Planting Plums For Self-sufficiency

Thought I'd share a short video I made on the varieties of plum I've settled on this year.

Hopefully by having all these different varieties it should mean that we spread the season out as much as we can where we live. I'm looking for them to crop the whole time from mid July right through to the start of October, but I know this will all depend on frosts and other factors!

Let me know what you think of the video.

What other fruit do you try to have a large selection of to make sure you get a harvest?

Plums For The Whole Season?

The season for plums in the UK is from mid July until The start of October. These are from a variety of plum types, grown under different conditions, they're even growing plums under plastic now to get them even earlier. 

But last year I think we had plums for the grand total of 2 weeks. They were a glorious two weeks, but it left me thinking I've really missed a trick. Time to do something about it.

New School Forest Garden

As many of you know I'm the sort of parent that gets roped into things, I seems to have an inability to say NO at the best of times, but when it's helping kids I'm even worse.

The school library is the perfect example of this!

Blank canvas

Somehow since the spring I've been attending some small meetings with the head mistress, Felicity - the garden designer and the teacher who runs Eco-club. We've been talking and making plans to create a new forest school and vegetable garden area that the kids can use and enjoy.

Perfect Day Planting Trees

I woke up this morning with a long list of jobs I wanted to get done, and although I didn't manage most of them I still feel that it was a really good day.
It started off with my children giving my wife their cards and mothers day presents before texting my own mum (and speaking to her at a more sociable hour later). Then it was on to tree planting (my mum is coming round later in the week).

These first two pics are from Friday night where we just popped over to plant a couple of trees

I had a few trees left over from the ones I was selling and I didn't want them to go to waste, nor did I want to replant them only to lift them next year so I decide to plant them in our little coppice. Reading Tracy's blog the other day, when she asked if you could ever have enough apple trees really spurred me into action - you can never have enough apple trees! 

I thought that planted down the fence line they would be away from the willow I've got growing but also produce lots of food. I also like the idea of having two areas of apples away from each other so that if the frost catches one it might miss the other.

Good concentration putting the rabbit guard on! 

So armed with a spade, some BF&B (blood, fish and bone), compost (just a little for the bottom of the hole), tree guards, cardboard (to make a little mulch mat around the bottom of the tree) and a load of trees I set off over to the coppice. 

Trees planted with a cardboard mulch mat under it. The tree behind isn't exactly straight but who wants straight trees!??!

 At the top of this area there is a foot path so I thought it best to plant the cider trees up this end - it might discourage scrumpers, you normally only eat a cider apple off the tree once! The lower half would have eating apples, mainly with a long storage capacity as I want to store more apples and it would mean that I could harvest lots of apples in one go then.

Gooseberry bush being carried off to be put in the coppice

I went over on my own to start with, dug all the holes (the boring bit) and then went and got my pair of helpers, they love planting trees and needed no convincing to come and help me. 

They're very good and take it in turns with the different jobs. We also stopped lots of times to watch ants, worms and figure out what lived in a hole in a big old perry pear tree in the hedge. 

One holes the tree while the other puts the soil back in the hole.

Taking turns!

We did spend a bit of time trying to decide who lived in this hole!

Eaters planted this side and cider apples nearer the footpath (behind this picture) - should put off scrumpers! 

Once we'd finished that area and had some lunch I got back to planting. 

Five cherry trees planted and two apricots. 

The orchard at the bottom of the garden is only half full at the moment as it's handy to have somewhere I can park large diggers and things, but last year I did plant a cherry tree near the fence line. I decided to increase this and plant another five cherry trees and a couple of apricots, they're all on dwarf root stocks so I'm hoping that netting a short row like this won't be too difficult in the future. We love cherries!

In total we planted another 12 apple trees, two pears, five cherries, two apricots and a gooseberry bush.

The funniest question people ask me about my apple trees is what am I going to do with "all those apples"? 

In a good year we'll eat loads, store loads, make juice, dry them, can them, make cider, add them to jams and chutneys and give away or sell the surplus.

In a bad year we'll have just enough to get by, hopefully!

What about you? Have you planted enough to allow for bad years as well as good if you've got the space?

What would be your fruit of choice to plant in your area or your dream location?

Fruit Tree Nursery 2014

Last weekend I finally managed to finish grafting and planting all of my fruit trees.

 I planted them in two separate beds quite close together to try to encourage them to grow straight and true. I 've also experimented a little bit as one lot was planted through some old weed suppressant matting I had left from ages ago and the other will be mulched with straw

In these two little beds is hopefully my future cider orchard, some apricots and nectarines to see if I can get them to grow in our cold spot, cherries so we can have delicious stone fruit in the summer, plums and pears to grow around the veg garden and some more apple trees to grow and sell.

