How do you like them honeyberries?

Sorry to be a little late with the blog entry this week, folks, but the past week has been absolutely nuts. Or perhaps, to be more accurate, I should say it's been absolutely berries.

Last weekend, as I noted, we spent most of Saturday hacking, slashing, pulling, and otherwise tearing down the big forsythia hedge on the north side of our back yard to make room for the new honeyberry bushes we'd ordered from Honeyberry USA. We'd planned to stop by the Belle Mead Co-Op after our dentist appointment on Sunday (since it's right in the same neighborhood) to pick up some mulch for the new plants, but the weather was too wet, so we had to put off that errand until Monday.

Brian had already arranged to take the day off from work, and I was able to rush through my work and go with him to load half a yard of bulk mulch into a motley assortment of bags and trash barrels crammed into the back of our little Honda Fit. We also picked up another 50-yard roll of groundcloth to protect the new plants from weeds. After unloading all this, we ate lunch and spent most of the afternoon stripping down and bundling up the big pile of forsythia branches. By evening, we'd reduced it to just a small pile of untrimmed branches, plus 23 bundles of sticks for bulk pickup and a mass of leaves for the compost bin.

However, even after spending most of the day on planting-related tasks, we still weren't as far along as Brian had hoped to be. He'd originally intended to get the ground all prepared for the new bushes, digging the holes and amending the soil with compost, so all we'd have to do on Friday would be to put the plants in the ground and cover them up. But at this point, it looked like we still had a whole day's work left in front of us to prep the ground, plant the bushes, and cover them with ground cloth and mulch. And since we were supposed to be heading down to Virginia on Friday to visit friends for the weekend, he didn't think we'd have enough time that day to get the job done. So, when we came in from our work and found the new bushes themselves waiting for us in a big cardboard box out front, Brian promptly contacted his office and arranged to take Wednesday off as well, so we'd be sure to have enough time to get them into the ground before our trip.

So Wednesday saw us once again suiting up in our gardening clothes and heading out into the garden. Following the rule of thumb that you should "dig a ten-dollar hole for a five-dollar tree," we figured we'd need holes a good foot deep and wide to accommodate the six-inch root balls of our new plants. Brian got each hole started with the big shovel, then moved on to the next hole while I went in with the trowel and excavated further to remove stones and stray roots and make sure the sides of the hole were rough enough for the roots to get a good foothold in the soil. (In clay soil like ours, if the sides of the hole are too smooth, you end up with the "clay pot effect," in which the plant becomes effectively trapped within the boundaries of the original planting hole.)

Next, we started adding compost to the holes. We didn't have enough compost left in our bin for this purpose, so we used some "Black Kow," a cow-manure-based compost that we picked up at Home Depot. Brian bought it right after we ordered the new bushes, and ran a compost test on the contents of both bags to make sure they wouldn't hurt the plants. The package said to mix the compost with soil in a one-to-one ratio and fill the holes halfway up with this mixture; rather than get out a separate container for this purpose, Brian just added a shovelful or two of compost to each hole, topped it with a roughly equal amount of the dirt he'd dug out earlier, and mixed it together in situ.

The next step was to lay out several sheets of groundcloth and cut a big "X" in each one over top of the planting hole, so we could fit it in over top of the bush. (We originally thought we'd put the bushes in first and then add the cloth over top of them, but we quickly realized it would be hard to get the holes in the right position if we couldn't lay the cloth out flat on the ground.) We laid them out, weighted them down with chunks of concrete so they wouldn't blow away, and cut the holes with a utility knife.

=However, we realized there was a flaw in this scheme of putting down the cloth first and then picking it up again to put in the plants: what if the holes weren't all in exactly the same place? What if we put the pieces of groundcloth down in different spots from where we originally laid them, and the holes didn't line up? It might not be a problem, but Brian didn't want to take any chances. So to make sure, he labeled each piece of groundcloth by cutting a series of slits in the bottom, from one to five, to show which position it belonged in.

We then removed the pieces of groundcloth again and, at last, got to the main event: putting the bushes themselves in the ground. The five bushes we'd bought were two Tanas and two Keikos, which could pollinate each other, and one Solo, which was somewhat self-fertile but likely to do better with a companion. So, to ensure the best cross-pollination, we laid them out Keiko-Tana-Keiko-Tana-Solo, which we can remember by the acronym KitTy-KaTS. Each plant went in with its roots spread out as best we could in the hole, just below ground level, and got a mix of compost plus dirt filled in around it.

After a quick break for lunch, we got back on the job, laying out all the sheets of groundcloth that we'd previously cut over top of the plants and then cutting additional sheets to fit in between them so the entire slope would remain (we hope) weed-free. (We had to cut out a few holes in the cloth to go around some particularly large rocks and concrete chunks that were embedded into the slope, which there was simply no way to move.) The groundcloth didn't come with any metal stakes to hold it down, but we weighted it down along the top edge with the concrete squares we'd pulled out from around the forsythias and along the bottom with some of the more intact timbers left over from our old garden bed frames. We also had a few stakes left over from a previous purchase, so Brian added one in front of each concrete block that was directly above a bush, hoping this would reduce their chances of  sliding down the slope and crushing the plant below.

The final step was covering this entire slope with mulch, which proved to be tricky. In the first place, the big barrels were too heavy to simply dump out on the slope, and getting a shovel into them to scoop out the mulch was rather awkward. And even once we managed to get all the mulch from the containers onto the ground, distributing it to cover that vast expanse of ground cloth wasn't as easy as it looked. Although we'd bought all that we could reasonably carry home, there was still just barely enough to spread across the entire area without leaving patches of ground cloth exposed. We certainly weren't able to put down anything like the three to four inches of mulch the manufacturers of the ground cloth said it really should have to protect it from sunlight so it doesn't degrade. So chances are, we'll have to go back to the Co-Op for yet another load of mulch some time later this summer. But for now, we at least have five honeyberry plants in the ground with a layer of ground cloth and mulch over them—not a trivial achievement, considering that just two weeks ago this whole slope was a wilderness of forsythias.

Now, I guess, all we can really do is keep these babies well watered and weed free, and hope that they thrive in their new home. Grow, little berries, grow!