Making an Edible Food Forest Patch - anyone done it before?

[Samuel1988]

Morning all,

Me & my aunty managed to get in a couple of fruit trees yesterday in an allotment patch which is roughly 4ft wide & 8 metres long (sorry for the mix of measurements!) and so we planted them a good distance apart to give them enough space.

However, I would like to utilise the rest of this area as I don't want it to go to waste and I know if I don't the weeds will take over (like on my next door neighbours gooseberry bush patch) so i was thinking of planting an edible food forest patch.

The fruit trees would be the 'canopy' and I was thinking of planting in gooseberry & other fruit bushes, in addition to some rhubarb and lots of strawberries to mimic the undergrowth (I would rather have some not so productive strawberries as opposed to weeds.

Any advice? Have you done something similar?

Many thanks,

Samuel

[AllInContainers]

That's pretty much what I'm doing this year ... but in pots

Obviously I can't give feedback and what works and what doesn't till next year, but it would be interesting to compare notes with you over the year. I'm not only filling the "gaps" with bushes, but pots of ramsons, spring bulbs, Horseradish, Chinese Artichoke, edible daylillies, herbs and other stuff. Here's a rough mock up for this year (subject to change).



Specific plants aren't shown as I'll be shuffling them around to suit size/shape and so on for best fit.

I get a couple of advangtages with them being in pots:

• I can move them around to suit growth rates etc
• I can mix blueberries which needs different soils, with other trees and bushes

However mine will never look as natural as yours

I have one side that will be sunnier than the other, and the sunnier side will have huckleberries, dwarf pomegranate, inca berries, and herbs like rosemary and lavendar. The shadier side will have elderberries, ramsons, daylillies, and shade tolerant berries.

I'm not underplanting with strawberries, as I'll have two planters which take 40 plants each. But the shaded sides will have alpine strawbs which will do better in the sun deprived places than standard ones (if the seeds will ever germinate ), so they might work well for the underplanting. Another good groundcover would be chamomile