Berry Land

My garden is riot of berries, ripe and not ripe, but ripe with potential. It has been a great spring. The birds and squirrels are having a fine old time, and so do I, watching them. I am so easily entertained.

Service berries. The dark ones can be popped right in my mouth

What’s ripe right now are the service berries (also known as shadbush), well known for being the first fruits of summer. Many years ago, I bought a bundle of what were basically shadbush sticks, and I plopped them in the ground all around the yard. I put several on the very steep slope between my house and the neighbor’s, outside my fence. Before this year, I never realized they had actually survived and turned into slender trees more than 10 feet tall, this year serving up a cornucopia of beautiful red berries. This is my view as I lounge on my patio. I’ve seen cardinals, robins, and catbirds pulling off a berry and eating it delicately. I’ve seen squirrels trying to hang on to the tiny end branches where the berries are, scarfing them down by the pawful. I’ve got another large service berry tree in the front of the house, but many of those berries are covered in what I’m told is “cedar apple rust”, a most un-appetizing fuzzy orange coating. (Serviceberry is a close relative of apples.)

The blueberry extravaganza 

It’s really hard to take great pictures of green berries in the midst of green leaves, so bear with me here. Green berries coming along include a spectacular load of blueberries along my front walk. Again, I planted several bushes several years ago. Most have survived, but almost all the berries come from a single giant bush that exploded with growth when the Big Tree fell two years ago and it started getting full sun. I have only once battled the birds and squirrels for the blueberries, and got enough to make a pie. That was ten years ago. I wrapped the bush in bird netting to do it, and those silly birdbrains got stuck inside the netting regularly. Also, the bush was a lot smaller size then. I’m trying to figure out if there is a way I can protect at least some of the berries for myself.  Last year, I ate a few blueberries as I passed by, but it seems the birds like them slightly less ripe than I do, so the berries tended to disappear before I wanted to eat them. Thinking...

Pagoda dogwood

I planted an unusual member of the dogwood family a long time back, the Pagoda Dogwood. It has small clusters of flowers, and the branches form horizontal tiers. The clusters turn into black berries that birds go nuts over. The problem with the two trees I have is that deer destroyed them both several times, variously eating them to the ground or killing them by rubbing off the bark with their itchy antlers. Now both trees are inside my fence and they are coming along nicely, one about my height and the other much taller. I expect these berries to ripen in about a month.

Apples!

Not a berry, but related, is my apple tree. I have one left, and from a distance it’s kind of sad and bedraggled. But close up, there are definitely small little apples coming along. I see this tree from my bedroom window, and again, I wonder if I’ll be able to save any of the apples. I never have yet, though the tree is more than a dozen years old.

I have three kinds of viburnums: arrowwood, mapleleaf, and cranberrybush. The arrowwoods are supposed to have black berries, but I’ve not seen many on my bushes. The mapleleafs have black berries as well.  The cranberrybushes have, as you might expect, red berries. All three sets of bushes seem to be producing nice crops this year. These I won’t try to eat — they are for the birds.

American cranberrybush 

Arrowwood