It took longer than I was expecting, but I did end up doing some pretty deep digging in order to get rid of bindweed root. We now have two rows of four raspberry canes which will go along vertically along the plot. This replaces the four rows of four canes which went horizontal and were not really rows anymore. I’ve heeled in some more canes on a third row as a temporary backup, if any of the canes that I’ve planted don’t make it then I can use on of these. I’ve made the bed slightly longer by removing the strawberry plants that were in a small bed at the end, these got swamped by the raspberries last year. I dug up the strawberry plants and added them to the main bed. I had forgot that this bed used to be a really weedy bit where a fence once was, bindweed would climb up the fence. To prevent this, I have covered it in plastic and put soil on top. I had always planned to remove the plastic in a couple of years and that is what I ended up doing this weekend. The plastic had done a good job as underneath was a whole load of dead looking bindweed root. I removed as much as I could see, no doubt I will see the bindweed again this year but hopefully not anywhere near as much as I normally do.

To finish the raspberries off I put some homemade compost around them. The righthand compost was last years and I dug it all out and spread over the plot, covering about half of the plot in total. I had a couple of buckets left over and so mulched some of the strawberry plants with it. I’ve still got this year’s shredded clipping from the bushes in the garden to add (once I have got round to cutting the bushes!) and I will add that to the lefthand compost as the last thing that goes on until I leave it and restart the righthand bin again.

At home, I planted a couple more broadbeans as two of the toilet roll tubes failed to germinate. I also transplanted some of the leeks and put them into toilet rolls to give their roots a lot more depth.