Free Fruit

Let's start by saying this indisputable fact: I love our new place! I love Stempster! I love the house... and I love the garden.

One thing I don't love about it is that it's a money pit. This won't always be the case, I know, but right now, there are a million and one things that need mending, and purchasing.

The result is that I don't have as much money to spend on the garden as I would like. I get around this by buying younger plants. While I would love a semi-mature dogwood, it's cheaper to buy a young plant in a 9cm pot and just be patient. It will grow - it will just take a little longer.

Cheap plants are beaten by free plants, of course. This weekend, I put in 2 blackcurrant bushes, 2 gooseberry bushes, 1 vigorous mint root, and 1 blackberry plant. I also got 3 young bamboo shoots which is going to save so much money in the long term!

How did I get all of this? Well, I dug them up out the garden of no. 53. We're hoping the house sale will go through very soon so we spent Saturday taking the last bits of furniture and tools to Stempster. Once thing we did was dig up some of our favourite plants... the ones that we could. We had about six blackcurrant bushes, so I decided to take 2 and then cultivate cuttings from them later this year. We left some of everything behind, not sure what the next owners will want. Mum got roses, a shamrock which once belonged to her grandma, lungwort and various other beautiful things. I was mostly interested in the kitchen garden and orchard plants, determined to be as self sufficient as possible, as soon as possible.

Digging up the bare root plants wasn't as hard as I thought it might be. Mum had dug over the borders really well. All I had to do was loosen the soil on all sides with a sharp fork, then ease the plant out of the soil, lever it up underneath with the fork.

I really should have planted the bare root plants straight away, but it was getting dark by the time we got home. They spent the night in the car, and the following day, I started digging over a new soft fruit patch. I measured it roughly 9' by 4'.

Before I started, I was concerned. I had planned to put the soft fruit in the orchard which had, up until now, been a rough paddock. I was used to digging the allotment which had sizeable stones in every forkful and not a sign of beneficial life to be found. The soil was dusty and dry.

But the orchard could not have been more different. Yes, there were roots but the fork was the right tool for dealing with those. The soil was moist and crumbly, and there were handfuls of worms every time I turned it. After digging the allotment for the last couple of years, this was like a dream.

Once dug over, I planted the blackcurrants and gooseberries in staggered rows and gave them copious amounts of water each (working out to about a watering can full for each plant). A tad excessive, perhaps, but I won't water it again until the end of the week.

The mint I planted underneath some trees. It doesn't mind shade. At Wick, it was in a patch between an enormous bamboo and the house, so didn't get loads of sun. It was very vigorous so I don't doubt it will compete well with the tree roots around it. I gave it plenty of water too, and I just hope it doesn't spread to the rest of the orchard!

The blackberry I planted behind the greenhouse, where Mum had planted another one last year. Our hope is that we can have a productive patch there and, when it spreads, it will only be competing with the spruce trees.

The bamboo was a little more difficult. I knew I wanted some because it is so expensive to buy, and I'm hoping for a bamboo hedge at the far end of the orchard. I took 3 parts from the garden at no. 53, but they had very long roots and I didn't really want to chop them up any further so I couldn't put them in a pot. I would have put them in their eventual position but we have a gardener coming to cut the weeds and grass with a flail at the end of March and I don't want him to chop the bamboo by mistake.

For now, I have put the bamboo in the raised bed, and I'll move them next weekend when I've had a thought about what to do.

Once all of that was done, there was only one more thing needed:

a good long soak in the bath!