Waste No Space

I've mentioned in a couple of posts that the back of the garden is a steep slope, it's about 4 meters square and for quite a while was true 'set aside' land left to the weeds to slug it out for dominance, on the odd occasion madness would grip me and I'd attack it with the strimmer before wearily conceding defeat whilst wondering how much strimmer line I needed to buy before attacking it next time.

Now I'm lucky enough to have a south facing garden and this area gets full sun for the majority of the day, it seemed a real shame to leave it to the weeds especially when I wanted to grow more veg - so I hatched a patient plan, one that wouldn't require miles of strimmer line! Early last year I gathered up all the empty compost bags I could find and covered the areas I wanted to put the raised beds (and my miniature wild flower meadow), weighting them down with a collection of bricks, rocks and surprisingly useful old metal washing line posts I'd taken an angle-grinder to when I built the decking , I left things well alone for a good nine months.

When I eventually lifted the sacks I had pristine earth, weed free and good to go with the minimum of effort, utilising wood left over form the old fence we'd replaced I built raised beds and then managed to fill two of them with compost from what I'd thought was a very small compost heap - still surprised how much it yielded.

View from the top

The result is a little rough and ready but it's allowed me to get a crop of veg in and a couple of tasty meals worth already, the next step is to make the area more productive and less purely functional, I have a glut of plants needing a home and figure flowers around the veg will probably be a good thing and help with the aesthetic!

View from the bottom

An Espalier Apple Tree to be?

I have a small space in the garden that's currently under utilised, a small fence area that gets sun from late morning to mid evening, I initially thought I'd put another raised bed border into this slot but have recently been reading up on growing fruit tress against a fence or wall - I've now learnt that this technique is known as Espalier.

Spare Space

Above is the space I have in mind, what do you think - is this a suitable space? I believe I could eventually get 3 to 4 levels growing up this space providing a good source of fruit, unfortunately there's not enough space to plant a free standing tree which I believe would provide higher yields.

The tree I have in mind to go here is one provided by a relative who has a fantastic house/garden out in the countryside and suffers from tree's sprouting left, right and centre - when I found out I offered to take as many as they wanted, in the main to feed my fascination with Bonsai - more on this in a later post.

Apple (Hopefully)

I believe the tree above to be an Apple tree following Googling of Apple leaves but I can't be certain, any tips on how to positively ID this would be very helpful. I'm hoping that if it grows well this year I'll be able to plant out next year although currently unsure if I need to prepare the tree at this stage to get it ready for it's role as an Espalier - I'll keep you posted on this Journey of discovery!