The 39-blackberry challenge

First, a note on my last post, about what there is to eat. It is indicative of how far out of whack things have gotten in our culture that I ever feel deprived at all. I mean, look at the list of things we’ve been eating: that’s good food! It’s not as if we’re eating cornmeal mush every night, or (a more modern rendition) ramen noodles. Another note: the potatoes buried in buckets didn’t make it through the deep freezes of January. They looked okay till I cut them open and discovered their black interiors. I haven’t checked on the remaining cabbage bucket recently, feeling rather overwhelmed by the four feet of snow I’d have to dig through. Once we finish off the sauerkraut I may be motivated. But a root cellar is clearly a need and not just a desire.

My notebooks are filling with ideas, plans, and “to-dos” for the coming growing/grazing season. These include
> the possibility of getting pigs and using them to till up new planting areas until they reach slaughter weight;
> choosing a likely hen to hatch and brood chicks for us this spring;
> a scheme for raising pastured broiler chickens that can be harvested weekly for six months, providing enough meat for ourselves and our dogs through the warm season without requiring a freezer.
More on all of these plans in future posts.

My most pressing questions right now have to do with the 39 bare-root blackberry transplants and 400 asparagus crowns I ordered last September. My original plan was to establish a couple of small, specific cash-crop plantings to continue multiplying and diversifying our small income streams. So I started sketching out blackberry and asparagus beds for our north slope, which has fertile soil, faces roughly south, and receives full sun.

Focusing first on the blackberries, I read through as much blackberry production information as I could find. Here is what I found out.
If I were to plant blackberries for production, I would start preparing the field at least a year in advance. I would till up a large area and plant it with a cover crop in order to suppress the weeds whose germination I have just stimulated. The following year, I would till in the cover crop, test the soil and apply the indicated soil amendments before planting blackberry transplants in north-south rows to intercept the most sunlight. I might erect a wind fence on the north side to boost production, and a trellis system to prevent cane breakage and expose more of each plant to sunlight, again maximizing production. I would remove all wild brambles within a 600-foot radius to try to prevent a bramble virus from infecting my so-easy-to-annihilate monoculture. I would design and install an irrigation system to ensure maximum fruit size. I would plant grass between the rows and mow regularly throughout the season, or, alternatively, lay black plastic between the rows, and continually and carefully cultivate under the growing brambles to remove weeds. Throughout the season I would monitor for pests and diseases and apply approved pesticides as needed. This would require either becoming certified to apply pesticides, or hiring a certified applicator. In the fall I might have herbicides applied to suppress spring weed growth. I would continue to amend the soil and apply mulch to try to slow erosion and leaching.

A well-respected bramble production guide advises me to expect startup costs of about $3,675 per acre, with subsequent expenses (trellising, mowing, fertilizing, cultivating, irrigating, spraying) of $2190 per acre. Plants would not reach full production until the fourth year, at which point maintenance costs would stabilize at around $1500 per acre per year. This doesn't count harvest expenses, which include cooling the berries to 41°F within four hours and/or getting them to market in a refrigerated truck.

With all of this, clearly less than an acre of blackberry production is not even worth it. Thirty-nine plants? Don’t even bother.

In addition to the costs and challenges of scale, I found myself bumping up hard against the goals that are at the heart of why we became smallholders, including the desire to create “a resilient, diversified ecosystem of perennial polycultures,” “to sustain people, livestock, land, and wildlife in a healthful, low-input, low-cost, and relatively low-risk manner,” and to “nurture this small part of the biosphere and improve the health of the land.” Not to mention that fact that we don't have tilling equipment, and are trying to avoid hired tilling to the extent possible.

So . . . what if I tossed the cash crop model out the window and approached the whole thing differently? I have spent $234 on blackberry plants—Nelson’s Midsummer—that have proven themselves hardy in Maine for a century. How can they best benefit the human and nonhuman life on this smallholding? How can they help increase the biodiversity and fecundity of our land (which needs some healing from its tenure as a motocross course) while diversifying our food supply? Bees will love the blackberry blossom nectar and wildlife will enjoy the berries. The sheep aren't likely to eat the foliage but goats will nibble at it, particularly the tender young suckers that lead to rampancy. Hmmm . . .

Right now we have our pasture area divided with stock fencing into 4 pastures and a winter paddock, with plans to reconfigure/expand this into 6 pastures through which to rotate our livestock. There is no shade in any of the pastures, so we had to erect inexpensive tarp-over-stock-panel shelters last season. The wind and the animals quickly wore away the tarps, which needed replacing through the season, making the shelters not so inexpensive after all.

I have been thinking of establishing hedgerows along the fence lines, to provide eventual shade for the livestock, in addition to the many other benefits of hedgerows: they provide a safe place for birds and other beneficial predators of plant pests to nest and perch; they provide nectar for bees and other pollinators; they create biodiverse edge habitat, slow erosion, and increase pasture water-holding capacity; they provide mulch and leaf mold, raise surrounding soil and air temperatures, filter dust, and block drying summer winds. They increase soil microfauna and overall biodiversity.

One of the challenges to establishing hedgerows is to keep the livestock from eating the young shrubs and trees until they get big enough to be unappealing or unreachable to our small breeds. A self-defending plant like thorny blackberry could protect developing young saplings and beneficial herbs such as thyme, comfrey, wormwood, tansy, and sage. If the blackberries start to get out of hand, our goats could be used to eat back the tender suckers, while they are unlikely to do more than nibble at the leaves on the thorny canes (this I know, from watching their approach to wild raspberries).

Of course, throwing the production model out the window in favor of other goals means that having blackberries as human food, for us and to share or sell, is not a given. On the other hand, blackberries growing in dispersed hedgerows containing diverse populations of wild roses, hawthorn, crapapples, conifers, chokeberries, and herbs are unlikely to succumb to pests or diseases. A few of them might, but not all of them. I can’t imagine that if the hedgerows are successfully established, we won’t get some fruit to eat and some to share—after all, blackberries spread like crazy, so we might even be able to dig and sell transplants. At a minimum we should get some for fresh eating, some for preserves, some to dry, and perhaps some for a few jugs of blackberry wine.

There is a principle in permaculture that “the problem is the solution.” In this case, an examination of the problem/challenges, particularly in light of our goals for this property, made a solution pretty obvious.

Even if we don’t get any berries for ourselves and our neighbors, the plantings will still have conferred all of the other benefits to our smallholding. The hedgerows will eventually eliminate the need to constantly buy new shelter tarps, and they will help reduce our feed and mineral expenses by providing a greater diversity and quality of forage for our livestock. All for $234.

Now I just have to figure out what to do with 400 asparagus crowns.