Food Forest building – Beautiful Chaos

The berry garden is recovering

After mulching the berry garden with a thick layer of leaves the blueberries are doing a lot better. The berry garden needed a good weeding and we added a layer of woodchips as well.

I am so happy seeing the blueberry plants looking healthy again. Last year they looked so terrible that I was afraid they all would die. This early spring we divided a full trailer load of leaves over the berry garden and we started watering the blueberries on a regular base as soon as it became warmer and dryer. This effort has paid of and the blueberries are thriving. There leaves have a healthy green colour and they are making new twigs, even shooting new twigs from the roots which need to penetrate the thick mulch layer first.

A white blueberry shoot in leave mulch — **New Blueberry shoot**

We even have been able to snack on a few very tasty blueberries already.

We also planted our currants here last fall and the black currants where ready to harvest.

A black currant twig with ripe black currants

I harvested about 1,5 kg of black currants, which went into the freezer for later processing. I usually collect all of the berries I can get first (currants, raspberries and blackberries) and then juice them all together. We use this juice in yoghurt or I make jelly out of it.

The white currant somehow does not want to ripen. They look good, but still taste so sour, so we will wait a little more before harvesting.

The couch grass keeps growing through, so we weeded thoroughly and added a layer of woodchips again, since the leaf mulch is decomposing and getting thinner.

I am hoping on becoming another trailer of leaves this winter to add a new thinner layer and to expand the berry garden. I want to relocate the raspberries, since they are doing miserable and need to be planted in good, nutrient rich soil, which holds moisture better. I also want to plant a row of strawberries, since they do not do well in the bad soil in our garden 2 and I would love to harvest some decent strawberries, but that is work for the fall.

Raising 9 roosters to clear soil for gardening

Chickens are used in food forest building to clear soil and fertilize the soil before planting new trees and shrubs, so I thought I can also use them to clear land for gardening. Did it work?

Well, I hate to say that for us it did not. Maybe the roosters are still too young, maybe roosters do not scratch as well as chickens, but to extend our berry garden the clearing that these roosters did is not enough. As you can see on the picture the patch in front of the chicken run is where they where and cleared the ground, but grass started growing again immediately, so this is not good enough to extend our berry garden on.

A patch of cleared pasture, with the chicken run in the back, where the grass is growing trough

As a last resort of trying to get rid of the couch grass, we are now trying out covering the ground with a silage tarp. I am not sure how long this would have to stay on. The sun burns extremely here so, on the black tarp, I hope that the heat will help killing the weeds, especially the rhizome grass. I would like to plant raspberries and strawberries in the fall.

Ground covered with a silage tarp and weight down with tires and wood chips

No peaches for us

I was so happy this spring. There where little peaches on our peach tree for the first time since we planted the tree, but …

the little peaches are all drying in and falling off. A part of the leaves also look wilted. Was it the late frost, or does this tree have another problem? I don’t know.