The Easiest Fruit to Grow for Survival, Plus, How to Make Blackberry Fruit Leather

If I could only grow one kind of fruit or berry, I think it would have to be blackberries. They grow wild in many parts of the country, but they are also incredibly easy to grow in your yard or garden. They pretty much take care of themselves. All we do is fertilize them with organic fertilizer in the spring, spread mulch around the canes, and keep the area weeded. That's it. Complex spraying regimes are unnecessary and our bushes have always been untroubled by insects or diseases.

'Triple Crown' blackberries require a trellis while 'Chester' blackberries do not.

You can find varieties of blackberries that will grow well in USDA hardiness zones 5-10. We live in zone 5, so we bought two varieties of thornless blackberries that can withstand cold temperatures. The 'Triple Crown' variety is my favorite. It does require a trellis to support its long, floppy canes. Those long canes, however, yield huge numbers of berries, up to 30 lb PER VINE.

A 'Triple Crown' berry cluster.

After all the berries have been harvested for the year, you have to cut the spent canes back and tie up the new canes that grow to take their place. Simple. 

Blackberries! And a few raspberries. Raspberries are pretty easy to grow, too, but
they are not nearly as bountiful producers for us. 

Blackberries are also exceptionally nutritious. Each cup of berries contains 50% of your RDA of Vitamin C, plus large amounts of fiber and cancer-fighting antioxidants.

About the only drawback to blackberries is that the fruit is highly perishable. If you pick them when they are dead ripe on the vine, you really only have a few days to eat them before they are past their prime. They are easily preserved, however. 

I can blackberry jam and freeze many pints of whole berries to use in cobblers later in the year. You can also dehydrate the berries whole or try this recipe for blackberry leather (aka fruit roll-up). The leather will last up to a year when stored properly. 

How to make Blackberry Fruit Leather: 

Based on a recipe in The Joy of Jams, Jellies, and Other Sweet Preserves. 

There are only two ingredients in this recipe: 

5 lb blackberries

1 lb applesauce. I used sweetened applesauce that I canned myself. 

The first, and most difficult, task is to seed the blackberries. You can stew them and then press the softened berries through a fine-mesh sieve, but that will drive you bonkers and possibly stain your entire kitchen with blackberry juice. It is much easier to use a food mill of some kind. 

I recommend this Roma Food Strainer. It definitely will get the job done.  

My Roma Food Mill, ready for action. 

I use the berry screen attachment (sold separately) and it keeps every single one of those tiny blackberry seeds out of the juice. I usually pass the pulp through the mill three times just to make sure I get out all of the juice and then I feed the remaining pulp to my chickens.

The blackberry juice and applesauce mixture

Stir in the applesauce and you are ready to make fruit leather. (The applesauce is used to improve the texture of the final product. You can't really taste it.)

I have an Excalibur Dehydrator that I really like and recommend. If you don't have a dehydrator, you can try making this in your oven, though I haven't tried it and can't vouch for it. You would want to keep your oven at the lowest possible setting, use parchment paper instead of plastic wrap, and check on it often. 

Assuming you have a dehydrator (and if you are a gardener or prepper, you really should!), this is how to proceed:

Line the dehydrator trays with plastic wrap, taking special care to make sure the wrap is secure. I left an 1" margin on both sides of the tray so the air could circulate more easily.

Fruit on the prepared tray

Spread the fruit mixture on the plastic wrap. You are looking for a depth of approximately 1/4", but you want the edges to be thicker than the center. That will help the whole sheet of fruit dry evenly.

Loading up

This recipe filled 6 of the 9 trays of my Excalibur. I set the temperature at 135 degrees. After about 5 hours, I checked on the leather and it was making excellent progress. I turned it down 20 degrees, just to make sure that the leather remained pliable and did not get brittle. After a total of 15 hours, the leather was at the perfect consistency. It was tacky to the touch, but not wet. The time it takes your batch of leather to dry will be dependent on many factors - your dehydrator, the humidity, how thick you spread the fruit, etc.

Done!

Then all you have to do it remove the plastic wrap from the tray and roll it up like a scroll.

