More “Green” Advice—Plant your own berries 

To follow up on my rant last time about “green awareness” I offer you the following advice.   

One estimate of the distance a typical food travels to get to our dining room table is ...ready for this?... 1,500 miles.  With greenhouse gases, global warming, and the price of gasoline (direct and indirect costs) skyrocketing, what can the typical person do?  I mean, we have to eat!!

An obvious answer is to buy your food locally.  How local should you go?  Well, heck!  Try your own back yard!  One of our themes this year is to be even more environmentally friendly (key phrase- even more, it's a standard goal of ours, after all).  Along these lines, we’ve invested heavily in fruits and berries (as have most nurseries in our area).  Over the last couple weeks, our staff has been hard at work potting them up.  As one employee put it, the fruit of our labor looks like "naked little sticks in pots".  And that is pretty much what you will see this time of year when you go shopping at the local garden center for berries and such.

Oh, but wait.  Given a bath from our good ole sun, some water from our bountiful sky, and a little time, these naked sticks will bear a delectable array of harvests!  In the ground or in a fancy pot, sweet juicy strawberries will abound. You can plant both June bearers if you want them to all come on at once or ever bearing varieties for fresh eating all summer long.   Blueberries will delight the eye and the belly (most varieties fall into early, mid, and late season producers; and some of these are pot-friendly).  Raspberries (choose from ever-bearing which start producing a crop in late summer and continue until frost or spring producers which produce one crop the second season in June) will scream to be popped into the mouth.  Blackberries, too (they all produce during summer, but you can choose among several varieties, including thornless).  You can also find red currant and gooseberry to round out the berry list.  To add a couple early greens, rhubarb and asparagus are available now for planting even though they aren’t berries.

The kicker is, while you contribute to an environmental solution, you will actually add beauty to your beds!  Strawberries may be short, but they're a star when they're putting out their delectable berries, not to speak of their big white flowers and the fact that they are semi evergreen through our winters.  You can buy them this time of year in bundles of 25 for around $10 but if you wait until May they will cost you about $2.50 for one plant.  Blueberries are a smart addition to gardens even if you're crazy enough to not want the fruit.  The bell-shaped flowers are plentiful and adorable, and the leaves provide brilliant fall color before dropping (unless you get a variety that is evergreen- then they provide winter interest).  Blackberries and raspberries require a little space, but if you give them the proper set up they add the pleasing touch of a good manicure.  Nothing like a little structure in the garden to add interest.  We've been enjoying the color and structure of rhubarb (in containers and in the ground) for some time already.  And, if you haven't familiarized yourself with asparagus after its production time, it's like a billowing fern decorated with berries.  The newer varieties of asparagus are large male selections and won’t reseed all over the garden like the old ones did.

Think of your efforts as a form of Community Supported Agriculture.  Sink a little dough now into plants that will give you some of your very own produce later in the year.  You don't have to have acres of your own land sprawling out to do this, either.   Choose the right varieties, and you don't necessarily even need a back yard.  Just a sunny spot and some initiative.

By planting your own berries (and asparagus or rhubarb if you are so inclined) you will be able to enjoy the freshest possible produce (no trucking necessary), the healthiest possible produce (you will be growing these organically) and you will be adding to the value and beauty of your landscape not to mention the fact that this whole conversation started out about doing something ‘green’ and growing your own produce is about as green as you can get.

So this spring do something for the environment and for yourself.  Plant some berries, rhubarb and asparagus and watch it grow.  Then enjoy the fruit of your labor. 

Steve Smith is owner of Sunnyside Nursery in Marysville, a retail garden center celebrating its 60^th anniversary in 2008.  You can send your gardening questions to him at sunnysidenursery@msn.com  or call at 425-334-2002