Perenial Sugar

We have established grape vines, blackberry, and raspberry.  Working on trees, but they take forever.  Looking for other sources of sugar.  I seem to be really good at killing blueberry and strawberry.  Going to try alpine strawberry this year, but my hopes are not high.

Looking for perenial ideas that produce first year.  Ideas?

     Look into mulberries. Sure it's a tree, but they grow really fast. I've seen berries on trees that couldn't be much more than three or four years old. In five years, you'll have enough for a few pies or a few quarts of jam. After that, you will have so many berries, you won't know what to do with all of them. 
     I think even with strawberries you'll be looking at at least two or three years for a consistent crop. Plants just take time to establish themselves before they're concerned with putting a lot of energy into reproduction. 
     One more plus to consider is the hardiness of a mulberry tree. Good luck killing one. You will need a chainsaw and some Tordon. Their genetics put them in that wonderful botanical sweet spot between "weed" and "superfood". 

I -think- the really large commercial strawberry growers grow from seed every year.  I read that they cover the fields with plastic, use a poison gas under the plastic to kill off any living thing (plant or bug) and then replant.  I guess they could be starting with root stock instead of seeds.  I am sure you are right about producing more the second year.  I think they do it to eliminate labor.  Sure they use mechanical harvesters and just sort of grow larger fields.
 
Thanks for the mulberry suggestion.  Looking at a catalog now.

ajdrew said:

I -think- the really large commercial strawberry growers grow from seed every year.  I read that they cover the fields with plastic, use a poison gas under the plastic to kill off any living thing (plant or bug) and then replant.  I guess they could be starting with root stock instead of seeds.  I am sure you are right about producing more the second year.  I think they do it to eliminate labor.  Sure they use mechanical harvesters and just sort of grow larger fields.
 
Thanks for the mulberry suggestion.  Looking at a catalog now.

Click to expand...

 
nah strawberries are a VERY VERY labor intensive crop.
they havest with these giant crawlers with like 12 guys laying on their stomachs a foot off the gorund... picking as the thing crawls through polytunnels.
 
lots of attention in transplanting and care... they will probably be the LAST crop to be mechanically harvested, what with the berries being very very prone to damage.
 
they sterilize the soil because strawberries are insanely vulnerable to all sorts of problems.
 
strawberries are probably the most fickle mass produced plants ...

I thought the gas was to get rid of weeds.  I learn something new every day.  Usually forget it the next day.  Anyway, I thought it was a way to decrease the labor of weeding / tilling.  I read about changing laws and how the practice of gassing the fields was going to end due to workers health risks.  The article was on how organic strawberry might be a good crop after the laws went into place because the price of the large operations strawberry would have to go up when the gas was outlawed.

Then it dawned on me that it would make no difference.  The large strawberry growers would just buy some land in Mexico and gas away.  Sorry to turn it political, but I am ever so sick of laws that try to protect us but wind up sending our food production to other countries.  My country now raises chicken, sends that chicken to China to be processed, and then gets it shipped back.  Do we really need to be dependent on a Communist country which machine guns its children in public squares for expressing political concerns?  Uggg.