I burn holes 6” apart and use that for beans, roots, and garlic.
mistake: planting my prime ark freedom blackberry too close to a wall. being new to growing fruit, i had no idea that a few years later, that little blackberry would become monstrously sized.
new primocanes now scrape against that wall, which messes up tender leaves. and warm days can heat up the wall, which then damages the leaves.
i should have chosen a spot eight or ten inches farther away.
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I made a similar mistake with a fig tree. I put it in a concrete planter box right next to the house. Little did I know that the thing could grow 10’ in a season, blocking my kitchen window, getting into the eaves, rubbing against the house every time the wind blew. Last year I made a pathetic attempt to espalier it. It did not work. Someone I met here is going to come dig it up and take it to a new home.
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This is down right poetic–and so true!!
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Try planting too many trees before I even knew what a rootstock was
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Glad to hear that the weed fabric gets a big thumbs up.
I have been slowly putting it down (with hundreds of galvanized 6" ‘staples’). It’s a chore. I should have gotten knee pads . . . as it sure involves crawling around a lot! But I think it will be worth it - preserving moisture and fighting the weeds.
So far - we are ‘squaring off’ the pomegranates. But I think I will put it all the way down the rows, between trees, too. I’m just waiting to sink the lines for the drip irrigation system, but am wondering if I should just lay them on top. Do you have a drip system?
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That looks great! Yes I have drip hoses down, my fabric is woven and allows moisture through.
This fabric allows water to flow through. I watched it to make sure. I doubled it, because I found that light still gets through some of it and allows the weeds to grow underneath. (The stiffer gray stuff, especially.)
Think of you often. We have wild pomegranates here that are white on the outside (creamy really) and I think boy, PomGranny would love these!
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I’m about to plant PAF blackberry near a fence. How many feet away should the plant be from the fence ideally? Thanks
Really depends on whether you want to pick from both sides, if you don’t than you could get away with 1 ft. If you do than I personally would go no less than 7 ft.
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My (false) strawberries
I have learned multiple lessons from attempting to have a “wild berry patch” raised bed this year.
First off- starting with huge amounts of found peat moss on top of my soil was a huge success in that it made everything grow very well. Unfortunately the plants I didn’t want also grew very well.
I discovered red sorrel (which is edible and makes a nice lemony addition as a salad green)
I initially wanted the bed to be a wild lowbush blueberry bed, starting with about 8 plants (I think 3 or 4 have survived). What it turned into was a massive wild blackberry /false strawberry monstrosity. Yes, mistakes were made. HOWEVER, I did end up getting about 8 wild blueberries this year, about the same amount of food as 2 Bluecrop berries 
.
The false strawberries were pulled this evening. Some of the red sorrel was planted in another bed to use for salads, and there are a surprising number of decent blackberries. I think I’m going to put a pair of known blueberries in the middle of the mess and see how it goes. Worst case scenario at this point, I’ll pull all of the blackberries and be back to square one.
Long story short - if you have a plan, sometimes it’s better to follow it than seeing how long your false strawberries will spread before never giving you fruit.
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By red sorrel, do you mean red veined sorrel? I pulled red veined sorrel out because the flavor is inferior to garden sorrel. Now, I find the red veined sorrel growing all around my yard as a weed.
I am referring to Rumex acetocella, also called sheep sorrel. I’m betting there are others like the ones you just described that I would also eat/propagate if I knew what they were.
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One big mistake was planting comfrey in my vineyard.
It’s almost impossible to get rid of.
One other:
I wasted years trying to grow Apricot in the Puget Sound lowlands.
It’s very poorly adapted
prone to brown rot
blooms way too early.
Don’t bother.
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@Boizeau , I used roundup to get rid of a few comfrey, worked like a charm.
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On the other hand, I have comfrey growing at the base of my trees. It keeps the chickens from scratching up all the mulch, serves as a nitrogen fixer, keeps out other weeds, is popular with my bees, and serves as a good chop and drop mulch.
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Maybe a dumb question, but why do you want to get rid of the comfrey?
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It has a gigantic taproot
spreads aggressively
and almost impossible to get rid of.
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My biggest mistake was probably relying on what another person I didnt really know tell me about a tree I wanted to harvest scions from. I grafted it and 3 years later, it bore fruits that neither looked nor tasted like what I was expecting…
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