Advice, what to grow?

[richsims]

Hi, I'm after some advice/opinions as to what to grow in my Bristol garden.
I have a length of ground in my garden that runs along a brick wall - about 15' of length, over 6' in height. The bedding is about 1' wide.

The area gets lots of direct sun, especially in summer.

I have a young family and my girls loved picking the strawberries we had last summer, so ideally more fruit would be wonderful.

Currently this is covered in ivy, so I have enlisted some help to get this off and the roots up, preparing for planting.

What will grow well in this spot? I considered raspberries, but it's been suggested they won't do so well up against the wall, is this right? What other alternatives are there, either to grow up the wall or to have 2 heights of planting?

Thanks for guidance.

[chris]

Edit: didn't realise you were new - welcome!

I grow all my raspberries up against a wall. They fruit extermely well, and it means I can drill rawplugs into the wall, fix hooks/eyelets in them and run wire to tie them to.

Does the wall ever cast a shadow? Beneath my wall of raspberries, I have strawberries, at the ends I have two berry bushes (white and red I think, can't remember!)... further along the wall and onto my house wall I have a thronless blackberry bush that I've trained up the wall, then over a fence.

The raspberries can cast some shade with their leaves (edit: so my strawberries take a little longer to ripen, than those in hanging baskets!) - so that's why I tied them back to the wall.. everytime i'd go out to feed/water the chickens/what not with my little one on my shoulders (think she was about 14 months odd?) she'd point to the raspbery 'wall' and shout "NOM NOM" - and lean over and pick some herself and just stuff them in her mouth. I think she probably ate half the fruit off the plants herself. Some raspberries took longer than others to ripen because they were wall-side, but still, I got a great crop of all gold, and glen ample from that wall I'll be lining my other walls and fences with them in the same fashion.

There's other hybrid berries too - you could perhaps even train a gooseberry.. although for me, they didn't work out well as I couldn't keep on top of the sawfly caterpillers - which devastated my bush pretty much over the night.

[paula.berriman]

Hi

A nice trained fruit tree would grow lovely up that wall providing is south facing and gets plenty of sun. As far as what to put into the ground you can grow anything with soil and sunshine. Shady areas are best kept for ornamentals that like shade as veggies love sun and in my case its the more sun the better for bumper crops.

Good luck with it all.

[Two_Sheds]

The bedding is about 1' wide.

That's not very wide at all - any chance it can get bigger?

If not, try and enrich the soil as much as you can, and also fork it over really well to about 2 foot deep, so it's free-draining