Each spring before our raspberry plants begin to bud out and produce new leaves, I go up and down the rows spraying Roundup on the grass which tries to encroach into the rows.  The grass greens up before the raspberry plants do, so I’m generally able to kill the grass without harming the raspberries.

Last spring I tried that system with my 45 blueberry plants.  I’ve had a difficult time getting my blueberries to do as well as they ought.  They aren’t growing tall, and they haven’t produced as heavily as they should.  I properly acidified the soil, but I have never been able to bring myself to prune the bushes like you’re supposed to do.  The problem with my bushes, I thought, must be the grass with which the blueberry bushes have to compete.

So this spring before the blueberry bushes began to put forth leaves, I sprayed Roundup around, between, and among all the blueberry stems.  I watched with satisfaction as the grass around the bushes all died.  As I continued watching, I became anxious when the blueberry bushes were failing to leaf out.  Weeks went by, and no leaves appeared.  I’d killed every single bush!  My experiment had failed.  I mourned over my loss and over my stupidity.

More days went by.  One day as I mowed the grass in the aisles between my dead blueberry bushes I noticed new shoots coming up from the roots of a few of the bushes.  All 45 plants eventually sent up new shoots.  Over the course of the summer the bushes all grew like they’d never grown before.  By fall they were tall and luxuriant-looking.

Blueberry plants bear their fruit on two-year-old stems.  Based upon how the plants look this fall, next year will produce a bumper crop.

My ill-advised spraying taught me the necessity of regular pruning.  If I want healthy plants and good berries next year, my plants need to have the old, unproductive wood pruned out every year.

President Dieter F. Uchtdorf says that human lives are like that.  We have many good things competing for our time—“so many, in fact, that if we (don’t) set inspired priorities, we might miss doing the important ones.  Competing priorities (begin) to arise, deflecting our focus….Like a fruit tree with an abundance of branches and leaves, our lives need regular pruning to ensure that we use our energy and time to accomplish our real purpose—to ‘bring forth good fruit.’”  (The Ensign, May 2012, pgs. 59-60).