These past few days it's been snowing and slushing. (That's what Poppy calls it, when that heavy whitish stuff drops from the sky and goes splat and makes mud.) And cold. Today is supposed to be better, but it's been SO cold this week - overnight lows of less than freezing.
Thankfully most of our plants haven't put out any flowers yet. The only one that did was a haskap (not haksap, as I mistakenly thought it was before, many pardons). It's the Siberian blueberry-type thing that we put in last year and got mowed by the young man we hired to help out around here. Didn't think it would come back, but there you go. Awfully tough, apparently. I guess it would have to be to live in Siberia.
But about five days ago while I was wandering around inspecting the fruit trees and bushes, I noticed that this plant had several white flowers, so when the temperature was set to drop, I dropped a couple five-gallon pails over it and its sister to preserve the blossoms. The pails stayed on for two days, and came off yesterday afternoon to let the bushes have a boo at the sunshine. It rained last night, and doesn't appear to have frozen, so hopefully the little flowers are still sturdily attached to the stems and we'll see some fruit in a few months.
Maybe I shouldn't even have bothered with that, maybe it's overkill. These plants are reputed for their extreme hardiness - just leave them alone and forget about them and then come back and grab a handful of berries later on. Nice, huh? If only we were all that accomodating. They should splice haskap genes in with the human race, don't you think?
