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Subscribe It’s only just about to be fall and I am already looking forward to spring. But isn’t that the way it always is? As the mornings start to come crisp and cool, we know the snow is coming, too, and our minds turn to the dreams of spring that warm us through the long, cold months of winter.
This year, after past attempts that failed for various reasons (some our mistakes, some related to chickens), we actually managed to get some blackberry and blueberry bushes in the ground and see them survive. They are planted along the outside of the garden fence and enclosed with wire for protection.
It will be some time (years!) before those bushes are producing enough to be satisfying, though. What am I to do in the meantime? I need berries!! I need pie.
I was very excited after reading this post about ground cherries and chichiquelites, which go from seed to berry in one season and are also prolific reseeders, delivering more and more, year after year, but most especially delivering great satisfaction the first year.
Great satisfaction in the form of pie. These are sweet little fruits that can be used in all the same ways you’d use blackberries, blueberries, and other berries–for jams, jellies, pies, and more. Best of all, I can have a good harvest the first year!
And so I could hardly wait to get the packets of seeds even though I can’t plant them till spring. I can fondle them all winter and let them feed my dreams while I prepare them a place to dwell.
These are ground cherries. They aren’t “real” cherries–they’re actually akin to tomatillos, but can be used as cherries.
Photo by Sheryl Gallant.
After harvesting, leave the ground cherries sitting at room temperature until they are mushy over-ripe. Slit them open to remove the seeds if you want to save them. You can wash the seeds and dry on a paper towel to plant more! (Store cool and dry until planting.) If you’re not seed-saving, you don’t need to remove the seeds before using the fruit–the seeds are tiny and soft.
These are chichiquelites.
Photo by Sheryl Gallant.
Leave the chichiquelites on the vine until mushy ripe. If you want to save the seeds, squish them out to rinse and dry. As with ground cherries, chichiquelite seeds are tiny and don’t need to be removed otherwise before using. Chichiquelites are also known as garden huckleberries, which is how I shall refer to them henceforth because you can’t make me type chichiquelites again!!
I’m going to plant the garden huckleberries and ground cherries in one of our box beds. It’ll be a pie garden!
I have a plan. A plan, I tell you, a plan! Here’s my plan:
Do my drafting skills amaze you? I’m practically like an architect.
Wire all around the garden, with a hinged wooden frame on top to be lifted back and to open from the front. The chickens will be foiled!
Chickens love to get in box beds.
And chickens are hard to foil.
Unlike just draping wire over the garden as we tried with our other box bed this year, it will be easy for me to get in and out to the plants. This draping method was a real pain to deal with when it came time to get the herbs out of there. (And as you can see, above, it wasn’t entirely chicken-proof.)
The only thing I have in my future pie garden bed now is mint. And a bunch of weeds. I’ll tear the mint back some, but I like my mint, and I like it in a box bed where it can’t take over the farm. The garden huckleberries and ground cherries will have to learn to live with it.
I can’t wait!
Posted by Suzanne McMinn on September 18, 2010Thank you to Sheryl-Runningtrails for her pie garden mentorship. She sells her seeds here at her Farm Store. (That’s where I got mine!)
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Party on my friend, plan away!
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Now you’ve got something to get you through the winter – planning your pie garden!!!
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Just a bit more info:
I think Ground cherries taste like a sweet pineapple and tomato cross too! They’re delicious in salad!
The ground cherries don’t need to be over ripe and mushy to eat, just to save seeds for the following year. They do, however, need to be golden ripe and not green. Often the ones that fall off are still a bit green so you will need to let them sit on the counter and ripen before eating. The green ones in the picture are still ripening, but they ripen buch better if you leave them in the husk. The very green ones knocked off by mistake don’t usually ripen at all. Unfortunately, I planted them too close together and had to crawl underneath in the berry jungle, so I knocked off a lot of green ones… Make sure you separate the rows by a lot of space.
The ripe ground cherries are very sweet. The green ones are not.
