How To Use Small Fruits In Garden and Landscape

“Let’s give a thought to design when we plant the small fruits in our gardens. Let’s plant for pleasure and appearance as well as for fruit.” J. Harold Clarke

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Many a row of strawberries or other berries and many a grapevine have been planted without thought of garden design, just set in what seems the only vacant spot when the plants arrive as a gift from one of the neighbors or as a result of impulse buying.

Maybe they will bear just as well, but that is not the way to get the most out of small fruits any more than it is the way to get the most out of ornamental plants.

So let’s give a thought to design, or if that sounds too vague, to where we can plant the various kinds of berries to get the most out of them, in the fruit, of course, but also in convenience, appearance, and general enjoyment.

You already have some berry plants where you don’t particularly want them should not lessen your interest in garden design or planning if you prefer that word but stimulate it.

Once you have a variety you like, it is easy to propagate more plants, set them just where you have decided they should have been planted in the first place, and as soon as the new planting is in production, dig out the old rows.

Kinds Of Small Fruit To Plant 

The kinds of small fruits to include, one or two or all, is the first thing to be settled in planning that part of the garden.

Some may wish to have only a few which can be grown under their particular conditions of soil and climate. Others may want only a certain one, and there are always a few, perhaps with the collector’s instinct, who want them all.

This question will have to be settled after considering personal likes, climate, soil, space available, and time to care for the proposed planting.

Yields will vary with the variety, the year, the soil conditions, and the care given. If you are shooting for a definite amount of fruit, you better add a few extra plants to your order.

Select A Suitable Site For Your Fruits 

Once the kinds of fruit and the varieties have been determined, one should use all his knowledge of soils and sites, frost pockets, drainage, and other factors to select an area for planting.

If, as is more likely to be the case, only one space is available, then it should be studied to try and determine if all the fruits desired will grow satisfactorily on it.

Berries In Vegetable Gardens

On the smaller place, there are three general ways of locating the berry crops. Very frequently, they are combined with the vegetable garden. This is especially good for strawberries as they should stay in one place only two to four or five years at the most.

They would then be turned under, new plants having been set, preferably at some little distance, before the old ones are discarded. It is often practical in the small garden to shift the strawberries from one side to the other, alternating with some annual vegetable crops. But what of the bush fruits?

They should be suitable for five to ten or even fifteen years in one place. There are also perennial vegetables, such as asparagus and rhubarb.

One solution is to place the bush fruits at one side of the garden with the perennial vegetables between the berries and the annual vegetables. This will concentrate activities such as cultivating, fertilizing, and spraying.

Berries And The Home Orchard 

If the home grounds include planting tree fruits, the small fruits may be made a part of that, again for convenience in the consolidation of necessary operations. The trees are usually planted, so they will use all of the land by the time they are six to twelve years old.

Strawberries make a reasonably satisfactory intercrop, the number of rows between two rows of trees being reduced as the trees spread out. A good arrangement may be to have small fruits between the tree fruits and the vegetable garden on the large place.

Berries In The Landscape 

The owner of the city garden, be it large or small, must give special attention to the appearance of the small fruits’ planting, and usually as viewed from all sides. The problem is one of integration with the present, or intended, landscape plan.

Fortunately, grapes and several of the small fruits lend themselves very well to such integration.

Here one must distinguish well those fruits, the brambles mainly, which are aggressive, and use them where their aggressiveness can be controlled without damage to other plantings.

This is not to discourage the inclusion of the brambles, especially red raspberries, even in the small garden, as they are delicious fruits, but just to point out the problems ahead.

Grapes Are Widely Grown

Over the country as a whole, there are probably more home gardens with a grapevine, or several, than with any other fruit, although the newer homes are not so universally vine-planted.

During my boyhood days in Indiana, nearly every home, on the farms and in the smaller towns, had a grape arbor.

The modern gardener might well consider a grape-covered pergola, but it will not have quite the same place in family life that it once might have had. Other plant materials can make a better outdoor living room.

But the grape is still an excellent home garden fruit. Moreover, it can be worked into the landscape very satisfactorily: to cover an unsightly fence, to screen out an undesirable view, to cover a little arbor shading a garden seat, or frankly for fruit on a standard trellis back of the vegetable garden.

