Lingonberries

Actually, I was surprised when the third lingonberry plant arrived. I hadn't remembered ordering it.

 

Next year, maybe I'll do the other side of the yard too. It's even more shaded there though, so I probably won't plant lingonberries. They will grow in the shade, but they don't produce very well without at least partial sun. Maybe rhubarb.

 

No, I mean lingonberries.

 

I noticed today, with surprise and delight, that one of my new lingonberry plants has already propagated a new plant through the roots. Another lingonberry plant, with two leaves, has popped up about a foot away from the one that I had planted. I know they do that, but it's only been a few days.

 

Lingonberries can be used in a lot of things, but they're most commonly used in making jam. However, my current patch doesn't produce enough at any given time to do a lot with, so I usually pick and eat them. I have several plants and each one produces a lot of lingonberries, plus they usually produce two crops a year. The problem is that they produce best when there is more than one variety of them. I have four, but each one produces fruit at slightly different times of the summer and fall, so there's not a lot of them available at any one time. I did pick enough to make jam a couple of years ago because Michelle asked me to, but she let them go bad before she did anything with them, so I've just been eating them. From midsummer to fall, there are usually berries ready to be eaten.

 

As you can see, lingonberry plants don't die out in the winter. They don't even go dormant; although they don't produce berries beneath the snow, the leaves remain green and they are ready to go in the spring.

 

I bought five more lingonberry plants. They're small 2" plants. A couple of them came a few days ago, and I have them under a grow light in the laundry room for now, and I have three others coming. As with many plants these days, you have to order early in order to get what you want, and I did that this year. Lingonberries produce best when there are at least two varieties growing near one another, but if you buy them from Amazon, they don't usually even tell you what variety you're buying. This year, I ordered early from a grower who had three varieties that I don't currently have, so I ordered three of them. Actually, I ordered three varieties, but I may have ordered two of each. I'll find out when they get here, since I don't remember.

I'll be extending my current lingonberry patch a little further toward the road, and I'll plant one of the new varieties there, and probably the others in the garden that I started building last summer along the south fence. It's a bit more shaded there so I don't know if they'll produce as well as the ones along the driveway, but time will tell.

Some of the photos in previous posts aren't showing because I hosted them on my miscellaneousstuff.com domain and I let that expire accidentally, and now they want a couple of hundred dollars for me to buy it back. I probably still have the photos, so if I ever have some spare time, I'll replace them.

 

I added five new lingonberry plants to my side garden. These are the 2" ones that I spoke about in the post above. Three of them just came and the others have been under a grow light. Plus, I added a 4" one to the lingonberry patch along the driveway.

 

My original lingonberry patch along the driveway is nearly all filled in since lingonberries propagate on their own. I didn't get a lot of berries from it this year, I think, because my original plants are maybe too old, and lingonberries produce better on new plants. Next spring, I guess I'll have to thin it out a little. I don't think it will require removing entire plants; just cutting them back should do the job.

The lingonberries I placed along the south side of my yard are healthy but have not yet produced any berries. That part of the yard is more shaded than along the driveway, so I didn't expect them to be very productive, but I had hoped for some berries. Next year, after I've harvested some of my compost, I'll probably add to that lingonberry patch and trim the trees along the fence to get let some more sun in.

 

Usually, my lingonberry plants are green, healthy, and ready to go when the snow melts in the spring. For some reason, this spring, although it followed the mildest winter we've had since I've been in Maine, left a lot of dead branches and one entirely dead lingonberry plant. Given that lingonberries grow best in cold-weather areas, it may well be that the plants require long, cold winters. It's also possible that the nature of the winter, in which everything would melt away, only to be covered with snow again in a couple of weeks, might have encouraged some starts and stops that weren't good for the lingonberry plants. Of course, it's also possible that some of these plants have simply grown old and needed to be moved out so that new growth could occur.

At any rate, I spent an hour or so today trimming and weeding my lingonberry plants, and my feet and ankles got bitten in the process. Darned bugs. I haven't looked at the lingonberries in the side yard yet, but I will probably do so tomorrow. The last I noticed, they were healthy enough, although they have yet to bear fruit. They are only a couple of years old and in a more shaded area, so, from what I know about lingonberries, the plant will grow in shade, but it will not produce much fruit, if any.

Weeding was a PITA too. The darned maple seeds go everywhere, and the they generally germinate directly next to another plant. Plus, they very quickly develop long roots so it's hard to pull them up without pulling up the plants along with them.

 

I finished trimming and weeding the lingonberries, including the ones in the side yard, and I added about 50 pounds of soil to them. Since lingonberries like peat moss or the equivalent, a lot of their base was made up of that, but it breaks down over time, so I added some soil and will probably add a bag of peat moss over the top of it next week.