A first look

I have decided to start a blog to bring together my thoughts about gardening - the plants and the creatures that live among them. My garden is just outside Charottetown, Prince Edward Island, on the east coast of Canada.

This little fellow is a potato bug. He and his brothers and sisters devastated the one volunteer potato plant in my garden, and have now invaded the sunberry patch.

Sunberry (Solanum burbankii) is part of the nightshade family, which also includes potato, tomato, pepper, and eggplant. There is very little information about it on the Internet, and so when I bought the seeds at Vesey's Seeds and started them on a window sill in March, I didn't know what I was in for. But they grew like mad. I planted them outside in June. The leaves immediately got scorched and sunburned, but soon recovered, and now the plants are 3 feet high. As new green leaves appeared, they were quickly turned to swiss cheese by the dreaded flea beetle, a tiny black jumping insect that puts hundreds of small holes through the leaves.



As delicious as sunberry seems to be to the insect world, I was really disappointed by the flavour of the huge crop of pea-sized berries it produces. And something about knowing it's from the nightshade family makes me wary. I picked about four cups of berries, and they are still in the fridge - should I try cooking them into jam to see what they will taste like, or just give up and toss the berries and the plants into the compost? I'll leave that decision for another day.