140 in total this year, should be interesting to see how they do.

Did anyone else get round to doing any grafting this year?

Stone Fruit & Pear Grafted

I feel much better now I've started to do this years grafting.

Today I managed to graft all my cherry, plum and pear rootstock's.

Some of the completed grafts

The cherries have been grafted with a few older varieties  like "Van" and "morrollo" then some more modern ones like "Summers Sun" and "penny". I only did ten trees as the dwarfing rootstock's I wanted weer quite expensive. I plan to plant all of these, when they've left the nursery bed, in the orchard, quite close together so they can be netted easily.

The 15 pears were a good selection of what I could find locally, from the basic but lovely "Conference" to the more unusual "Court du Lame" (I've just googled this one and found nothing so maybe I've written it down wrong) and I also grafted a medlar on one as well.

The plum rootstock's were used for 4 different varieties of plum and also an apricot "Novi Sad" and nectarine "Lord Napier". These more warm climate fruit should give me a bit of a challenge in years to come (anyone have any luck with apricots over here or am I just dreaming?)!

I set myself up in the greenhouse just in case it rains...

Turned out to be a good plan - shame I put the washing out to dry first thing!

All the grafted trees waiting for their nursery bed to be dug over ready.

For the grafts I used the whip and tongue graft (Have a look in my blog here, here and here for more information on grafting) but I must confess to using insulation tape to secure them together, as the ones I did with it last year seem to work just as well as the ones done using proper grafting tape and wax, I guess time will tell on that one.

So that's 40 grafts down just 100 apple tree grafts to go! Anyone else grafting this year?

Ground Layering Fig Trees - Part 2

Back in July last year I did a post on ground layering fig trees and today I dug them up to see how they did.

 The first one came up with good roots growing where it had been in the soil, so I was optimistic about the others.

 However that optimism was misplaced as the rest had either a tiny bit of root on or none at all. Only a 40% success rate with just two showing roots out of a possible five.

In future I think I'll stick with taking cuttings from fig trees as they worked well in the past (see my two other posts here and here) and it's less work as once the cuttings have taken they're already in the pot so no need to handle them twice.

Ground layering works well with some plants (like hazel or blackberries) so I'll use this method with other things and I might give air layering a try later in the year as another method of propagation. What methods of propagating trees and bushes does everyone else use and do you all experiment with new methods?

Trading Skills - Orchard Renovation

My friend Sean who did the plastering when we renovated the living room, didn't want payment when he did the work for me, instead he wanted to have some favours in the bank for work he wanted done at his place. I almost prefer this trading of skills rather than handing over money - the trouble is I assumed he'd want my carpentry skills!

 Sunday morning I went to his to begin to pay him back. In the recent storms he had a plum tree half blown over and caught up in a pine tree next to it. This is in his little 1 acre orchard that's not had any work done to the trees in a long while.

The tree, although not massive, was in a quite a dangerous place as the weight of them was being supported by a few branches of this other tree. It had to come down with my help or fall down sometime soon.

 Although I have a chainsaw I'm no expert, unlike my tree surgeon brother, but luckily I've worked with him enough to know what to do and how to approach the job. I must say that since buying our smallholding my skills with a chainsaw have increased dramatically! 

I slowly worked on the tree making sure I tidied up as I went along, to reduce the number of hazards I was working around, and this way I was just left with the branches that were hung up in the other tree with nothing else obstructing them.

 Then it was a simple matter of a few well placed cuts and letting it fall to the ground. I was quite pleased with myself that it went so well!

 I then logged it up for Sean and left him with a big pile of brash to clean up!

Before I went we set our "tree karma" straight and planted three trees that I had brought with me to replace the one that was cut down. We planted a cherry, pear and apple, the apple. Sean's son Oliver  helped, he seemed to really enjoy digging the holes and getting the trees in - I wonder if he wants to help me plant a couple of hundred willow cuttings?

Buds Are Breaking

Everything seems really far ahead this year - except me!

I've hardly started in the garden and I'm already about two weeks behind!

On the bright side my hawthorn hedge seems to be coming to life. All the buds are breaking on these trees that little bit earlier due to their "mini greenhouse" rabbit guards.

Is everyone else already playing catch up with the season or is it just me? I plan to plant a lot of seeds over the next week or so!

Hybrid Willow For Logs?

The last couple of years I've been planting a few trees in the corner of our "large" 2 acre field with the view to making this into a little coppice for firewood and somewhere for the kids to make dens when they're older.

