It seems we haven’t put up too much content from our perennial food forest this season! So, it’s time for us to change that and talk about those late season berries and perennial protections!
Quite a few of the common very cold hardy perennial berries are late season harvests. Prior to your frosts is a good time to visit your perennial berry plants as you’ll likely find their bounties in great shape and ready to eat. If you don’t eat them, the birds will, so it’s good to get to them before they figure things out.
In our case, we had some Aronia and service berries coming in. We previously harvested some high bush cranberries. We might have gotten to our service berries a bit late this year as many of our plants had been cleared out. We’re not too disappointed, though, as our perennial food forest is largely still becoming established. Our low bush cranberries were a bit anemic this year, too.
Growing a perennial food forest is a very long game of gardening. It takes many years, sometimes even a decade or more, to get the plants to a size where they’ll produce a substantial harvest for you. In the first many years after planting, our focus is mostly on allowing the plants to get substantially larger than it is harvesting the fruit. Many of our plants are still in the 3 to 6 year range, so quite young overall.
Also, if you’re new to growing perennial trees (especially fruit trees), it’s a very good idea to protect your plants from moose early on. We usually place a tomato cage over our young trees, but a hardware cloth or chicken wire fence wrapped into a circular column works too. These are a favorite for moose in the fall months, they’ll just chomp them right down to the ground. When food gets a lot more scarce, eating habits change.
We’ve even lost “protected” trees to moose, too. Moose do what they want. And a tomato cage or wire fence isn’t exactly going to stop one of North America’s largest animals. The hope is that you dissuade them enough to chomp on other things. But, a hungry moose may very well decide your protection is feeble and worth their time to defeat. That’s just the risk with northern perennials, in a nutshell.
We talk about the perennial food forest like it’s a garden. But, it’s really just fruit and food bearing perennial plants that we’ve planted throughout our yard. Most of the plants lie at the perimeters of our land, making it unlikely future plans like buildings or gardens won’t interfere. We have a sort of “master plan” with our property that helps guide us where we plant things.
We’re happy to have gotten at least a few food forest snacks this year, even though that’s not our focus currently. It’s always nice to take a stroll out through the back 40 and be surprised by gorgeous clusters of fruit ready and waiting to be snacked upon!
