Very long-time readers might have followed the saga of our berryhouse for quite some time. It's been going so long it has its own narrative page. But to catch newer readers up:
When we moved here in late 2019, the property came with a Trade Tested shadehouse. We used it with the original cover until 2021, when the cover blew up in a significant weather event.
After enquiring about the price of a new cover, we decided against spending more than half of the original price replacing it.
Instead, we opted to cover the steel frame with some bird netting we already had. That bird net has now officially outlasted the original cover.
With the bird net on, we transformed the interior of the shade house into a permanent berry house.
We began with blueberries, blackberries, boysenberries, and yellow raspberries. In the years since, we've extended the blackberries, and added red 'Waiau' raspberries.
Annual cleanup
This part of the property is a giant pain in the butt. Every year, kikuyu grass infests. The berry canes go everywhere. It's just generally a really difficult design to work with, and past-me was not clever enough to choose thornless berry varieties.
I have good gloves, but it's a big job. It's not designed for simplicity.
But I love the berries. They are worth all the frustration, pain, and difficulty; without exception. But that doesn't mean I won't delay and procrastinate the frustration, pain and difficulty if I can.
So some time between autumn and spring, I begin ripping out the grass, topping up the compost, and getting it ready for a new season. And this year I was busy writing and launching a book all winter.
So it was early spring, and the berries were beginning to put on new leaves by the time I forced myself to go out there and do something about the mess.
And I got about as far as 'good enough'. There are still extra canes in weird places, but that just means more berries.
The back of the berryhouse does not look as good as the front. Most of the random piles of stuff around the sides have been moved. And that revealed how poorly the steel framing is holding up.
Blow it all up
I've been saying for years I want to rebuild the berryhouse somewhere else, and that's really going to have to happen sometime soon.
The Trade Tested shade house frame has been slowly rusting away for a few seasons now. The base of the frame that sits against the ground is almost entirely gone, and the rust is now travelling up the ground supports.
This year, we found some of the support poles rusting out and just falling off.
We have plans to knock some extra support into the corners, but it's a sinking ship. This is not going to work for much longer.
And having run the berryhouse like this for a while now, there's a lot I just really hate about this system.
Square berry houses mean more head room, for a start. And there has got to be a better way to do this that does not require the farm's worst annual maintenance job.
The problem is I haven't quite figured out how to do that here, as things are now.
It also didn't help much when the money we'd usually use for a project like that had to get funneled into more pressing priorities, repeatedly, throughout 2025 and 2026.
A new fight
Last year I noticed a new pest in the berryhouse, and it's already made an appearance this year. Bronze beetles are really having a go at my berries.
And I don't really know what to do about that either. The chickens have free-reign in the berryhouse until the berries start ripening.
They do not seem to find the beetles appealing. They may prefer the earlier portion of their lifecycle when they're grass grubs, but they haven't made much of a dent in the population.
In the meantime, there's some pretty significant damage happening to the plants.
Reading information online, it looks like I might have some luck with Yates Success Ultra, but it would be off-label.
And with the berries actively flowering, that will almost certainly affect my pollinators too.
So if anybody out there has any better ideas, I'd love to hear them.
What will be, will be
I'm leaving it as a job half-done. I think ripping it up and moving it will be a winter job, and I'm sorry to future-me, but it's going to be her problem.
Hopefully we'll get some decent berries out of it this year. But between low rains, a half-hearted effort with the cleanup, and the bronze beetles sucking the life out of my plants, my hopes of a great season aren't that high.
And I think that's OK. Some years don't result in the best crops for a lot of reasons.
This year is looking like it might be a hard one in many ways, so we'll just take it as it comes, and see what happens.
READ NEXT
What do we do with a broken shadehouse?
Waking up one morning to an exploded shadehouse, we had to think on our toes.
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Another year in the berryhouse
An expansion to our berries in 2024. And yet another illustration of how overwhelming this annual job can be.
Related content: annual jobs · berries · berry house · blackberries · blueberries · boysenberries · bronze beetle · raspberries · The Outpost · Waiau raspberry
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