End of season garden, protecting the blueberry plants and other things

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Hello, and welcome to da garden, eh!

The gardening season has come to an end here, and I'm now in the process of doing the fall cleanup work. One of the things that I have to do is to protect my perennials such as the blueberry bushes and raspberry plants. If I don't protect them with fences, the deer and rabbits will eat them down. The raspberries can survive being eaten down because of the way they propagate by root spreading, they just don't give you raspberries the following year if the rabbits eat the canes that grew this past summer. Those are the canes that will bear the raspberries the following year.

The blueberries, on the other hand, don't spread by roots, so if they get eaten down, the damage can kill them. I didn't protect them right away last fall, I had the 4 foot tall garden fence wrapped around them to keep the deer out of them, but the rabbits got to them before I realized that I needed to put a chicken wire fence around each bush. This last spring, when I pulled the garden fence away from them for the summer, I left the chicken wire around each bush to keep the rabbits away from them.

A couple of days ago, we decided to open up the fence again for the winter. The end of the fence wire is what gets wrapped around the raised bed to protect the blueberry bushes from the deer.

This picture is from the middle of last month, from outside the garden fence looking in at the blueberry bushes. Behind the raised bed is one of the garden beds that we planted popcorn in. Those corn stalks had to be removed before we could wrap the garden fence around the back side of the raised bed.
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The corn had been harvested in September, but the corn stalks had to be removed. Teresa cut them down with a machete, leaving a stub and root ball. I dug out the root balls from the 2 rows of corn closest to the raised bed so that we could pull the fence in around the raised bed without fighting with the corn stubs. I was trying to use my home made broadfork for digging out the root balls, but I ended up breaking off one of the handles.
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Today, I took the digging fork out to the garden bed and dug out the rest of the root balls and cleaned up the garden bed.
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Another thing that I got done today was to dump out the two planter boxes that I had tried growing potatoes in this year. I had planted Adirondack Blue potatoes in the boxes to see how well they would grow. This is the empty planter boxes.
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I did get a few potatoes from each box. I had one good plant in each box, so I didn't expect many potatoes. The harvest wasn't too bad, these are the potatoes from both boxes.
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Here's a picture of the main garden with all the corn stumps waiting to be dug out, and the pile of stalks waiting to be shredded. Hopefully I'll get back to doing that soon, I'd like to have it done before it starts snowing.
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That's all I have for this post, thanks for stopping by to check it out!

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5 comments
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At least my blueberries are not threatened by deer, it's the starlings that pick my blueberries off before their ripe, here comes the cold.

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When you have problems with birds eating the berries, you need to put bird netting over the bushes so they can't get to the berries. I had to do that with my grape vines when I had them, the birds would eat the grapes before I could get to them.

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