Somebody at work was talking about bushes and suddenly I had a lightbulb moment – that’s what I need! The problem is that I don’t really have a garden as such, it’s really just an open yard with grass and weeds which makes it very difficult to plan any flowerbeds. But if I use bushes, I can create a kind of a boundary around the yard and then actually start calling it a garden for a reason.

When I started thinking about what kind of bushes I want, I thought about the blackberry bushes that dad had planted at his cabin. I’m not talking about the low blueberries that grow everywhere in our forests, but the garden variety. Problem with the garden blueberries is that they don’t really like our climate. They survive with a lot of care, but like I said, I only have wide open spaces to offer them which makes them very exposed so I need something hardier. Enter the blue honeysuckle – if this plant survives Siberia, it sure survives my garden! Well, I hope.

Now I need to find another sort of blue honeysuckle because these guys will be at their happiest when they get cross pollinated. And a happy blue honeysuckle is a big-berry-producing blue honeysuckle!