I cut each roll in half so they would could fit in quart canning jars for storage.

Next, I used my Food Saver's accessory attachment to vacuum seal a clean, used canning lid to the jar.

Et viola! A healthy, homemade snack that will last until next year's blackberry harvest. If I can keep it hidden from my kids, that is...

Oh Spring, Where Art Thou? Garden and Orchard Update

This is what my garden looked like at this time last year:

The north half of my vegetable garden, mid-May 2012

2012 had an extremely mild winter which was immediately followed by one of the hottest and driest summers on record. In May, our garden looked great! Just don't ask about July or August...

This spring has looked more like this:

Snow in May! 

The last time it snowed here in May was when my great-grandmother was a young girl. What a contrast to last year. 

The lingering cold has really slowed down everything in our garden and orchard, but although things are growing slowly, the good news is that everything is growing. We have had abundant rain that has put a dent in the drought and things are green for the first time in a long time. That feels good. 

GARDEN 

The north half of our vegetable garden, mid-May 2013

The south half of our garden, mid-May 2013

We added another three raised beds to our garden, so our vegetable garden consists of 528 intensively managed square feet. We still have to haul more bags of pea gravel to cover the new pathways. This fall we plan to add the final box to complete the garden and then start the process of doubling each box's depth. 

We follow the Square Foot Gardening method, but have changed things to suit us as we have gone along. The Square Foot Gardening method claims that you only need a 6" deep box, and for many plants, that is true. When there is a drought, however, deeper soil retains moisture a lot better and some plants really appreciate the extra depth.  

We put a lot of effort into starting our own transplants this year. After all the time and energy we poured into that, it was really disheartening when our transplants were subjected to snow and freezing rain time and time again. Even the cold hardy plants like cabbage and broccoli really took a beating, but they are slowly making a come-back. This would have been a great year to have cold frames or row covers set up. Oh well, some other year, perhaps. 

Broccoli to the rear, cauliflower in front

Radishes and cabbages. The cabbage in the front right was one of our original  group
that was planted and got frozen. The outer leaves died off, but it has grown back.
The cabbage to the rear of the photo was one we planted later on.  

Lettuces and spinach in various stages of growth

Forellenschluss lettuce

I love this lettuce! Forellenschluss is German for 'speckled like a trout'.

'Encore' lettuce mix

Doesn't this picture make you want to take a bottle of ranch dressing out to the garden and chow down right there? No? Maybe that is just me. ;)

Strawberry blossoms

'Little Marvel' peas in the foreground, Swiss Chard in the back. We are growing lots of chard
this year for poultry feed.   

These barely visible sprouts may not make the most interesting photo, but they are really exciting to us.
Carrots! Lots and lots of carrots! We have had the hardest time growing carrots. I think the moist,
cool conditions must have been just right for them to germinate.   

Garlic and some of our onions

The only fly in the ointment is our garlic. You can see that it is coming in pretty patchy. All of the cloves have sprouted, but most of them are still tiny. Strange.

ORCHARD

Things are slowly developing in the orchard, too.

'Montmorency' cherry blossom

One of our first tasks in the orchard this spring was to install limb spreaders in the trees that needed them.

May 5th - limb spreaders in place, starting to leaf out

It is important to attain a crotch angle (Yes, I just said that! I promise it is a real term!) of around 45 degrees between the limbs and the trunk. This assists light penetration and air circulation which are both important for healthy trees. Limbs with narrow crotch angles are also more prone to splitting away from the trunk under a heavy load of fruit. We will leave the limb spreaders in place until fall when the branches should have set into their new positions.

We also planted four new trees: a 'Stanley' prune plum, 'Surecrop' pie cherry, 'Sunglo' nectarine, and 'Contender' peach. Our orchard now consists of: 1 row each of blackberries and raspberries, 3 blueberry bushes, 3 apple, 3 pecan, 2 cherry, 2 pear, and 1 each of almond, peach, plum, and nectarine trees.