Blueberries – Ideal For Landscape Use 

Of all the small fruits, the blueberry is probably the best landscape subject. It stays put, does not spread, grows quickly to maximum size, and then, if properly pruned, remains for years about the same size and shape.

The foliage is attractive in summer, and some varieties have splendid fall coloration. The ripe fruit of most varieties is beautiful and will remain beautiful for three or four weeks if birds and hungry humans permit.

Much has been penned on the difficulty of growing blueberries, and the so-called cultivated varieties favor acid and reasonably moist land. Blueberries belong to the same family as rhododendrons and azaleas, the Ericaceae, and require similar growing conditions.

At least if you can grow these ornamentals, you can grow blueberries. There are types adapted to different situations from the gulf coast north to the Canadian border. The hardier types will be low along with the northern range, growing more of the ground cover type.

Strawberries Very Adaptable 

Next, I would place the strawberry in preference for landscape use, although it should probably go first as a home garden fruit.

Strawberries can be so easily tucked into some corner of the vegetable garden or some other out-of-the-way place that their use in the landscape has not been fully appreciated.

However, they are very attractive as a ground cover throughout the growing season: shining green leaves followed by lovely white flowers, red berries, another green leaf period, and some autumn coloration. And they make an excellent edging for walk or flower border.

It is quite practical to grow a few strawberries in pots, set them in place, fully grown, where they will flower and fruit, and then take them out if there is something else that would look better during late summer.

For example, they are attractive as a low border between lawn and vegetable area. Or they may be used to fill in a small bed somewhere towards the rear of the property.

There they will turn out a surprising amount of fruit, and, although never so striking in color, if kept watered, they never look bloomed out as some annuals and perennials do.

Currants and gooseberries are:

• Good landscape subjects.
• Making trim bushes that do not spread beyond their allotted space.
• Reaching 3 to 4 feet high and about as wide.

They have relatively small attractive leaves and make good conversation pieces when loaded with their red or yellow fruit.

Brambles In The Landscape 

Red raspberries grown on a suitable trellis will make an excellent screen planting or hedge, although not so effective as a screen after the leaves fall. But they will send up suckers in great numbers, particularly if mulched, which will reach out for 7 or 8 feet on each side of the row.

They can be pulled easily when young, but it is a chore, and some prickles will make gloves almost a necessity. Cutting them off is not as satisfactory, for they will sprout up from the stump.

Black raspberries do not sucker, but the canes root at the tips to form new plants, which, if not taken out, may result in the planting expanding through the fence into the neighbor’s lawn.

The canes are somewhat silvery in appearance, gracefully arching and can be pretty attractive, even during the winter months, when properly groomed.

The various dewberries have relatively little landscape value in themselves. They are trailers, lying flat on the ground unless supported. Some landscape use may be made of them by erecting a suitable trellis.

However, the fruiting canes should be removed after harvest, and the new canes should not be tied up until the following spring. This means that the trellis will be standing bare except during the spring and early summer. Dewberries spread by tip layering the same as black raspberries.

The so-called bush blackberries also send up suckers, not so many as the red raspberries but wide-ranging and armed with vicious spines.

Therefore, I would consider them less desirable for the small garden than red raspberries, except in some southern areas where the latter do not thrive.

Trailing blackberries can be very aggressive where they grow well, sending out heavy, viciously thorned canes 10′ to 15′ feet long, which take root at the tips. They will have to be put on a trellis if the fruit is to be where you can reach it, although if left to their own devices, they will make a broad mound higher than a man’s head and perhaps 12′ feet in diameter.

They will remain evergreen or semi-evergreen, and the mound of green is not unattractive if viewed from a bit of distance, but certainly not a landscape subject for the small lot. They are very productive in milder climates but will usually be killed.

I have not tried to fit the more unusual small fruits into a desirability scale for landscape use. The elderberry is quite attractive in bloom and fruit and quite tall.

If used at all, the proper place would seem to be in the landscape planting. Somewhat the same may be said for the high-bush cranberry, probably more valuable for its ornamental properties than its fruit.

