Battle of the Small Fruit

 We have a little war going on in one of our garden beds:

This is the blueberry bed, but all those green, healthy-looking plants are not blueberries. They are raspberries, and they are taking over:

Here you can see a sad, yellowish blueberry that’s been completely overrun by vigorous green raspberry canes. These canes have jumped — or rather, burrowed — from their bed under the grass path and into the blueberry bed. 

And they’ve already managed to kill one blueberry bush entirely:

We’ve struggled with blueberries ever since we planted them, and last year we replaced several. That was the year of the drought, though, and they haven’t done well:

Though this one managed to put on some decent growth, you can see from the color that it’s not doing well. I suspect that we’ve never been able to get the soil acidic enough for them to thrive, and the discolored leaves are a sign that they are not getting the nutrients they need because the soil is too alkaline. 

We’ve worked to amend it, but at this point, it looks like the raspberries would be more than happy to take over. And why not let them? If that many (free) plants are volunteering to provide fruit in this bed, it seems silly to pull them out and baby these ridiculous blueberries, when it looks like all they want is to be left in peace to die. 

As you can probably tell, I’m inclined to let the invading forces win this one. If we pull out the blueberries, we can move the raspberries around for better spacing and add some black raspberries as well, which would make Kirk happy. Or maybe we could save half of the bed to plant some new asparagus. Many of our old plants have died off, though that’s a story for another day.

In any case, it looks like the blueberries’ days are numbered.