The South Marysburgh Mirror GREEN INVESTMEN'T—old style - By Robin Reily My retirement is on the horizon where it’s been looming for a few years. Financial advisors nudge us to diversify into stocks, bonds, gold even bitcoin. | have an environmental leaning and favour companies with a concern for the planet. While financial ‘green fund’ diversifica- tion seems prudent, | don’t en- tirely trust ‘the market’...not putting ‘eggs in one basket’ calls me to the chicken coop. The County has adequate soil, reasonable rainfall and a long growing season. One of the ways to diversify and add ‘depth’ to your holdings is to enrich your soil. Growing some of your own food can be reassuring. Yet, it’s not as sim- ple as calling up your banker. Building soil takes years. The knowledge of how to grow things can take longer. I’m hoping that regular readers of The Mirror can benefit from my experience with this more ‘earthy’ kind of ‘green’ in- vesting. Which brings me to this issue’s topic— blackberries, the shrubs not the cell phones. We have several gardens. With dogs, sheep, chicken and ducks and many wild visitors...1 wanted to fence off a quarter acre for vegetables. The Farm Centre had the necessary posts and page wire but | also wanted to break the wind, hide the metal, and let food climb upward. Blackberries seemed a good choice. The vigorous and cold-hardy type of blackberry [Balsor] have nasty barbs that dig into your skin if your try and pull away from an unanticipated jab. Another cultivar of black- berry, without the barbs [Chester], is not as hardy. If | was trying to grow food for survival, | probably wouldn’t plant things that freeze at the edge of their normal range but I’m equally interested in growing experience. All black- berries spread quickly...the barbed kind with under- ground roots—the barbless kind bending down its tip to re-root. So, what to do. | ordered 25 of each kind and alternat- ed them around the fenced perimeter. If the barbless sensitive ones died, | was confident that the flesh-eating regular berries would take over. Five years into that ex- periment I’m happy to say that both survived. The barbed ones grew larger with more berries and a slightly better taste. Grudgingly the clear winner once my brain blocked out the painful memories and my blood volume stabilized. Blackberries fruit densely on second-year canes so don’t expect jam your first year. You will get some ber- ries from third year stocks, too, but often the older stocks wither into brittle canes, reminiscent of the ‘walking dead’. To get at new, younger berries you have to reach past these old demons...one false move and they pounce. To give the younger plants more light and save your skin, it’s good to use ‘loppers’ [a long sort of scissor] to cut them out. I’ve become adept at ex- tracting the dead canes with the loppers. Rather than reach in with thick leather gloves, | used these loppers like people in nu- clear plants use tongs to extract spent fuel rods... equally dangerous work. The barbless ones fight on but every year they lose a little ground to their bully- ing cousins. Both slowly exhaust the soil they are growing in but the barbed ones sneak underground and pop up in the vegetable beds, rising from the crypt. This spring I’m planting some barbless ones in their own spe- cial bed, protected from their overbearing relatives. But to give the vampires their due, they really are ‘overbearing’ with many nutritious berries to replace the blood cells I’ve lost growing them. Remember to gather manure in a ‘bull market’...it could make the difference.