In this little corner there is about 30 native trees, cherry, hazel, sweet chestnut, cherry, etc. But in my fencing frenzy of the last month or so (I'm going to draw up a plan so everyone will know what area I'm on about when I talk about it) I've sectioned off a long strip about 10m wide and 80m long (approx) down the one field to make this coppice area bigger, now needing hundreds of trees.

The trouble is what to plant.

I want to be able to coppice this on a short rotation if possible and divide it up into sections that will be coppiced each year.

My Potential plan for the coppice area (a very rough plan)

I've been reading about hybrid willow and it seems to be the fastest growing tree about that coppices well and is relatively good for firewood and charcoal making. The beauty of growing it like that is the logs only ever reach about 4" in diameter so there is no splitting required.

What I want to know is has anyone else had any experience of growing hybrid willow for logs and what does it burn like on a high efficiency wood stove? Or should I go for slower growing native trees like sweet chestnut and hazel?

Patching Hedging In The Rain

In the corner of the bottom field there's what looks like an old gateway that's been fenced over.

 It can never really be used as a gateway again as there is now a telegraph pole and straining wire in the way.

 I decided that with the left over plants from the top hedge, to patch over this gateway and make it so that people couldn't climb over if they wanted to.

26 hawthorn plants later, along with some bamboo and tree guards and the jobs done - I got soaked in the process!
I'm not sure how well these plants will do as they're shaded by the big oak tree above them. The rest of the hedge was planted a long time after the oak and they've grown OK so hopefully these young plants will survive.
Anyone else been patching they're hedges lately?

Recycling Old Fence Posts

With my full time homemaker job role approaching in the spring I'm always on the lookout to save money, and I managed to save a few pounds this week with some old posts.

Ken, one of our next door neighbours, was ripping out a section of fencing on the boundary to our field (not our fence though so we don;t have to pay for it) to replace it with new, higher fencing, that would keep in the mad boxer dog Jilly.

 The old fence post broke off at the ground, rotten where they were in the soil, but otherwise sound. The only trouble was they were destined for his bonfire. I intervened.

 10 minutes with the chainsaw and they all had new points added to them.

Voila! 11 new fruit tree stakes.

They'd be no good for fencing now, too short and not really a big enough diameter, but they'll easily last the few years they're needed to support a fruit tree and as I'll plant a few more this winter it's saved me a bit of money.
Anyone else got a use for old fence posts?

Planting A Hedge - Part Two - The Raw Materials

I'm planning to get my hedge planted when I'm off work over Christmas, so I thought it was best to order all the items I need well in advance

Tree guards

 This week I bulk brought 250 spiral tree guards with 3ft bamboo canes as well as 225 hawthorn plants that I heeled into the garden, ready for when I want them. I've also ear marked a few home grafted cider apple trees to plant in the hedge at intervals.

225 hawthorn plants ready when I want them!

I do need to get some pig netting, staples and fence posts to do the whole thing properly and prevent people (or dogs) getting through until it grows. Hopefully I'll be able to borrow either my father or my brother for a day to help me put all the fence posts in and then maybe next year we can get some stock!

Holly Seedlings

I want to put some holly in my hedge when I plant it.

It's good at stopping people climbing it, gives some evergreen cover, good berries for the birds and can be used for Christmas decoration.

 But after seeing the price of it per plant I decided I better try to find my own source!

 The neighbours who I cut the tree up for (yesterdays post) have a huge old mansion that has a 4 acre garden with beautiful trees and vistas. So I asked if they had many seedlings they didn't want/need. They did, loads of them!

 After being walked round and told I could help myself I went back grabbed a tub and a spade and got digging.

I managed to get 24 in half an hour, but the roots on them aren't that amazing so I decided to plant them up in a little nursery bed in the garden and see if they grow more roots over the winter before going into the hedge.

Hopefully this should help the cost of the hedge a little bit and also give a bit of winter cover.

What other seedlings do you think I should be going after for my hedge?

Planting A Hedge - Part 1 Planning It Out

I guess I am someone that likes boundaries, I like my garden to have a fence and my fields to be separated up.

The footpath that runs across the top of our land wasn't a big issue for me, but I always knew I wanted to separate it in the first field as this is where our children are likely to play and the majority of our "free range" (or escaped) animals are likely to be. Also as this is the area that contains our sheds and shipping container I'd like it to be a little more private, although the footpath isn't heavily trafficked, everyone like to have a look at whats going on.

