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I have been collecting some fruit bushes for the last two years and they are all potted up and doing quite well (except my poor aphid infested gooseberry - it looks quite stunted and poorly compared to the other three but several nights of deaphiding and it seems to be relatively free so hopefully will recover).
I have:
4 gooseberry bushes
2 white currant bushes
2 red currant bushes
2 x3sticks autumn bliss raspberries
1 x3 summer fruiting raspberries
All of small but sprouting nicely - the gooseberries are in their second year but everything else was this year from Aldi (the autumn bliss, I'm embarrassed to admit, was ordered last year but delivered at the beginning of the snowy period so were stored out in the garage and then forgotten until I came across them in March
)
My problem is that I have a teeny tiny front garden (open plan) that I would like to convert from an eyesore into a decorative fruit garden.
The dimensions are (it is quadrilateral in shape):
Front nearest house (we're a semi detached): 5.18m
Left side looking from house (unattached part of house so by path): 3.09m
Side furthest away from house: 5.63m
Right side attached to next doors front garden: 6.7m
Ideally I would like to create some kind of border between ourselves and next door and split the lawn (more accurately weedy, ant infested scrubland) into three vertically from the house (using a wavey edging) with the two edges planted up with fruit bushes (and heavily mulched - we have a cat problem,I love cats but hate their poo
) and the middle as a decorative strip of really nice lawn (this third will also contain the hanging bird feeder - in the hope the little birds will want some protein with their seed - I'd like to have a small circle (of the same edging) around the feeder and grow poppies and other wild flowers there to encourage the bees but perhaps another plants like lavender would be better?).
I think I have too many bushes to plant up in the space I have though - I have read that the red and white currants and the gooseberries need to be spaced 5ft (or 1.5m)apart, so I can only plant 4 bushes one side and two on the other? I don't want to overcrowd but it seems a lot of space, especially for the gooseberries.
Can I prune the bushes to keep them small without affecting fruit production? Or does anyone have any better ideas on how to utilise my space? Or am I being a bit ambitious for the size of my garden
Thanks
I have:
4 gooseberry bushes
2 white currant bushes
2 red currant bushes
2 x3sticks autumn bliss raspberries
1 x3 summer fruiting raspberries
All of small but sprouting nicely - the gooseberries are in their second year but everything else was this year from Aldi (the autumn bliss, I'm embarrassed to admit, was ordered last year but delivered at the beginning of the snowy period so were stored out in the garage and then forgotten until I came across them in March
)My problem is that I have a teeny tiny front garden (open plan) that I would like to convert from an eyesore into a decorative fruit garden.
The dimensions are (it is quadrilateral in shape):
Front nearest house (we're a semi detached): 5.18m
Left side looking from house (unattached part of house so by path): 3.09m
Side furthest away from house: 5.63m
Right side attached to next doors front garden: 6.7m
Ideally I would like to create some kind of border between ourselves and next door and split the lawn (more accurately weedy, ant infested scrubland) into three vertically from the house (using a wavey edging) with the two edges planted up with fruit bushes (and heavily mulched - we have a cat problem,I love cats but hate their poo
) and the middle as a decorative strip of really nice lawn (this third will also contain the hanging bird feeder - in the hope the little birds will want some protein with their seed - I'd like to have a small circle (of the same edging) around the feeder and grow poppies and other wild flowers there to encourage the bees but perhaps another plants like lavender would be better?).I think I have too many bushes to plant up in the space I have though - I have read that the red and white currants and the gooseberries need to be spaced 5ft (or 1.5m)apart, so I can only plant 4 bushes one side and two on the other? I don't want to overcrowd but it seems a lot of space, especially for the gooseberries.
Can I prune the bushes to keep them small without affecting fruit production? Or does anyone have any better ideas on how to utilise my space? Or am I being a bit ambitious for the size of my garden
Thanks
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