well i went outside today and started working on my new hedgerows for the perimeter of my new garden area that i'm going to be working on..

i moved the killarney, the heritage and the fallgold raspberries today to the west side of my garden..still have the blackberries and the black raspberries yet to move..

i moved 2 of the 4 wild plums that i have to move..for the west end of my NORTH hedgerow for the garden, the east side side of the north hedgerow is already planted with baby hazelnut trees.

also on the west side on either side of that raspberry row i just moved are two sweet chestnut trees..

i still have to dig up a rotting old fence and remove it..to move the rest of the raspberries and blackberries..and then i'll have 3 sides of the garden hedged in with berry bushes..the south is already done with blueberries.

the plan is heavy mulch and sheet compost around all the berries, and some of that is already done..and also to do the same under the wild plum and hazelnuts..but i would like to have some plants under the hazelnuts and the wild plums..they both will be multistemmed hedges, but was hoping to get advice on what to put below them rather than just mulch..if anything..this is a zone 5 /4 garden in northern LP of Michigan

i understand that the wild plums will be quite thorney as they grow up..so i probably don't want anything i would be picking for food crops or that i would have to dig up and divide perennial wise..and not having ever dealt with the wild plums i'm not sure what to expect..(got these by mistake and wasn't sure i even wanted to keep them..but figured a thorney hedge on the north end of my garden might not be a bad idea with all of our wildlife

Are you gonna make the sort of hedge where you sometimes chop a bit at the base of something and bend it over?

I would just let wild plants grow under plums... or sow them if needed. Some kind of bush will probalby come up too, and if you like, it let it be.

paul, not really sure what you are referring to there..with the chop over at the base stuff.

this is a 50 x 48 garden area that i've begun to start working up..

the north boundary will be 4 wild plums on the west side of the edge and 6 hazelnuts on the east side of the edge..they will eventually form a thicket hedgerow along the north side of my garden plot...the entire south part of the east boundary is an established asparagus bed with a circle garden north of that just south of the hazel hedge..a circle of grass lawn with 4 beds around it, circle is 16' with a scarlet canadian cherry in the center..each of the beds on the outside of the circle are 4' deep and there are paths going off the circle of lawn at N, S, E and W..the north beds have lilacs on either side, and there are baby paw paw trees planted beside the paths on the other beds..there will be perennial flowers in these beds to draw in pollinators..the path that goes south of the circle has asparagus on both sides of it, and there are some establish horseradish and rhubarb clumps in the garden now.

the rest of the garden is not planted except the borders..the south border is planted with around a dozen blueberry plants, heavily mulched with pine needles, and wood chips..

the west border has a sweet chestnut tree at the south west corner and then going north from there are the killarney, fallgold and the heritage raspberries..and aother sweet chestnut tree..there is an old fenceline that is rotting and needs to be removed and when it is the black berries will be planted along thae remainder of the west border..i also have some black raspberrie sthat will be planted probably north of the norseradish along the path south of the lawn circle and south of the asparagus there..

pathways will be left and then the garden beds, hopefully i'll get them well raised ..will be built in the rest of the garden..this space that is yet to be developed is 24' wide and 50' long

i have some dwarf apple trees ordered to go into these beds, some are no ladder superdwarfs so they won't cast much shade.

i have seen a hedge beign cut and layed by my great friend Glyn Oníons. that is probably what paul means. If the trees in the hedge have grown up a bit, these were elms, you saw them half way though the trunk, maybe a bit more and pùsh them over in the line of the fence away from the cut side of the trunk so they still have bark going up the trunk on one side though it is cut through on the other and so the tree will not die.
  The layen trees will send up new branches going upward that you cut as you do any other hedge. There were plenty of elms in the hedge, they end up laying one on top of the other.
  This system is used for hedges round feilds not round gardens.

  Brenda Groth in the book Wuthering Heights they have a black currant hedge so two hundered years ago, give or take twenty to thirty years they used to have black current hedges. I suppose it was not a recent fashoin when the book was written so i can say two hundred years ago.
  I have an architec cousin who seems to learn quite a lot about old fashioned house and garden styles, like, he says they used to use goat and cow hair, if i remember right, combed hair, in mud walls to strenghten them. About hedges he said that hedges around feilds used to have eighty types of trees in them. Could that be true, are their eight types of trees in Britian?
    Plums are not too terribly prickly, it is not like the leaves of a juniper bush that are so prickly it is almost impossible to pick the berries iit is easy to find a way of picking th eplums without getting prickedthey have never pricked me though i have seen some good spikes growing out of the branches .  Nor like gooseberrries, they have thorns but not too many.
        A really good plum that makes the best jam in the world excepting blackurrant, is the damson, prunus isititia. I don't have it, one of my ambitions is to have one. agri rose macaskie.

I just read the Transition Handbook this winter. Mostly about places in Britain and in it the guy listed some trees used in permaculture. I lent the book to someone, cannot remember now to whom but I do remember Lime trees, I assume this is not your citrus variety but something else.

  Here is the link for the town of Totnes http://totnes.transitionnetwork.org/Central/Projects_list

Energy descent plans - how to live with less fossil fuel inputs. Permaculture figures into this scheme heavily.

