Creating a Fedgerow!

When I was in England a few years ago I fell madly in love with hedgerows. Not just the rows demarking fields, hedges of brambles (blackberries to us), apple and plum trees, sloes (a type of plum) and other fruit trees and shrubs grow wild seemingly everywhere! And loads of these are on what's still considered common land. I stayed a few days with a friend in Reading which is basically a suburb of London and I found blackberries, apples and plums in bit of a park at the end of her street. I picked a basketful and made applesauce and blackberry plum jam. I ate so many blackberries from random bushes all across the Yorkshire. When I got excited about all of the readily available fruit people I spoke to were indifferent: it's so commonplace that most people don't even notice it exists. But if you look back at recipe books from wartimes and earlier, its clear that this supply of 'free' fruit was a valuable part of the average person's diet

When I was working at FoodShare I read about food forests which are very similar in principle to hedgerows. I was able to plant a small demo version in some underutilized space there but it never reached its full potential because it was abandoned when FoodShare moved to a new location a few years later.

I've wanted to create something similar ever since but lacked space to do it until we began the Laneway Garden Project. We don't have huge space to work with, just around 20' x 16" along the fence at the back of the lot. So calling it a forest is a bit of a stretch but I was certain it could be a hedge of fruiting plants and shrubs at least... a food hedge, or fedgerow!

Last year before the raised beds were even built, the very first thing we put in the ground was a serviceberry tree that we got from the city of Toronto's Tree For Me Program. Along with a rhubarb plant we had the beginnings of a fruit hedge. Later last summer we added a black raspberry that I've been dragging around through my last 3 apartments and a white currant bush. Earlier this spring we benefited from a friend of Janis's who donated some of her raspberry and rhubarb splits. So we were off to a good start!

This year we were the grateful recipients of not one but two grants, one of which was an Edible Community Garden Grant. from our friends at TreeMobile. We received a Fedge grant which allowed us to fill in our Fedgerow with a gooseberry, 2 haskaps (2 varieties to pollinate), more than a dozen strawberry plants, 5 asparagus crowns, some sorrel and anise hyssop! We planted some of the strawberries in old eavestroughs along the fence and the rest in ground beneath the shrubs.

 

We were also delighted to receive a shrub sour cherry tree. It will be planted in the pollinator bed so that it gets the max amount of sun.

Can't wait to pick fruit in our own garden!