Gardeners' Holidays 2019: Edible Landscaping Day

We celebrated May Day this year in our usual way, getting up dark and early to go dance on the battlefield with our Morris dance team, followed by assorted other gigs in and around Princeton. By the time we got home, we were too pooped to even think about working in the yard. So the closest we came to gardening on May Day itself was harvesting some of our home-grown rhubarb for a fruit crisp, which we thought we'd earned after our day's labors.

This weekend, however, is another story. We're devoting quite a lot of time to getting our yard ready for a really big gardening project: planting our new honeyberry bushes.

Given that our usual MO with home and garden projects is to spend a lot of time considering all the options before finally diving in, you may be surprised that we're actually taking the plunge on the honeyberries so quickly. But in fact, we'd already spent years debating what should take the place of the forsythias, putting off making a decision because we weren't really satisfied with any of the options. And we'd already decided that this year, the forsythias absolutely had to go, whether we had the perfect replacement for them or not. So when I read on the Honeyberry USA site that these bushes should be planted in either spring or fall, and I realized there wasn't that much left of spring, I decided we'd better hurry up and order these so we could get them in the ground before the weather got too hot. Otherwise we'd have to wait until autumn, and we just couldn't put up with the forsythias that long.

So, within a week of learning that there was such a thing as honeyberries, I had ordered five of them. (Acting on the advice of the Honeyberry USA site, I chose a mixture of later-blooming varieties, which they said are a better choice for Zones 6 to 8.) We even sprang for the more expensive three-year-old plants, rather than the smaller ones. The larger plants should produce berries for us within a year, and they'll also do a faster job of forming a privacy screen between us and our neighbors.

However, buying the honeyberries meant that we were now on a schedule as far as removing the forsythias. According to an e-mail I received on Thursday, our new bushes are winging their way toward us even as I type, and while they can safely wait for up to a week to be planted, we have other commitments next weekend that definitely won't leave us enough time to dig up the forsythias and plant the honeyberries. So our best bet is to remove the forsythias and do whatever else is needed to prepare the beds this weekend, then take the day off on Friday so we can pop the plants into the ground and get it taken care of.

This morning was rainy, so we puttered around taking care of indoor tasks like laundry (and made a trip out to the library's annual book sale, where, as is our tradition, we bought more books than we actually have room for). But by afternoon it had cleared up, and we set ourselves to the job of pulling out these forsythia monsters. And as we expected, this was no easy task. These bushes clearly didn't want to go. Brian, who was doing the actual cutting, several times cut all the branches on a bush completely free of the stump, so it was no longer attached to the ground in any way, and moved on to the next—and still the previous bush refused to budge, clinging on to its neighbors in a desperate attempt to keep itself put.

My part of the job was to wrest these big branches free and haul them up to the patio, where we planned to pile them until the leaves dried out and fell off, at which point we'd be able to bundle them and leave them on the curb. However, before I'd piled up more than half the contents of the hedge, it became clear that the sheer size of this pile so close to the house was going to make it a fire hazard. So we ended up shoving them off the patio and onto the grass, which they'll probably kill before we manage to get them bundled—but oh well, the less grass there is, the more chance that our favorite weeds, the barren strawberries, will spread into the empty space.

Once we'd cleared away all the branches, Brian got to work on the stumps that he hadn't been able to pull out with the first go. This was a sort of hit-and-miss process, involving hacking at the things with a variety of different tools—our big hedge clippers, our trusty King of Spades, and even the sledgehammer we used for our patio project—until he'd inflicted a combination of slashing, piercing, and bludgeoning damage sufficient to get them to part ways with the ground. Some of these things had actually been planted inside hollow concrete blocks (I don't know what they're called, but you can see them in the picture), so he had to pry the block up along with the stump, then continue to chop at it in order to extricate it. (He returned the blocks to their location along the fence, where he hopes they'll help hold the dirt in place until we're able to get the honeyberries in).

And that was just today's part of the job. Tomorrow, we're planning to pick up some bulk mulch from the Belle Mead Co-Op, since the Honeyberry USA site says suppressing weeds around your honeyberry bushes is a must, and after that, we need to prepare the space with some compost and see what we can do about cleaning up the mess we made today. And just in case we don't have time for all that tomorrow (since we have several other errands to take care of also), Brian has arranged to take Monday off as well.

So, basically, we spent all afternoon today, and will likely spend a good portion of tomorrow, just getting ready to plant a new crop that we don't actually have yet. But at least all the work we're putting in now should make it possible to get our new bushes into the ground fairly quickly when they finally arrive. And, though I don't want to count our berries before they're hatched, there's at least a fairly good chance that we'll actually be able to start harvesting and eating them as early as next year. (In fact, I've already got my heart set on using some in a honeyberry fool, which is almost as much fun to say as it would be to eat. Come to think of it, "Honeyberry Fool" would make a great title for a country song, too.)