Allotments 4 All

Hi everyone,

What are the pros and cons of growing passifloras, hops and fruit trees through a membrane?

thanks tons  :)

A couple of thoughts:

If you want to nourish your plants and trees with a top dressing of compost or manure at any time, you'll want direct contact with the soil around the plant

Fruit trees don't like to be stifled - they do better with a little space around them so the birdies can pick off predators from around the roots

Thought of cardboard covered by mulch instead? If you keep the mulch thick you'll suppress weeds and the cardboard will rot down :)

Be sure you have the Passiflora where you want it... it sends up runners/suckers from the roots all over the place!
::)

Thanks for the thoughts Saddad... will take your advice and cut a gap of about a foot and a half in the plastic to plant the passifloras in. I may then mulch that area with straw... Would that be a good idea or is it bad for the soil?

I'm a bit nervous using a cardboard due to it's chemicals, but I will experiment if I can get my hands on some... Problem could be that the plant may dry out underneath?
I will still try planting though the membrane and let you know!  :)

Cardboard has the excellent quality of soaking up rain and passing it on down. I've had cardboard over about 30 square metres for several months now, and it is very soggy. Looks terrible and is very slippery. Otherwise I am delighted with it, though I'm going to be pulling out plastic parcel tape for years into the future.

We are re-doing a garden at this moment that was covered in mypex. The roots of anything invasive have traveled up to 30 metres underneath it and have come up anywhere there is a hole or join in the membrane. Bindweed, bamboo, lilac, passion flower etc. Also this dry summer has killed and weakened loads of plants as the moisture has not penetrated as well as it would on ordinary ground.

Go with a bark mulching instead, I know it does not last, but it will improve the soil and keep the moisture where it is needed.

Mypex is best used under gravel that is planted with dry loving plants.

Cardboard looks terrible, what is the use of planting something nice and attractive and then making it look as if you have emptied the contents of your dustbin under it. Oh and the slugs love to hide under it.

I expect somebody on this forum will suggest using old carpet. Ignore them, once again are you building a garden or making a rubbish tip?

lol@ace, cardboard, newspaper and raw compost do offend the eye :-X a covering of straw makes it all look pretty again :)

Or in my case, free (rather coarse) woodchips produced by local factory in an effort to reduce their mountain of waste wood.

Sorry to repeat myself, but my cardboard/newspaper layer is temporary, to suppress rough field grasses/docks/umbellifers etc while I carve out an allotment taken on in May. I am gradually covering the area with newspaper and cardboard while at the same time making neat oblong beds. One long one is made of compost, earth, peat, manure piled deep on top of the cardboard, concealing it and producing tomatoes/squashes/corn within a few weeks of taking on the plot.  It is now growing leeks and broad beans, and very few grasses and weeds have come up through the layers since May (nearly 5 months).

The other is the same size but is dug out, more slowly. I remove the cardboard to put elsewhere, as I go, and it is CRAWLING with worms, who seem to love it, but surprisingly few slugs. It is currently holding kale and leeks and bare earth which I might try overwintering peas on.

I am interested in comparing the two methods.

They each have their problems and advantages. It is expensive and exhausting to haul sacks of various things to pile on top of the cardboard for the first method, but the result is an instant productive garden.

Second method: I like digging! and the ?dead weeds are put into black sacks to rot down for a year. I still have to haul sacks of manure/peat to enrich the dug area, but not so many. I think the combination of the two methods is good and interesting, and I am a firm supporter of cardboard!

The paths in between are gradually being covered with the woodchips, and eventually all the cardboard will be invisible.

Around the perimeter I have put Mypex over the cardboard as a firebreak, so to speak, between the overpowering, towering grasses of the field, and my precious beds. And around the Mypex I have just done some energetic strimming.