Soil Preparation For Small Fruits 

Although too few of us do it, it is desirable to prepare the soil a year in advance by growing some annual crop. In this way, weeds can be brought under reasonable control, organic matter worked in, pH adjusted if necessary, and facts learned about the soil fertility or lack thereof.

For general garden planting, the soil will need to be plowed and harrowed, and rotovated. If there is a likelihood that the soil may need lime or phosphorus, these elements should be plowed under or worked in deeply as it is somewhat difficult to get them down into the soil later by surface application.

If the soil needs conditioning by adding a large amount of organic matter such as sawdust or peat moss, by additions of sand or clay, or the laying of drains, these should all be done before planting.

When To Plant Small Fruits 

Spring versus fall planting has been discussed for years. In most places outside of the Deep South, I would suggest spring, as early as the soil can be gotten in the proper condition. Early fall planting permits the plants to become established during late fall and winter and start promptly in the spring.

But weeds also may become established during the winter, and spring-set plants have the advantage of the soil preparation for planting, which starts them off free of weeds. The weed problem will be partially solved where a mulch is applied in the fall immediately after planting.

Fall-set plants in northern climates may be somewhat more subject to winter injury than they would be after a season’s growth in place. Fall-set strawberry plants will produce some fruit the following spring if properly mulched and protected during the winter.

Spring-set plants will produce very little that same spring and will be stronger if all blossoms are picked off. With the bush fruits, not much can be expected in the first season anyway, so the best time for planting depends on the conditions that give the best survival and vegetative growth.

In the Deep South danger of damage from hot, dry summer conditions is greater than the danger of winter injury, so fall planting is often more desirable.

In far northern gardens, spring planting seems more desirable from survival during the first winter.

The winters are relatively mild and moist as in the Pacific Northwest, fall-set plants will survive easily enough, but the weed growth by spring may be terrific. So unless a mulch is applied in the fall right after planting, I would prefer spring.

Root Pruning Small Fruits 

Some writers place great emphasis on root pruning before planting, especially the removal of broken roots and the making of a clean-cut where the end of a root has been somewhat frayed in digging. To ensure a neat and workmanlike job, such root pruning might be done, but I do not believe it could be proven that it will result in any better or healthier growth.

Top Pruning Small Fruits Bushes and Trees 

The pruning of the tops of these particular fruits at planting time is more important for two reasons. In the first place, there may be a long shoot growing over to one side so that the bush, if left unpruned, would make a one-sided growth instead of the well-balanced bush usually desired.

But more important is that when the plant was dug, unless with a reasonably large ball, and certainly if bare-root, a large part of the fibrous root system and probably all the absorbing rootlets and root hairs were lost— they just break off as the soil falls away.

This materially reduces the water intake organs of the plant, and it will be very helpful if the potential leaf surface is reduced somewhat – to balance water intake with water loss – by removing shoots or parts of shoots bearing leaf buds. Probably a third of the top growth could be removed with beneficial results.

Fruits Bush And Vines Planting Tips 

Bush fruits and grapes should be set about an inch deeper than they were before digging, which will leave them just slightly deeper after the soil has been well compacted by rain. Strawberry plants should be set as deeply as possible without covering the tip of the crown, the fleshy organ to which the leaves and roots are attached.

For blueberries, which are frequently moved with a ball of soil, and for currants and gooseberries, which may have a rather large root system, it will be desirable to dig a hole at least a foot across and 8 to 10 inches deep.

If the plant is bare-root, spread the roots and work the soil around them, occasionally ‘jiggling’ the plant slightly so the soil will sift down within the root mass and firm by stepping.

When blueberries are being planted on unfavorable soil, it may be desirable to dig an extra-large hole and incorporate peat or leaf mold. But for the other small fruits, it is usually better to work organic matter into the plot.

Unless the soil is very moist, it will help to fill the hole only halfway, then pour in half a gallon of water, allow it to sink away, and then fill the hole.

It has been found very helpful, especially in low fertility soils, to use a starter solution as the plants are set. A suitable solution may be made from one of the complete fertilizer formulas especially designed -for such use.

FGR-1158 – magazine excerpt from book: “Small Trees for Your Home Garden” by J. Harold Clarke