June 2020: After three years attempting to grow these berries in our garden, we’ve decided it isn’t worth trying to grow them at this elevation. Of all the berries, only the goji berry produced berries. (We decided we didn’t like them, and they were very invasive.} As of May 2020 they have all been removed. With little good information to guide us, we tried our best before giving up. 

The first year of this garden we planted strawberries, raspberries, blueberries and goji berries. The only successful berry was the goji, and it turns out we just didn’t like them well enough to keep the plant in our garden. In the three years, we harvested maybe a dozen strawberries, no blueberries, no raspberries and about 2 cups of the goji berries. Kind of a bust.

All berries were planted and maintained as directed. Soil was amended to make it more acidic and fertilizers & compost added to the soil, but none of that mattered. (More on each berry below}. Our conclusion is that berries just don’t have enough warmth nor a long enough summer to sustain growth for a good start the following year. Tim’s observation is that we don’t see berries in the mountains out in the wild either, so why would we expect to grow them successfully?

Before planting the berries we had little to go on. I just couldn’t find information on growing berries in our climate. That should have been a clue. If berries grew successfully in the mountains, someone should be writing about it. Since I’m not finding it, all I really had to go on was the fact that many of these berries are listed as hardy to Zone 3, and we are in Zone 4. Web sellers indicated that if I buy a Zone 3 plant, I should be able to grow that plant in Zone 4. That is my pet peeve. These “zones” are not helpful. They are based primarily on winter low temperatures. They do not provide information about plant requirements for summer growing season length, summer temperatures, growing latitude, hours of daylight, etc. Please see my post about this: “Growing Zone Frustration”.   

STRAWBERRIES
Our first strawberry plants at this location, originally planted Spring 2017, grow leafy and beautiful. They blossom some, and a few berries grow. The summer of 2018 I did not protect them from birds, and I fear that the birds got to them. The summer of 2019 only about 5 of the 24 plants grew back after winter. These were bird-proofed, grew well and we ate about a dozen berries, one or two at a time.

The strawberries planted were “Fort Laramie”, an “ever-bearing” strawberry. I considered replacing these with some “June-bearing” strawberries, since they are supposed to bear in June or July. Perhaps those would produce some strawberries in August or September, but all things considered, we think it just isn’t warm enough for a long enough period of time, and don’t want to put forth the effort to construct better protection for them.

RASPBERRIES
The raspberry plants grew large, they just didn’t produce berries. The first year of our garden we planted some FallRed and FallYellow rasberries. These were both, as their names suggest, “Fall-Bearing” raspberries. Perhaps that was a mistake. Since I questioned the viability of these, I purchased and planted two of the “Summer-Bearing” varieties the summer of 2018, Encore and Latham. They got a good start that summer, and in 2019 they grew well. By the end of that summer, there were about 6 green berries on one of the plants, which were small and not well developed when they froze in September.