I am quite pleased with the result this evening, but exhausted....

we used cardboard, weed suppressing membrane, old carpet and all the other nasties you mentioned. if you need to cover the ground to kill off the weeds, which they did, cardboard doing the best job of the lot, you just have to take what you can get at the time. Our fruit trees are all planted through weed suppressing membrane, with one side able to come back and manure put down around them. it does seem to keep most of the weeds down, we have to pull bindweed etc up if it comes up around the blaccurrants, etc but that's the way with bindweed :(

I have been told by the gardeners' at Ryton Organic Gardens that bark chip is not the thing to use because it sucks up moisture and nutrients and turns the soil acid... Not that it doesn't have its use. Do people agree with this?

I find the advice given on using cardboard to be most interesting and helpful... I will certainly try this and also the membrane method (with folding flaps as suggested above).

Still a bit confused... Is it best to mulch onto the cardboard or should I just pin it down? What mulch?

To simplify my first message, I am doing different things on my cardboarded plot:

1. Putting coarse woodchips on top of the permanent paths, over cardboard (the disadvantages of barkchips, if true, don't matter on paths).

2. Layering one long narrow bed (7x1 metres) with compost/manure/other materials placed on top of the cardboard as an instant growing area.

3. Pulling back the cardboard on the second long narrow bed and digging - this is much easier now that the rough field turf is dead and flattened. In case it comes back to life, I skim it off into black bags to compost down.

4. I have started another long thin bed parallel to the first by putting everything compostable on top of the cardboard to rot down over the winter. It will eventually be layered again as at 2.

5. I will start another version 3 eventually, but the cardboard there is rather new and hasn't done its job yet.

There is a large car/tractor/garden machinery supplier adjacent to my first allotment. They share a huge skip, purely for immense cardboard boxes, with a local supplier of camper vans and camping equipment. I only have to glance at the skip these days for a kind person to run up its ladder and start hurling down down box after box, already flattened, for me to drag off. They can see that I am totally unhinged, but they are very nice about it.

that's what we did, last year, incredible amount of worms, the cardboard had rotted over winter and the nasties underneath, mostly creeping grass!, was dead and nourishing the roots of our plants

Lucky artichoke! :P ;D

Hi si, if you put a hefty mulch over it you don't need to pin it down, but don't do it on a windy day lol

Bark mulch over weed suppressing membrane for the long paths between groups of beds:



Straw mulch over newspaper (could be cardboard) for the short paths:



The traditional view of mulch is that if you put it on fresh it will deplete the soil of nitrogen first whilst the lower layers rot, then give it back again once rotted. How much nitrogen will it deplete? How much will it give back? No-one seems to know - worth experimenting, like manic says, find out what works for you. And the increase in worms when you mulch is dramatic :o

Mulch thickly - 6-8 inches - and top up the mulch whenever it needs it ::)

If you have e.g. fruit that likes an acid soil, like blackberries, I wouldn't hesitate to mulch heavily with bark chippings to increase the acidity of the soil.

You can feed the plants any time by applying pelleted chicken manure over the mulch (Rooster is the organic one) during the growing season. The rain will do the rest :)

A lot depends on what you mulch with. Bark or dead leaves, say, have lots of cellulose and very little nitrogen, so the bacteria need to get nitrogen from the surroundings; this becomes available to plants when the decay process is finished. Grass cuttings, on the other hand, have an excess of nitrogen, which is why they go so horrible when left to rot on their own.

(sob) you are so lucky to have those grass cuttings Robert!
your rubub love squelchy old grass cuttings though don't they ;)

They certainly do!

28 years gardening on the council, 6 years working as a gardener for private clients. I have always used bark chips as mulch, sometimes if we are clearing an area I blow the chippings and shredded waste straight on to the plot. never had a problem. I dare say something has died along the way, but I can't say it was down to the chippings. A good tip earlier, use the dried chicken manure around the plant.

When I am planting I  always use a drop of well rotted manure in the planting hole, so if you are just putting the plant straight into the ground perhaps the chippings will take away the nitrogen when it is most needed, so plant properly and put a bit of food in the hole first and you should always have a result.

Thanks to all for your responses and especially the pics supersprout. I'll let you all know what I do and how it all gets on!

Simon ;D ;D ;D