An ignored piece of advice

 My simple plan is to plant a hedge along this footpath to give a clear boundary. This will be fenced both sides (possibly), with a double gate right at the start (but that might have solid fronting to it and be 6ft high to protect my stuff).
I've decided to give a 12ft corridor down the path as this give me good access with a tractor to the next field and also allows it to be mechanically cut if I want it to be in the future, I know I'm loosing grazing space but the trade off for privacy is worth it (I can still run animals up their to graze it if I want anyway).
The trouble is, what hedging to plant? I've been reading the relative merits of them all, evergreen, beech, yew, native, etc. But I've decide that I'll plant a mainly Hawthorne hedge, with holly and any other native hedging plants I can find seeded down either here or at Mum and Dads.
I'm going for mainly Hawthorne as the total run of it is 42m so that will mean around 250 plants and as I'm not going through any grant schemes this way is lightest on my pocket while still giving me the results I want.

Don't know if you can see the pegs and the blue bit of string to mark the hedge or not. I've marked it a metre wide

The far end of the hedge will also have cider and crab apple trees planted every so often to make productive use of this space but not with a fruit that's too desirable to walkers!
Anyone else planted any hedging and have any tips? I'll plant it as a double row and aim for 6-7 plants a metre.

Ground Layering Fig Trees

We've got some friends in the village who live on a beautiful old estate full of amazing trees and buildings. When we first went round a year or so ago I noticed a huge fig tree/bush against a shed opposite their house and asked if I could try an make a fig tree or two of my own from it.

A lrage fig tree with loads of fruit

 The cuttings I took from my mums last year are doing well but I thought a few more fig trees won't hurt (and if it comes to it I can always sell them if I have too many!).

Stripping the branch

 The first thing i did was to find some low down branches with no fruit on. I then stripped away some of the leaves, leaving around three on the end. Then I scrapped away some of the outside layer of the branch, the plan being that this is where the roots will start to grow from.



Pinning the branch in the ground

I dug a little hole and pinned this branch to the bottom of it. Filled up, the plan to leave it for a few months at least to create some roots. The bamboo cane is so I can find them and to stop the mower from cutting them off

Covered over - waiting for some rain on it now!

I did five of these so I'll let you know in a few months time if any have taken!

The next tree I want to propagate from is their mulberry tree, so any advice for that one will be appreciated!

Help Watering

I'm still not feeling right today and I think two days of drinking re hydration salts and eating rich tea biscuits have sapped my energy somewhat. But I did manage to drag myself outside to do some watering.

Daddies little helper!

It's essential when you plant trees as late as I have this year to keep them well watered for the first few months and in any dry spells for the first year. It has rained a bit over the last few days but not enough to soak the roots, so me and the little girl donned our wellies and went watering trees.
Well she filled her watering can with soil but I'm sure it won't be long until she gets the idea!

Standing Firewood

I know it's too late to be planting trees, but they were half price so I couldn't resist.

Tree planting kit!

I 've decided to add to our little coppice area in the bottom of the second field. I wanted to plant some more trees for future firewood and have a few fruiting trees mixed in. We've already got sweet chestnut, Rowen and hazel planted.
To add to it this year I ordered 10 common hazel, 1 purple filbert, 1 kentish cob, 1 paper bark birch, 2 cherry plums, morrello cherry and a Stella cherry (I also ordered some more fruiting root stocks). I also moved a couple of flowering cherries I had in pots that I couldn't find a home for down to this area.

Marking spots to plant trees with bamboo

Having this little area set aside in the one field will be great for wildlife and if I add a little every year and manage it well then we should be able to have some firewood from it in the future as well as a regular supply of fruit and nuts (if I can fight the squirrels)
I'm hoping it will be come a miniature "forest" garden area, I've also added a gooseberry cutting I had spare, alpine strawberries and a blackcurrant. I will be adding bluebells, wild garlic and other herbs as the trees start to get established. The trouble is I need to fence it off and I've no idea how much space to leave for future growth of this area trees are more of a passion then grass at the moment!

Planting A Little Tree Nursery

In a break between April showers today I managed to get my grafted trees planted.

My tree nursery bed

 I dug over a small patch of the veg garden yesterday with the rotovator so planting was fairly easy. I added in some compost and bone meal to give them the best start then set about planting them.
I spaced them one foot a part (300mm) in a row and my rows were about two foot apart. These trees are only going to stay in this bed for one or maybe two years before they are big enough to be up dug up and transplanted somewhere else. I used a short length of bamboo to mark each tree as I know what I'm like when I'm wondering around the garden in the dark!
I plan to keep the weeds down on this bed by mulching with straw as the last thing I want is another area to weed, but having them in the veg garden means they are safe from rabbits!

Thanks to compost woman for this cutting!

I was a little annoyed while planting as I seem to have lost the label off one tree, so now I need to figure out which one it is!
What am I going to do with all these trees? Some I'll keep and grow, some I'll give to friends and family once they're established and hopefully I'll sell one or two (although not the one with the missing label!).