It snowed so I sprinkled them with ash. I also sprinkle it all over the bush. The branches are then dirty with ash. I do it every winter if it snows. I don’t know what the effect is of sprinkling ash all over the bush, but I haven’t noticed anything negative. If it doesn’t harm them, it’s good for them.
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Mine are waking up already 
saw a tiny tiny green leaf starting inside one of the buds. So my guess is mine will wake up next week fully since we are supposed to have a week of warm, then a week of cold. At least they are frost tolerant. (It’s around the time they woke up last year)
I’m in 7b Maryland.
Mine are starting to flower and haven’t planted them in the ground yet. Just got them less than a month ago from One Green World. 9A
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My tundra has started to leaf out, but my indigo gem and Aurora haven’t. So I’m hoping it slows down and doesn’t get close to flowering until the other 2 wake up.
My tundra this morning, 3/7
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All 3 of mine are awake now. Tundra the most, supposed to be in the upper 50s during the day and low 40s at night now. Hopefully bees are up by the time they bloom.
My Crandall currant is also starting to wake up too. Saw some green poking out of the buds.
same here. still over a meter of snow covering mine.
OK as promised I was going to report back on my Texas experience especially regarding chill hours and flowering. To recap I am growing Keiko, Willa, Aurora and Maxine’s Opus in pots, bring them indoors in the summer months so they don’t get fried and put them out for the rest of the year. The ones I did in ground did fry when we had a bad (110F) summer hence the pots experiment. The question was do we get enough chill for these to flower here and I now have my answer, YES. I don’t know my exact chill hours this winter but we get between 600-800 hours depending. Since it was a pretty average winter I am guessing 600-700. Aurora is just starting to bloom now, Willa and Maxine’s Opus looks like they will open in the next week. For those keeping track, some of Aurora’s bloom will overlap with Willa and Maxine’s Opus to give you flower timing. I am guessing the last 1/3 of flowering Aurora will overlap with the other two which is good enough for natural pollination. Keiko is not flowering but it was having some unknown problem last summer and lost a lot of the top branches and is now growing back from lower branches. I don’t think this one is a chill issue, just some damage happened.
Also worth noting, in the DFW area of TX we have very mild winters, many mild, even some warm days interspersed with periodic cold days and a few days of freezing. I was not sure if these would come out of dormancy in the mild winter then get hit by a freeze. Nope, these started growing about when our spring starts, roughly so no issues with that either. Looks like pots will work, chill works, indoors June-Aug. works to protect from heat, so I think I am going to succeed with pot grown Honeyberries in Texas. The fruition of my 5 or 6 year experiment. They should ripen before the summer heat in June. Now next question and the final one will be how big can I get these in pots. They are flowering at 10-12 inches tall right now. If I can grow them big I can get lots of honeyberries, even if I can’t, some honeyberries will be enough. Sweet success for one of my wilder experiments with plants I have no business growing in Texas. Sometimes the experiments work.
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