Soft fruit garden - The Accidental Smallholder

Posted: Sunday 5 September, 2010

by Rosemary at 8:54pm in Growing 1 comment Comments closed

We've identified the walled garden as the site for our eventual soft fruit garden. It's 12m x 9m, roughly and walled on three sides; the fourth side adjoins the barn and is now open. John and Linda cleared part of it in May and planted some spuds and beans. We're now clearing the rest. The weird thing is that despite all the pulling of weeds, I haven't seen a single worm and we reckon that this is due to a lack of organic matter in the soil.

Preparing the soft fruit garden from asmallholder on Vimeo.

We've decided, therefore, to delay planting fruit bushes until autumn 2011. Meantime, we're putting on a good six inches of horse manure (with three ponies we're not short of it) and covering it with black plastic. Next spring, we'll plant tatties through the plastic. Dan's bringing up compost from Longcarse that's moving with worms, to try to get things going, so that the fruit bushes get a good start next year.