking at the gardens and bushes when I see the first robin of the year in our yard.

I do the assessment of each branch or cane for any possible damage. The first thing I prune is our lilac as it is the first thing that shows any sign of life in the late winter to early spring. I prefer to prune it when the temperatures are warm enough that I won’t have my fingers and hands getting cold within just a few minutes. Plus with our lilac, it is large enough that it takes a couple of days. Pruning entails removing the short branches that had blooms and leaves on them the year before. Most people will lilacs in the fall as it is going into dormancy. But with the early spring pruning, I can catch any damage from the winter and take it out as I take the previous year's dead blooms out. Plus with the leaves gone, it is easier to see the dead stuff.

The next thing I look at after the lilac is our fruits. What I am looking at with them is any sign of new leaf buds and shoots coming up from the ground on the raspberry canes, rhubarb poking up through the dirt. Our raspberries we do cut them down to about a foot above the ground in the fall.

For strawberries I prune out the dead like everything else and check for live plants. As I am pruning the dead I am also clipping the runners from last year. This year I might have to replace the mother plants. This does happen every so often with strawberries. Strawberries do reproduce by sending out runners from the mother plants. These smaller plants will take a year to produce strawberries.

As you can see I mainly go for the dead and the winter damaged with all of the plants, bushes, trees in the yard and garden in the spring time. With some plants I will cut them down to the ground in the fall. But those are flowers that come up from bulbs. Also with the bulb flowers I will do what is called dead heading. This type of pruning is trimming off the flowers that have done bloomed and have started to wilt. I will leave the stalk up for the rest of the year til fall. Then I will cut the stalk down to the ground. By doing this the stalk is gathering good stuff to provide the bulb with what it will need to get through the winter. Now this is for those bulbs that don’t have to be lifted each winter. The more tender bulbs like gladiolus and elephant ears just to name a couple that in my area have to be pulled up from the dirt as they  will not make it through a winter in the Inland Northwest. There might be a variety within those two plants that might not have to be pulled each year, but I don’t know for sure. So I tend to stay away from those as I prefer to just plant and let it go and do my dead heading and winter prepping of beds.

Happy gardening.

     If you are limited on space but want to still grow some of your own vegetables and fruits then you can use 5 gallon buckets with some hole drilled in the bottom to allow for drainage. You do have to pay attention to the type and variety of the vegetable and fruit that you would want to grow in them. To help with not having to put a lot of soil in the bucket and to help with drainage add some rocks or gravel in the bottom before putting in your vegetable and fruit soil.

     We will be getting old livestock water trough to grow our raspberries to contain their roots. Since they spread very vigorously by roots. Which is fine if you are not worried about new canes coming up outside of the bed that you have them growing in or are using them as a living fence, that would deter anyone from going through the canes if they have thorns.

     As you can see in the following pictures there is still a lot of work to do on our beds and some to be filled with soil. The tiered one in the center will also have partially composted yard and vegetable debris in the bottom to help take up some of the room in the it and thereby, not requiring so much soil to fill it. This is similar to Hugelkultur. Hugelkultur is pretty much adding a compostable material in the bottom of a raised be to take up room and not have to use so much soil to fill the raised bed. As the filler starts to decay under the soil you will need to add more soil to the top of the bed to keep it to the level that you want it to be. But we will be doing all soil as we are also going to be starting the process to get out of the city. It would be easier to just spread all of the dirt than to spread dirt and compost that hasn't decayed around the yard.

     The first year of a new raised bed and purchased bagged soil you will not have many weeds to worry about pulling. This makes it an easy year of gardening. You might still get a stray one or two weeds in your new beds. My biggest pest this past year was slugs and our new puppy that thought that she was helping me with planting. While she was actually destroying what I had just planted and had a plan for a nice neat 3 sister planting in a halved blue plastic 55-gallon drum.

     Remember you are only limited by your imagination on the size and shape of your raised bed design and/or pots. 

     As you can see by the pictures there is still plenty of work to do in the beds for this year along with clean up. But with living in the Inland Nortwest of the United States we are still able to get some snow till the end of March.

     Next week I shall talk about how and why I choose what I will be planting and where in the beds or pots that you see in the pictures.

     Happy Gardening