Planting the fruit

Well, after all this wet weather we finally managed to get back down to the plot. It was refreshing to feel soft earth beneath our wellies rather than the solid frozen ground.

I had managed to pick up some fruit bushes from Aldi a week or so back. We had a nice mixture of yellow and red raspberry, blackcurrant, redcurrant and gooseberry canes which all needed planting. I had also picked up a Cox's orange pippin apple tree. I love apples and had initially toyed with the idea of an apple tree but dismissed it due to the space it would take up, but when I saw this for sale for not much more than a couple of quid I couldn't resist buying it.

Saturday afternoon we headed to the plot and planted the apple tree and dug a trench for the raspberry canes. This was lined with manure and all the canes were placed in a bucket of rain water to soak over night.

This morning I dropped Phillipa and Fenn off at Philly's mums house whilst I popped over to the plot for a few hours.

All of the raspberry canes were planted, and then the rest of the fruit was placed at the end of the patch around some pre-existing canes which my neighbour informs me may well be a form of loganberry.

It's not much to look at at the moment as the canes are small, but hopefully in a years time they will be more established. We may get a few fruit this year but I'm not holding out much hope.

Here you can see the apple tree and the compost bin we built a week back. I need to stake the tree, so will harvest a stake from the woods at some point soon.

As the weather was being kind I dug over a bit more earth. The ground is nice and crumbly with lots of worms and turns over pretty easily.

This week I plan on getting another good load of horse manure to add to the pile, and maybe dig over some more of the patch.

Our kind neighbour also gave us some French bean seeds that he had saved from his last years crop. It's a great atmosphere on the site, and I'm sure this will only get better as the months go on and we start to see a few more people down there.