Preparing the fruit garden - The Accidental Smallholder

Posted: Sunday 27 February, 2011

by Rosemary at 1:38pm in Renovation Comments closed

It's another lovely day here - third day in a row with rain early on but lovely sunshine by mid-morning.

Dan's been in the fruit garden where. this year, we'll be planting potatoes to clean the ground. It's 12m x 9m and is split into roughly two halves. We dug out one half last summer but didn't manage to get all of the other side cleared. The soil is light sandy loam but we noticed that there weren't many worms. This is what it was like 6 months ago:

Over the winter, Rebecca and I have dumped horse poo lifted from the field over the cleared area and covered it with black plastic. Dan also added a few barrow loads of Longcarse compost, that was moving with worms.

This morning, Dan started forking over the bed, incorporating the now rotting poo with the soil. It looks fabulous. On the one area where we didn't cover with plastic, it's not so good - the rain has obviously leached out some of the nutrients and the fibrous material hasn't rotted as well. Lesson learned.

With a little more work, we'll be able to get the first spuds in the ground. We will have to fence the open side and put two gates on as the dogs need to be excluded now. The other side will be cleared over the spring and mulched, ready for planting with strawberries, raspberries, gooseberries and currants in autumn. Just looking forward to fresh, homegrown spuds now, though.