Monday, March 10, 2014

Soft-fruit manoeuvres

Next to the vegetable beds we have a long and narrow bed for soft fruit: raspberry, gooseberry, blueberry. We have never been happy with the soil in this bed as it is mainly the original clay from the meadow with very little else mixed in. This year we decided it was time to upgrade it by forming a raised bed.


We constructed the bed out of the same wood the vegetable beds are made of; this allows us another 25cm of soil to be added. The bed now measures 9 m x 1.2 m.


We added lots of home-made compost and horse manure. The raspberry canes were sorted and a few decent ones re-planted. The blueberry are a pretty sorry sight but we'll give them another go and if they do not take off, we'll replace them at the end of the year. The gooseberry is one of several we have dotted around the garden and they seem to do well. We'll put some rhubarb leaves under the bush to prevent sawfly and hope for an abundant crop. Hopefully we'll have plenty to make our favourite gooseberry and mustard seed pickle.




Meanwhile, we have cut the red and black current bushes back, creating the classic goblet shape and we need to tackle (trim and tie) the blackberries that run 6 meters along the fence.



8 comments:

  1. I'm just about to go out in the garden to dig up surplus raspberry canes. I offered the spares on the village Facebook page and now have too many takers for them! And we have finally planted out the soft fruit bushes that I grew from cuttings taken from bushes at our Manchester allotment - a project started a good year before we finally decided to move - think it was a sort of promise to self that we would be moving, sometime, somewhere!

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    1. Raspberry canes grow so fast, we hop that we have got two varieties now; an early and a late. They have always done very well but the blueberry bushes are very poor.

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  2. Your garden is so beautiful! Have you found any downside to raised beds?

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  3. Not really Coco, some criticise that we have made them too wide which results in having to walk on the soil but we use a plank to walk on and it really doesn't compact the soil. We had no alternative as the soil was solid clay and we needed to improve it a lot - the results have been impressive and much better crop yields. Thanks.

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  4. Anonymous9:36 pm

    blueberries need bog! unless you have peat / ericaceus compost, the blueberries won't grow. I think that they don't like pruning either.
    regards Josey

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    1. Thanks Josey - we are trying to change the soil a little and make it more acid. All we can do is wait and see, nothing ventured...

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  5. As a last resort, my understanding is that blueberries will grow in pots. . .

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  6. We'll use pine needles this year, to make the soil more acidic and we have added lots of manure - if not pots it might be.

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