Growing up I always remember going out back of my parents house in the summer and seeing the currant bushes. They were full of the most delicious looking red berries and every year I would snatch a few thinking they would taste different. Somehow, I always grabbed them before they were ripe because the tartness was sometimes too much. However, my mother must have known when they were the best because she would employ us kids to go pick as many berries as we could so she could make her currant jelly or use them fresh on vanilla ice cream (we always had a five gallon vanilla on hand).
A few years after we bought our 15 acre farm, my mother asked if we wanted the currant bushes. She had done nothing with them for years and hated to see them just sit there. Of course, I hated to see the fifty year old bushes be neglected, so I agreed we would take them. Betsy laid out a new garden to house these big bushes with our garden hose to form two half moons with a walkway to the middle. The location would be off our outdoor kitchen hanger. My father-in-law came over and tilled up the area and we were able to easily remove the sod. The plan is to have the currant bushes as the outside frames of a new hummingbird garden area.
The big problem was trying to figure out how to get the bushes from their house to ours without killing them. Enter my father with his trusty backhoe. He dug up the bushes with their huge root balls. We successfully saved the bushes but each one weighed a ton with the root ball intact.
My father and I got them to the house on his trailer and dragged them off the bed into our yard. The trick at that point was getting them to where we were going to plant them. Even though they were 10 feet from where they had to be it was still back breaking work. He had to leave so I had decided that I was going to use a hand truck to move them where they needed to go. It worked like a shot except for two things, it was one of the hottest days of the summer and I moved them by myself. Needless to say, I got them planted and after watching them for a month the berries ripened and tasted wonderful. I cannot wait to see what we can do with them next year.
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