They make great jam and I have a jam recipe. I will post it in the Farm Bell Recipes when I can (probably early Monday morning). I have made pastry turnovers with them too and they’re delicious! I thought they tasted like peach turnovers but hubby says that’s just because they look like peach turnovers and I’m suggestible … you try it and let me know, please :-)
Since they produce until the frost takes them, you will get more fruit if you start early indoors. Ditto for the chichiquelites.
The chichiquelites get sweeter as they ripen too. To get them at their ripest, wait until the entire small cluster is black before picking them.
Also, they are bland when raw but have a lot of flavour when cooked down with sugar for pie filling or jam.
I do have both seeds for sale on my farm site at:
http://artbysheryl.com/providenceacres/
Please feel free to ask if you have any more questions or concerns :-)
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They sprawl even more when a big puppy walks on them…
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And I love that baby! I could look at her all day.
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I apologize to those of you who wanted these seeds and found my site down yesterday evening. I had problems with the shipping calculator not adding shipping. Its fixed and up again now.
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I have red raspberries, gooseberries, blackberries, honeyberries, salal berries, Saskatoon berries, black elderberries, black mulberries, strawberries (of course), ground cherries, chichiquelites, currents (if they aren’t dead). I have more honeyberries growing from seed in the kitchen, as well. The honeyberry bush I have in the garden is a Haskap ‘borealis’. Anyone else collecting berries?
Ground cherries are also called ‘Cape Gooseberries’.
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The ground cherries I tried twice, none even germinated either time but I have been going to try them again.
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They like full sun and a good soil. The chichiquelite berries are a lot smaller in the shade. I guess it also depends on how many you plant. I have 1.5 20′ rows of ground cherries, WAY more than we needed. I have one 20′ of chichiquelites, also more than we used.
As mentioned earlier, the chichiquelites have no flavour raw. It’s not that they’re too tart raw, they have little taste at all. They’re surprisingly VERY good when cooked down with sugar, however, for pies and jellies, so you grow them for baking, not for cereal.
When you rinse off the chichiquelites, the water is a bright, lovely, true purple colour, not bluish like blueberries. I am going to use them for organic soap colour very soon. I am hoping to make lovely purple soap with them. I’ll post it on my own blog when I do it, probably next week (time and fencing permitting). I just need to get more coconut oil.
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My ground cherries reseed and are growing in the field too, so I know they have no trouble germinating outside in the spring after wintering on the ground. Those field plants are a lot smaller, barely 1′ tall, in the weeds, grass and poor soil so we don’t use them. The ones in my garden in full sun with mulch, good soil and manure are 3′ tall.
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If you plant some strawberry babies now you’ll get a few berries in the spring. You will also get all the plants you could possibly want in the form of runners by fall for producing berries the following year! They reproduce at an astounding rate! If you want the large berries like the ones you buy, plant June bearing. The everbearing ones are here and there and smaller.
I planted three 20′ rows of strawberry babies this past spring. I had the plants, so I put them all in. Some I got in a trade and the rest I got form cleaning out my MIL’s garden. I’m overwhelmed at the invasively growing strawberry bed now! It’s taking over the entire garden and the runners are so thick, I’m going to have to clean them out now! I’m turning them back as they try to grow out into the field and lawn.
If you plant some rhubarb now, you’ll get some big enough for cutting next year ;-) I got several pies form just two large plants this year so I planted an entire 20′ of rhubarb roots in July. It’s growing well and I might get a small cutting from them before the frost takes it all. It’s a lot of rhubarb, I know, but I had the roots from cleaning out my MIL’s, so I planted them. I can always sell the extra stalks and give some to the Salvation Army Soup Kitchen in town.
We like plain rhubarb pie, but strawberry rhubarb is good too.
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Rhubarb I would love to have here but apparently we don’t get cold enough in the winter. I have tried several times but the roots must rot before spring because they don’t come back up again.
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There are a lot of things that grow down here in the South that would never grow in the North though and I guess I would miss them if I ever moved back but still..sometimes..I sure do miss things like mountains, snow, Indian summer and sugaring, gardens that don’t start with pure red clay…things like that.
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