Our new 'Sunglo' nectarine

We have gotten the tree planting method espoused in The Holistic Orchard down to a science. If you want to learn the correct way to plant a fruit tree, check out the post I wrote on the subject here. We'll continue to get practice since our orchard is far from complete. (Insert Hubby Dear's groans as he reads this.) 

Our apple trees were just planted last spring, so I wasn't expecting any fruit this year. Our 'Jonafree' apple tree (the one with the spreaders pictured above) surprised me by going into bloom. 

'Jonafree' apple buds in various stages of development

A king blossom. The king blossom is the one in the center of a cluster of blossoms. It is the one that
will open first and  has the potential to form the largest fruit. 

'Earliblue' blueberry blossoms. 

Our blueberries are also blossoming. We've only had them a year as well, but the bushes are three years old and so this is the first year we could expect a small crop.

Of course our weather has been so wacky, I was worried that these blooms would be killed by frost. We continue to get frost warnings, so I did a little research to find out at what temperature the blooms would be killed. Here is a handy little sheet that summarizes killing frost temperatures for many types of trees.  This is another site just about apple trees and one about blueberries.

The upshot of those articles is that as long as it stays in the 30s, the blossoms will be safe. I just hope temperatures stabilize soon so that we can plant out our tomato and pepper transplants.

Has your spring been delayed like ours has been? What is growing in your garden?

How Many Fruit and Berry Plants Do You Need?

When I made my orchard plan a few years ago, there is one factor that I didn't take into consideration - how much fruit does each type of tree or berry plant yield? I recently did some research on this topic and  I was astounded by some of my findings. The dwarf prune plum tree we just planted, for example, will only yield between 1/2 and 1 bushel of fruit. When the plums are all dried into prunes, that's really not much. On the other hand, when our apple trees are all in production, we can expect to get between 50-75 bushels of apples each year. That's a lot of applesauce. 

Here are some estimated annual yields for commonly grown fruit and berry plants in the United States. Obviously, your results will vary based on your location, climate, etc., but this is a good place to begin your planning.   

FRUIT TREES:

'Jonafree' apple bud, May 2013

Apples - 

• Dwarf - 5-6 bushels per tree
• Semi-Dwarf - 10-15 bushels per tree
• Standard - 15-20 bushels per tree 

Apricots - 

• Miniature -1-2 pecks
• Dwarf - 1-2 bushels per tree
• Standard - 3-4 bushels per tree 

Cherries, Sweet -

• Dwarf - 8-10 gallons per tree
• Semi-Dwarf - 10-15 gallons per tree
• Standard - 15-20 gallons per tree 

Cherries, Sour - 

• Dwarf - 3-5 gallons per tree
• Semi-Dwarf - 12-18 gallons per tree

Nectarine - 

• Miniature -1-2 pecks
• Dwarf - 3-4 bushels per tree
• Standard - 6-10 bushels per tree 

Peach - 

• Miniature -1-2 pecks
• Dwarf -3-4 bushels per tree
• Standard - 6-10 bushels per tree 

Pears - 

• Dwarf - 6-8 bushels per tree
• Standard - 12-15 bushels per tree 

Pears, Asian - 

• Dwarf - 1 bushels per tree
• Semi-Dwarf - 1-2 bushels per tree
• Standard - 3-8 bushels per tree 

Plums, European - 

• Dwarf -1/2-1 bushel per tree
• Standard - 1-2 bushels per tree 

Plums, Japanese - 

• Dwarf -3-4 bushels per tree
• Semi-Dwarf - 4-5 bushels per tree
• Standard - 5-6 bushels per tree 

BERRIES: 

Blackberries from my garden

Blackberries - 3-4 plants per person. Average yield per plant is 1 quart. (Note: My Triple Crown blackberry vines far outproduce this estimate.) 

Blueberries - 2 plants per person. Average yield per plant (if you have multiple types for cross-pollination) is 3-4 quarts. 

Raspberries - 25 plants per person. Average yield per plant is 1-2 quarts. 

Strawberries - 25 plants per person. June-bearing strawberries (the ones that produce all of their berries at once) yield about 1 pint per plant. Everbearing strawberries (produce small amounts from June through first frost) yield about 1/2-1 lb per plant. 

