Snow
One of the goji berries, on Sunday

Over the past couple of years I have amassed a collection of fruit bushes, many of which have not yet found permanent homes in the garden. This is mostly down to the fact that choosing and buying plants is much less effort than digging a hole and planting them, especially when the garden is a mess.

I made the first steps towards rectifying this problem when I created the goji garden. It’s now home to the 3 goji bushes, a fern (which may be dead) and my Good King Henry plant.

The next step was to work out what I had, and what it needed. So I have just nipped out to do a fruit inventory in the garden. These are the results:

On the patio:


  • 4 blueberries, 3 cranberries. These have to stay in pots because I don’t have acid soil.

  • 2 Ben Hope blackcurrants. 1 is healthy, the other is not showing any signs of growth yet, although it does have buds.

  • 2 tayberries. As above, one is healthy, one may be dead.

  • 1 redcurrant.

  • 1 Rubus tricolor, a fruiting ground cover plant in the blackberry family.

  • 3 rhubarb plants. These are in large pots and will probably stay there, at least for this year.

  • Lots of strawberries. Too many to count, mixed varieties (labels long gone). They need sorting out – most of them can be planted out as ground cover in the goji garden.

In the garden:


  • 1 jostaberry, in a tub. Doing fine, but would probably appreciate being planted out at some point.

  • 1 dead blueberry, needs disposing of. It was one of my original pair of blueberries, neither of which ever came to much.

  • 2 tubs of autumn fruiting raspberry canes, doing fine.

  • 1 tayberry, currently spreading its stems across the garden and tripping people up. Needs a permanent home and a fence to be tied into.

  • 1 blackcurrant, doing fine.

  • 3 gojis, newly planted.

  • 4 established minarette fruit trees (apple, cherry, plum and pear) in the chicken run.

  • 2 vines, also in the chicken run. Not showing any signs of life yet, but they’re not getting much sun at the moment.

In the Grow Dome:


  • 1 nectarine, a permanent resident.

  • 1 fig tree, very young. A winter resident of the Grow Dome.

  • 2 kiwis, awaiting better weather before planting out. They’re supposedly hardy, but still very young.

  • Strawberry seedlings.

Now all I have to do is find homes for all these plants!