20th February 2010
As I was getting tired of lifting boxes and boxes and boxes, I took a break from 1-3 pm yesterday and went outside to enjoy the sunny sunny day. I can actually work in the office now, find things and run the press when my ink comes in. I am quite pleased. I have a bunch of orders to get out this coming week. I so thank everyone for their patience.

It was a little over 63F/18C yeterday so I decided it was raspberry row cleaning day. The row was no longer a row, so I am on the first year of making two 25' rows. I left some out of the 18" wide rows, as I do not want to lose any berries this summer, but I will take care of those next fall/winter. Most of those out of the row are second year growth. Some I transplanted into a section of the new row before I quit for the day. I was surprised at how much was added to my compost/burn pile of raspberry debris.

Photo left: A few years of overgrowth on the raspberries.
Photo right: A very cut back raspberry row to 1st and 2nd year canes, taking out all the spent canes from last year, all the weak canes and all the dead wood. It is not as bare as it looks in the pic.

Photo left: Part of the new row on the right.
Photo Right: A huge pile of raspberry prunings to compost.

Today I went to go do blueberry cuttings for a fundraiser my agricultural group is having in April. Between 3 of us, in the lovely 66F/18C weather, we went out to harvest, pot up and take to the greenhouse 213 cuttings in 3" pots. I went to the farm store to get peat moss and vermiculite first thing this morning and we mixed it up in my horse water tank.

Photos Above: (L)Blueberry cuttings and (R) saving blueberry plants and taking them to "V"'s house. Heading out to get more tomorrow and then I am done unless we are taking more to the community garden.

Then later in the afternoon we returned with two more people with another truck to go salvage some of the blueberry plants before they go under a bulldozer. I showed the other people how to prune the mature shrubs which were very overgrown due to lack of care for three years. Today I dug up and brought 6 of the mature plants home and planted them. I love my soil, it is at least 18" of topsoil and I can see why early pioneer chose this valley for their farms. It was easy digging and I noted that over 100 years alot of people leave debris in an area. I had a fair bit of glass in one area I found and put into the recycling.

Picture Above: Some of my new blueberry bushes outside the
fence of part of the garden. This will be the old section as I
am adding a new larger part, incorporated with chicken pens.