Sweeten you garden with a few berries

There’s something warm and comforting about time spent in your vegetable or ornamental garden, whether you’re harvesting crops, planting seeds or just communing with the bees.

An easy way to make it even more fun is to incorporate plants that offer you snacks as you go about your business. Being on your knees pulling weeds is just more tolerable when you can pop a few tasty alpine strawberries into your mouth as you yank out the redroot pigweed.

Tuck plants of these small strawberries under perennial flowers or as companions to herbs like parsley that like a moist soil. The berries may be small, but they explode with flavor in the mouth. Botanically, they are fragaria vesca and are commonly known as fraise du bois. Look for a superior variety called Baron Solemacher. These flavor champs dangle their treats now and then over a long summer. If you’ve forgotten exactly where you tucked them, all the better when you find them.

Much as our local grape growers finish vine rows with roses, you can finish vegetable rows with something to snack on. Here are some suggestions:

Our native evergreen huckleberries (vaccinium ovatum) produce delicious small black berries and stay compact at 2 to 3 feet tall in full sun. They’ll grow in shade but become very tall and rangy. Water them when you water your vegetable crops and they’ll be happy all summer. If your soil is alkaline, make it more acidic by adding compost, peat moss or decayed pine needles.

Blueberries (vaccinium corymbosum) are related to huckleberries and will be welcome wherever you site them in the garden. They grow about 5 to 6 feet tall with an almost equal spread, so give them some space. They prefer an acid soil

(pH 4.5-5.0) kept cool by mulch and moist during our dry North Bay summers. If the leaves yellow, add iron sulfate or iron chelate to the soil.

If you’re using trellises in your vegetable garden for peas or pole beans, consider planting goji berries (lycium barbarum) on the other side of the trellis, where they’ll thrive if they get full sun. Gojis are sweet little red berries high in vitamins, antioxidants and minerals. They will spread by underground runners, so snip off unwanted shoots. Prune by thinning out some main stalks and topping the rest to about 6 feet tall, tying the stalks to the trellis. Remove all but four or five laterals from each main stalk. Mulch with 6 inches of compost to keep soil moist. They’re not a pretty plant, but the fruits are extremely nutritious.

The Ribes family of fruiting small shrubs includes gooseberries, red and black currants and a black currant/gooseberry hybrid called the jostaberry. They prefer a cool climate and moist soil and may not perform well from Santa Rosa eastward, but gooseberries and currants have been established in Occidental and other regions along our West County coast where cold, wet fogs are routine in summer. Just keep the bushes dusted with lime-sulfur, because they are notoriously prone to mildew. Many people have no experience eating gooseberries, but they are plump and juicy, often pink or striped and have a rich sweetness with a touch of astringency. Currants are best fresh off the bush.

A good choice for a sweet-and-sour surprise is the bush cherry (prunus japonica x jacquemontii) that grows to 4 feet and produces pounds of tart pie cherries on each shrub. Plant two varieties for best pollination. Harvest your cherry pie while you’re deadheading those roses.

Down on the soil surface where the alpine strawberries await you, plant some dewberries. These are trailing, ground-hugging blackberries, and while we hardly need to plant blackberries in our region, where we are slowly disappearing under mounds of Himalayan blackberry bushes, it’s fun to find a few on stems creeping along under the potentillas.

Don’t forget the elderberries. The white clouds of spring flowers can be added to pancake batter or infused in vodka with sugar to make elderflower liqueur (there are excellent recipes online). Later, of course, come the trusses of little black berries. Don’t eat them raw. Cook them to extract their juice, which is full of antioxidants and supports the immune system.

Surprise yourself and your garden’s visitors with a Japanese honeyberry bush. It’s a member of the honeysuckle family that produces sweet, tasty small blue fruits in early summer. The bush grows to 4 feet tall. There are early- and late-blooming types. The late bloomers are best suited to our climate. Plant two near each other for best pollination.

Find a spot for a Hansen’s Bush Cherry (prunus besseyi). It likes good garden soil and summer water, but it will reward you with sweet-tart fruits that you should allow to ripen fully on the bush to a purple-black color for best flavor. It grows to 4 feet tall and has good fall color, so treat it like an ornamental shrub, with benefits.

Jeff Cox is a Kenwood- based garden and food writer who can be reached at jeffcox@sonic.net.