  Lime trees in England are lindens or basswooods i have just looked it up and got the american name base woods it i s a tila. it h¡is the plant used for lime flower tea. accirdug to juan oria de la rueda y Salguero you should pick the flowers early afterwards they have narcotic effects i did not read it properly the first time i thought the had poisonouse effects. maybe its the same difference.
    They are deep shade melliforouse insturment making medicinal trees. the tea of them helps all types of cardio vascular complaints lok the up in google and tranquilise people are antioxidant and sooth and reduce inflamation.
  My Husband says they are good at spreading the water of the ground but he was talking of tilas they have i the canaries and i don't know if they are the same family their leaves lok so very different from the european one. agri rose macaskie

i agree about the black currant making wonderful jelly, i have black currant bushes here..and they are great..my favorite is elderberry though..i've never had wild plum jelly or jam..but the baby trees will be 4 in a hedgerow..i also have some cultivated plums in the front yard..don't want them too close to the wild plums..in the rear yard.

today i put 2 sections of picket fencing along and outside of the row i put the raspberries in, so the raspberry hedge will be growing inside the picket fence (and east of the boards)..

the pickets should help to give wind protection and hold warmth of the sun against the berry bushes..

i will have 6 8' long secitons of picket fence on the west side..with the berry bushes on the east side of the fencing..i will be putting picket fence (eventually) along the south side but the fence will go behind and to the North of my blueberry bushes..so the berry bushes will be OUTside of this picket fenced part of the garden..thus protecting the berries from the north winds and givijng them a good sun warmth from the south.

along the north..eventually there will also be picket fences on the south side of the wild plum and hazelnut hectes..with gates in them..the nedges will be taller than the 40 " tall picket fences so the fence won't be casting shade on the tops of the trees.

these fences will contain my garden on three of the sides..and eventually i'll put  some kind of fencing on the 4th side as well..but that is no hurry for me...i'll decide where and when later.

so 2 sections of the pickets went up today and two ore will likely get put up tomorrow..but i ahve a lot of old rotted fence yet to remove..and the berriesyet to move to thenew areas of fence yet to go up.

Ron helped mne today but has sinus surgery in a few days..so i'll be on my own out there then..as he won't be doing much for a few weeks...(as usual)

well at this point i have all of the raspberries moved and the fence sections i have here, put in (need to buy more of course).
I have the old screens down and dismantled and the dryrottinig wood is stored in the woodshed for kindling..glad to have that done.
The compost is still waiting to be  spread around and the soil from the pond dig is waiting to be distributed and beds made..still have some blackberry plants yet to move, but the 4 wild plums (also called american plums) have been moved to the north line.
it turns out that they will be inside the north fence..by just a few feet as will the hazelnuts..i had measured wrong and thought that they would be outside of the fence.

the fence will be 6 8' sections on east and west and 5 8' sections on the north and south...only have 4 sections so i have quite a few left to buy when i can get a run to the home improvement store.

i'm making headway but the weather has turned cold again here now..was 57 when i started working outside today ..hauling that wood ..3 loads for kindloing..but by the time i had those 3 loads hauled into the woodshed it dropped to 50 and is 45 now..with rain or snow or mix in the forcast for tonight, tomorrow and early on Sunday (hopefully rain)

then Ron has surgery on MOnday so that will slow me down some

  I did not read your thread before i am sorry Ron has sinus surgery.
i don't know if he is more useless an dso that annoys you or more a bully, may be both, where people have problems with each other it is important to get to the bottom of it, you said he would not let you keep hens, is he a bully? Who gets the better of whom? Who gets the support from others? Do you need a bit of land of your own for hens? rose.

no my husband had to take care of farm animals when he was a child and was forced to weed acres of gardens for his parents, beaten if he didn't do it right..so he hates farm animals and garden work.

He had a head injury in 1985 and is mentally disabled, no he isn't a bully, he is very mild mannered, but is very mentall and physically ill and isn't able to do much of anything at all.

He is on 11 different medications every day and has been for over 25 years. I do my gardens so that i can get out of the house and have time away from Ron, but sometimes he will come out to the gardens and pull a few weeds. He does enjoy that I have the gardens as he can watch the wildlife, but he won't commit to helping.

He mostly is a hermit and doesn't like to be around people at all. He doesn't mind us having 2 cats and our wildlife, but wouldn't ever want any other animals that we had to care for.

And basically me caring for him and doing all the work around here that a man would usually do is probably enough for me. As for land, we have enough land.

And this thread was aobut the rasperries, well I knwo have them in a mixed hedge, 3 kinds of raspberries, blackberries, large fruited hawthorn, buffalo berries and 2 chestnut trees (that still haven't leafed out this year, might be dead)

    Well its good to ask, thogh i did not know whether to or not  the answer brings you up well.
    Animals tie one so, you might hope for circumstances in which they did not but they do unless you have some one to look after them, I suppose your tied anyway.  rose

yeah we have our good days and our bad days..seems bad months lately. Ron's mental condition has deteriorated, we are seeking a new dr (apt June 23) that may be able to sort out his meds to get him to a more functional mental state.

I have raspberries nearly ready to pick now on the black raspberries, the newer ones (red, black and gold) that I moved this spring aren't in bloom yet, maybe they'll not bloom this eyar but i'll have enough black to last me all summer.

the blackberries didn't take to well to the move so i don't expect blackberries from them until next year either..or my blueberries, which froze on Mothers day weekend when we got to 20 degrees for 3 nights in a row.

that freeze also killed off the apples, pear, cherries and many other fruits this year..but our grapes are blooming like crazy !!!