Most folks run out of room in their yard long before they plant enough trees and berries to produce an entire year's supply for their family. With judicious planting, however, even small yards can produce bountifully. We have an entire acre that we can use for our orchard and berry planting, if we find that we can maintain that much! In five years, it is technically possible that we could grow all the fruit we eat! Of course, that leaves the problem of storing and preserving all that fruit, but that is where a root cellar, canning, freezing, and dehydrating comes into play.   

References: 

I compiled this information from the Plant Manuals at starkbros.com. I highly recommend Stark Bros. We have bought all of our fruit and berry plants from them and are very pleased with their quality and customer service. 

Fall Orchard Update

We are entering our second year of planting and maintaining our survival orchard. (Here's my original post on the subject. I've made a few additions and changes to our plan since I first posted it.)

Apple trees, comfrey, and newly planted almond. Blueberries on the back right. 

The comfrey we planted thrived. Hopefully I can divide them sometime next year and get more plants to spread the happiness throughout the orchard.

Speaking of spreading something, I have been dumping duck poo and litter in the areas in between the trees. Duck poo is wonderful stuff for plants and will help improve the soil, which is something our hard-packed clay desperately needs. I am careful not to get it too close to the trees lest it "burn" the them, but that seems to be less of an issue with duck manure than chicken manure.

All the trees and bushes we planted over the past year survived despite the drought that continues unabated. If we do not get a lot of rain and snow this winter, the powers-that-be are going to add more water restrictions which are going to make it hard to keep things alive.

"Bluecrop" blueberry

Our blueberries will technically be old enough next year to give us a crop. They still seem pretty small to me, so I'll be interested in seeing what actually happens. Look how pretty blueberries get in the fall! Blueberries don't only produce delicious fruit; they also are beautiful landscaping plants. All you suburbanites with hoity-toity neighbors should take note! ;)

A sloooooow growing pecan tree

Last weekend we did two important fall orchard tasks. First, we put tree guards around the trunks of our trees. The tree guards will help keep voles, mice,and rabbits from eating the bark off the trees. Since the guards are white, they will also help reflect light on sunny winter days and prevent southwest injury. We will take the tree guards down in the spring because, according to The Holistic Orchard, they hold too much moisture against the trunk and provide cover for borers.

The fun (albeit exhausting) task was to plant our new trees: two pears and an almond.

Our new All-in-One Almond tree

I think nut trees are an essential part of any survival orchard. Last year we planted pecans, this year we planted an almond, and we will be adding walnuts in the future. You might be surprised to learn that folks as far north as Zone 5 can grow almonds. There are two varieties that will grow here, Hall's Hardy Almond and the All-in-One Almond. It seems that more people like the taste and texture of the All-in-One Almond and so that is the variety we went with. Either variety will make lovely ornamental trees in addition to producing lots of nuts.

One of our new pear trees. 

We planted two varieties of pears, Maxine (also known as Starking Delicious) and Seckel. These two varieties will cross-pollinate each other and have different strengths. Maxine is your typical Bartlett-type pear. It is great for eating fresh or canning and supposedly will last in cold storage for a while. Seckel pears are a smaller pear that are great for fresh eating but also dry well. We planting standard-sized pear trees so they will grow between 18-20 feet tall and 12-13 feet wide.

A drawing of the orchard layout, mostly to scale
The dots with circles around them are current plantings; plain dots are future plantings

We're making slow but steady progress. I look forward to the day when all this hard work will pay off!

Mid-June Garden and Orchard Update

It's been a while since I did a garden update, so I thought I'd share what's going on. 

Unfortunately, May was extremely hot and dry here, which caused our cold weather crops like peas, lettuce, and spinach to die prematurely.  If it's not one thing, it's another. 

Our garden on June 18. It's looking bare since so much has been harvested or pulled out. 

The chickens have the right idea. 

The chickens spend the hot part of the day underneath their coop. 

