The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Growing => Fruit => Topic started by: Sassy1 on August 26, 2009, 08:42:38 pm
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Having grown vegetable for a couple of years, I have decided to expand and have cleared some land for fruit trees and soft fruit bushes, but I don't know much about them.
I live on the south coast with fairly clayey! soil and a high water table. I want to grow eating and cooking apples -any advice. All my veg is in raised beds - but I don't think I can do that for a tree!
Thanks
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Welcome to the group,
with you tree Q , if you have the energy you could dig down and improve the ground ?
Linz
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You can get dwarf rootstock trees which will grow in BIG pots. As long as your soil doesn't get waterlogged there's no reason apple trees wouldn't be ok, but as Linz says you'd need to dig down about 3ft and add organic matter / compost. Blackthorn/sloes grow well on clay soil though ;)
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Hi and welcome.
Apples - great. Cherries - waste of time except for the blossom. Birds eat all the fruit!
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I'm no expert on growing conditions but will offer one piece of advice about growing soft fruit - build a fruit cage BEFORE you plant them - I planted a load of raspberries and blueberries last winter with the intension of building fruit cages to keep the birds out before they started to fruit - in the meantime, the plants were all eaten by rabbits!! :'(
Rabbits didn't touch currents or gooseberry plants however :)
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I am not a million miles away from you and my soil is solid clay (I am not permitted to "mine" for it in my deeds! LOL)
At the moment I have pigs on some of the land, doing what they do, just turning it over a bit, and then we plan to plant an orchard. We have been told that apples will be fine on the soil such as it is with a bit of TLC when digging the holes for them. We are going to try vines as well as an experiment. I already have soft fruit caged in, in my garden which has had no attention whatsoever paid to it for over 10 years (not even mulched,fed - anything) and my raspberry crop is ridiculously heavy every year - so it seems they thrive on neglect!
Good luck - keep us up to date and I'll do the same!
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Hi,
We too have quite a clay soil and a high watertable- our garden runs down to a tiny stream at the foot of it, so it is very wet. However we have a few fruit trees (not planted by us I have to add) and they all do fine- we have a Bramley apple, 3 eating apples, and a plum tree and no problems with any of them. I do agree with Rosemary- cherries are a waste, the birds always get to them first!
Beth
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Thank you so much for all the advice. The water table is very high. so I might start with pots, as well as sloes, which I hadn't thought of. Amazingly, our vines are flourishing. I shall definitely build cages first. We did sink kerbstones around the first veg patch adn chichken runs, which stopped the rabbits really well. Kerbstones courtesy of local highways, which they were chucking away!
I let you know how successful I am.