Raspberry patch of doom

[toomuchtooold]

Four years ago when we moved into this house with its overgrown garden I marked out the hillside bit next to the kitchen as my fruit garden. I strimmed down all the weeds and covered it with biodegradable mulching fabric and planted raspberry canes, rhubarb, strawberries and some currant and gooseberry bushes through the fabric and put bark chips over the fabric, hoping that the mulching would kill off the weeds while my fruit bushes grew, leaving me a lovely weed free orchard. Unfortunately as you can see in the pictures, it hasn't quite worked out like that. The mulching killed off everything but the horsetail, creeping buttercup, bindweed and dandelions. It is a total mess. I don't want to spend ages on it - there are other bits of the garden that I've been working on and I'd rather spend my time keeping them maintained than trying to rescue this bit, so I wanted to ask what's the easiest thing to do with this but of the garden - what would you do with it? I've read that with horsetail it's very difficult to control generally but you can grass over and now it to keep it down, I'd be fine with that I think. How would I do that? Do you think it's worth trying to rescue the currants and gooseberries and stick them in containers? My neighbour said if it was him he'd take a blowtorch to it but I don't think it would even work

The thing is that raspberries and most other fruit\currants like them take quite a bit of looking after, training along canes etc. Blackcurrants are the easiest.

I'd strim them down unless you have the time to look after them and plant a couple of fruit trees. They need help to ease in at first (watering and feeding ) but are miles easier to care for as they grow up. Yes go with your grass plan.

Because mowing the grass, although it should be every week in the growing season. will keep the horsetails in control too.

Horsetail weed is massively resilient. It took us years to eradicate it from our (very small, clay & stones) front garden. And that was with us literally picking off every little bit of it, every time we saw it. Our "garden" is about 2m sq... when I see horstails in large gardens like yours I just wince, TBH. Maybe a flame thrower?

I feel sorry for it, it was around when the dinosaurs were here. It looks lovely too.

I'd want to keep some fruit, if poss, so I'd try some pots. I just had a quick google and results said that it's perfectly possible, though, like all plants in pots, a bit more labour-intensive.

The best tips I know are buy the biggest pots you can manage to help with water retention. Then dig up the plants and knock/shake off as much earth as poss and wash the roots with water to wash away weed seeds and root fragments. Pot up the plants and mulch the tops of the pots to help suppress weeds and retard water evaporation.

The mulching process takes time, how long did you give it? Some of the people I meat at an allotment swore by the use of a hoe, and not bothering with anything else. You see the weed pop up, hack it off with the hoe. Eventually most weeds will give up and die. They need some nutrient to survive. The super stubborn ones then aren't that difficult to attack more methodically.

Oh if your garden area is sunny, and sandyish not too much heavy clay you could grow herbs like sage and lavender, they need sun but not much else!

I grow fruit & veg in pots in my back yard. Obviously it's more labour intensive as I have to buy pots, compost etc, but OTOH, if if something gets completely overrun with weeds I can just take a cutting & chuck out the pot / compost, & start again. I've got blackcurrant, raspberries, quince, potatoes, tomatoes, butternut squash, a decent variety of herbs, french beans, rocket, strawberries, aubergine, horseradish. I plan to sow some salad leaves into some planters when I have time to put them together too, and I may grow some courgettes if I don't run out of time to sow them this year, I found a climbing variety. That's all in addition to various flowers dotted about - some in their own pots, & some in with the fruit & veg (tomatoes grow well with pot marigold, for example). Thats all in a fairly small yard - basically big enough to park 2 cars in. It is south facing, which helps.

And YY to large pots. And use dishes underneath. Some plants are devils for rooting through into the ground...

Tarragon likes poor soil, apparently.

Grass it and mow it.

Come back to it when you have finished the rest of the garden, and start again.

If your fruit garden is in a windy place, then the fruits esp. the soft ones won't grow very well. I've got a good book about growing soft fruit, The author is Stefan Buczaki , it goes into really helpful detail. Apart from his pushing poisons .

It's called Best Soft Fruit.

The fruit grows fairly well... everything grows, it's a loamy clay soil on a south facing slope in the sunniest part of Germany (there's vineyards about half a mile down the road). Yeah, I think grassing and mowing is probably the best bet at the moment. I'll try and rescue some of the fruit bushes probably - watering and feeding is a lot less work than endless weeding tbh.

And thanks very much for your replies!