To: "North American Fruit Explorers" <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: Re: [NAFEX] oh no! The blackberries too!!!
Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2007 15:30:28 -0500
Any of you down in the south who think the wild blackberries are fine, think
again. I was looking at my Kiowas, which were further along than the
wildlings, pulling off buds and slitting them with my fingernail to try to
find one that wasn't black inside. After that I started in on the wild
ones. I pulled some 30 buds and found two that had been viable. Since the
freeze I have been thinking that at least we'd have the wild blackberries
this year. This is going to be even harder on the birds than I thought.
Does look like the dogwood berries may be alright though. I'm not going to
go chop the blackberries because many of the buds look like the anthers will
be fine, so at least the bees will be able to get some pollen from them.
Many of our strawberry flowers were damaged in the freeze despite being
double covered, and now we've had a couple of frosts that I wasn't home for
so more are black in the middle. Strangely enough, there were wild
strawberries in the open during and since the freeze that have had viable
centers. I'm wondering if some of these would be worth crossing to carry
better bud hardiness. I'm not likely to be much use at something that long
term, but the plants could easily be dug and shipped to someone else.
I do get the impression of a shortage of blooming plants right now.
There were 5 big bumblebees working a small patch of purple deadnettle this
morning, bees that normally would have been busy cheating on our blueberry
patch. Yesterday a male hummingbird tried to work the same worked over
patch, and then came over and tried pretty hard to find something to eat on
my orange shirt.
And the good news is that a few blueberries were undamaged, though
whether there will be enough to be worth picking, (or whether I'll feel
justified in keeping the birds from them when they have nothing else to
eat), I don't know. Donna