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

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?

What edibles did you use?

Many thanks,

Samuel

 

Hello and welcome.

A few thoughts on this. I'm not sure I'd put rhubarb there. Rhubarb is hungry and thirsty so will probably compete fiercely with the trees for resources. Also I'b be worried that its massive leaves would reduce the amount of rainwater soaking into the ground. It will also make for dense shade which your strawberries wont like.

Other than that, I'd be tempted to aim for as close as possible to what happens in nature. Brambles are woodland edge plants, so that would include blackberries, raspberries etc. Also maybe instead of the more usual cultivated strawbs, how about the wild ones? They produce much smaller fruit but they are much sweeter, and tolerate a lot more shade. If you have acid soil you might even get away with bilberries, which I think are delicious, although many would disagree. Currants also do ok with some shade. Also, there is a type of honeysuckle that has been bred for its berries, its called the honeyberry I think. I've never grown it but if it behaves like other honeysuckles, it will do absolutely fine in the setting you describe.

 

Welcome to the forum, Samuel_1988. Well done for helping your auntie with a bit of planting, if only my nephew would do the same!

I don't think cultivated strawberries will like it at all, they like lots of sun and easy living, but alpine strawberries would probably be OK. However, many people consider them a bit of a weed!

We have some gooseberries and blackcurrants growing in between some plum trees which have got to about 14' high in a strip down the side of our allotment, so a not dissimilar situation to yours. They don't suppress the weeds, though. Oh no. Still plenty of them. We just have to ignore them! But there's a reasonable crop of fruit.

Unless your heart is set on it, I'd recommend mulching the area around the trees with plastic, cardboard, old carpet, wood chips, what ever you have available or can afford to prevent weed growth. After a year or two, if you managed to clear the area of persistent weeds, you could then introduce ground cover planting but I think you'd have to hoe regularly for a couple of years to keep weed growth down while they got established. After that it might look after itself more.