When it's hot like this, it's best to just stay in the shade! I've been spritzing their run with the hose a couple of times a day and putting ice cubes in their water. They seem to be weathering the heat well. Hopefully by this time next month I'll be getting eggs from my lovely ladies! 

Drying garlic

We harvested around 40 heads of garlic. We gathered them into bunches of five or six heads and have suspended them in our garage to dry for a month or so. Once they are dry, I'll cut them off their stalk - we grew 'Music', a type of hard-neck garlic - and put them into storage. I plan to save our best heads back to use as seed garlic for next year's crop. I am also going to try dehydrating garlic in my Excaliburand grind my own garlic powder.

'Copra' onions

The onions are doing well and will probably do even better now that the garlic is gone. Our garlic plants were three feet tall and were shading them.

Our green beans had spotty germination

Our green beans had spotty germination, as did our carrots, cucumbers, watermelon, zucchini, and cantaloupe. We replanted the bare spots. We also planted extra vine plants in the space vacated by the peas. We will soon have a riotous mess in those bare areas!

Lots of varieties of heirloom tomatoes

Ripen already!! I can't wait for that first homegrown tomato of 2012.

We planted some black oil sunflowers in this open area

We are growing some Peredovik black oil sunflowers for a treat for our chickens.

Sunflower bud

The Berries

The heat has led the blackberries to begin ripening a full month earlier than last year.

I've only picked enough to eat out of hand, but in the next week or so, we should be harvesting buckets of berries. Time to dig out the canner and make some blackberry jam!

Barn swallow nest

One of the things we are doing to help control the wasps that plagued our blackberries last year is allow barn swallows to nest on our property. We had been knocking down the nests simply because the birds make such a mess on our porches and deck. Barn swallows eat an amazing amount of insects, however, so we are leaving them alone this year. Hopefully this will cut down on the wasps sucking the juice out of my berries!

We're getting a few strawberries from our everbearing plants and little bits of raspberries, too, though our big raspberry harvest will be in September. Or August, the way things are going this year!

Only about half of the new raspberries appear to have survived

The good news about the raspberry canes we planted this spring is that we have a few survivors. Hopefully they will make it through the heat of summer and we can fill in the row with extra canes from our established raspberries.

Blueberries going strong

Our blueberry bushes seem to be doing well and they've grown quite a bit. We planted two year old bushes, so hopefully we'll get a crop from them next year.

The Orchard

Our little orchard faced some struggles this month. Two of our newly-planted apple trees came down with a bad case of Cedar Apple Rust. 

Our Jonafree apple tree has managed to overcome the Cedar Apple Rust 

The GoldRush? Not so much. It's growth is being stunted by its struggle with rust.

I really didn't think we'd have to worry about disease pressures this early! And I didn't think Cedar Apple Rust would be a problem since we don't have any cedar trees on our property.

What's that right across the road from our orchard?

Earth to Emily! There are cedar trees right across the road! After I did more research, I found out that to eradicate the chance of Cedar Apple Rust, I'd have to get rid of all the cedar trees within a square MILE of our property. As that's not going to happen, I'm going to have to pay close attention to the weather conditions next spring so I can stay ahead of the rust. In the mean time, I have been using an organic disease control spray that seems to be helping somewhat.

Our pecan trees

Perhaps the most impressive growth has been from our three pecan trees. They might not look so impressive to you, but considering they were mere twigs when we planted them last November, I'm pleased.

Oh, but I'm forgetting the real star of the show, our cherry tree.

Our not-quite-as-dwarf Montmorency cherry

We got this tree for free four years ago and have pretty much neglected it. This year we have lavished it with care. It got a proper mulching, fertilization, and holistic sprays in the spring. It has responded with enthusiastic growth of nearly two feet!

I also pre-ordered the new additions to our orchard for the fall - two standard-sized pear trees (Starking Delicious and Seckel) and an All-in-One Almond tree. I was really tempted to order a lot more but I remember how hard Hubby Dear and I have to work to bust through our concrete soil. Three trees at a time is probably all we can handle.


Between the garden and my poultry projects, we've been busy. What's growing at your house?