Here is a slideshow of some recent photos showing how well established the new berry planting is. For the best view, click the full screen button in the slideshow footer.
Work continues in the new berry planting area. The fence is now nearly complete – all the posts are in, with both heights of high tinsel wire stretched and the final lengths of barb going on today. The contractor I hired to do the work has been steadily chipping away at what seemed like a huge project when it began and the fence is just a week or two away from being done.
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The task of laying the ground cover out, to cover each side of the eight trellised berry rows has begun. I dug the side furrows with the tractor, this furrow takes the outer edge of the ground cover fabric, while the inner edge is pinned down with a 6″ ground staple along the berry row. This process is very labor intensive with lots of rocks to clear, digging and pinning. I’ll try to take some more detailed shots of this part of the project soon, but for now here is a far-off shot of the berries with the (black) ground fabric visible.
The berries have started to bud out. Encore in particular is already in full leaf, Nova is showing leaves, and the rest of the varieties are just barely exposing buds.
Over the last few weeks I completed the prep work on the new berry project site. All but berry order has arrived, and we planted all the berries that we had – eight of the ten total berry beds.
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Quite a bit of work to prepare the new field for berry plantings. Some larger invasive elms had to be removed witha backhoe, and a neighbor helped with an initial discing and de-rocking with his bigger equipment.
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I have started a spreadsheet to track expenses (so far) related to the berry project. I’m trying to make all the information available about this project as I go along, so I am including a live embedded version of the spreadsheet
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The berries have been ordered and will arrive sometime in April. I had to shop around a little bit to find the varieties I wanted at the best price. I’m planting most of the raspberries a little thicker than usual to help them pre-fill the rows.
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