It has been another pretty soggy autumn/winter, which has slowed down our efforts to get the new allotment plot into shape.  We have however, managed to finish the latest (and last?) major construction project – a fruit cage.  There are some soft fruits that simply have to be protected from birds if you are going to get a decent crop and some of our favourites, like strawberries and redcurrants fall into this camp.

We have gone for the largest cage that we could assemble and fit into the available space on the grounds that filling it up would be no problem.

Fruit Cage 28 Mar 2016

The cage is 9 metres long, 2 metres wide and 3 metres high.  we built it around the existing primocane raspberries and have added a strawberry bed, gooseberry and jostaberry bushes and plum, redcurrant and whitecurrant cordons.  To try to keep the maintenance easier we have used weed suppressant membrane (topped off with bark chips) to make internal paths, along with some interlocking tiles liberated from Lynn’s Dad’s garage.

Fruit cage 28 Mar 2016