When you’re surrounded by forest you try to adapt as much as you can. The lack of sun made us expand our garden to the most sunny areas. It was a difficult task, but now, after half of the season, I can say it was worth it.

The history wasn’t always so full of trees

Our garden wasn’t always a forest garden. 30 years ago, when my parents moved to this part of Croatia, our village was mostly a farming area with lots of orchards and crop fields. But over the years, people stopped growing fruits, vineyards became abandoned underbushes, and fields became weedy meadows. With time passing, most of the orchards became overgrown forests and our garden slowly became a forest garden. Right now, we’re surrounded by 3 pretty large mixed forests. Since Croatian laws forbid you from removing trees that aren’t yours, we can’t do much about this but adapt to the situation. We can remove branches that pass on our side, but that doesn’t help much since the trees are so high that they still block all the sun.

So we decided to expand the garden to the old orchard that is still getting a decent amount of sun. The forest next to the orchard is ours, so we will remove the trees that block the light. With this, we will get enough light to have at least 6-8 hours of sun in the garden and prolong our season.

We started by accident

We began the process of expanding last year, quite by accident. We decided to remove some of the old fruits that were no longer flowering, and in the process, I realized that the orchard area was actually quite big. This is why we decided to cut most of the old fruits and have some more vegetable space. We did leave a walnut, plum apple, and apricot tree. Those trees are still giving fruits, so I didn’t want to remove them. Also, the plan last year was to leave the quince tree. But, since it’s in the middle of the orchard it would be a problem for us, so we ended up removing it.

Everything starts with the soil

Usually, when making a new garden you bring machines to do the tilling, harrowing, spread fertilizers, and fresh soil. In our forest garden, this is not an option. There is no access for any type of machine, so everything is done by hand or with small electric machines. We work with what we have. So, last winter I did all the hand tilling, luckily the weather was quite nice, so the tilling wasn’t as difficult as I thought it would be. The main problem in the new orchard garden were the roots. I ended up leaving most of the tree stumps on the ground. They are mostly on the paths and actually are great support for leaning the water cans and buckets. The downhill garden can be a problem when you have a full bucket of water. After the tilling, we left the soil until the spring to do the harrowing part.

We thought that the tilling would be much harder than the harrowing, but we were actually wrong. The winter was dry and warm in Croatia. I can’t remember when was the last time we had such a mild winter. This made the soil very lumpy and hard. It was almost impossible to use the machine. The small electric harrow could barely break the clumps of soil and many times it would bounce off. So, we worked the garden in sections. The dryest areas were left for last. We didn’t manage to harrow one of the beds since the soil was too hard. This bed will be left for next year, and we didn’t use it this year.

I’ve divided the orchard garden into 3 areas with 4 or 5 beds per area. This was done mostly to avoid big stumps and berry bushes that we already had in the garden. The orchard is bigger than the old garden, so even though it doesn’t look like it I got more space in the orchard than in the old garden.

Protection is everything

Since our weather has been a real issue lately, and we had a bunch of major storms early in the season, in May we decided to cover the new garden with hail net. The old garden already has one, and it has saved us many times through the last 3 years, so the logical thing was to cover the new garden also. Since we reuse everything, the trees that we removed became new poles for the netting and the only thing that we actually bought was the net itself.

Although we thought that the installation of the netting in the orchard would be easier than in the old garden it actually turned out to be quite a challenge. We had everything prepared, cut to measure, the two parts, since we couldn’t buy enough length, were sown together earlier, but somehow we ended up struggling to fit the netting. It took us the entire day, but we managed to do it and the garden was ready for planting.

Season so far

I can say that the expansion of the garden was an excellent choice that showed us what we were dealing with in the old garden. Everything is ready for harvest almost 2 weeks earlier than in the old garden. The early spring crops get enough sun and warmth to grow before the intense heat, and plants are already well rooted before the heat starts drying the soil. I managed to harvest a nice amount of peas this year. First time in 10 years. I bought only a small bag and got more than I paid for the seeds. For the first time in 10 years, I had more problems with diseases on spring plants than with heat exhaustion, bolting, and poor germination. We managed to harvest all the lettuce I’ve sown in April before it bolted. Also, for the first time in ages, I managed to grow beets and carrots already have big roots.

We did have quite a challenging year, with lots of storms, some of them were very strong and did some damage, but even with the difficult year, we’re really happy with the new garden. We’re still testing out this new part of the garden, so it’s still not as full as it could be, but even like this, it’s excellent. I will still work on the old and the new garden every year. We’ll just have more room to plan and sow according to the conditions. The side garden will be turned into a herb garden next year. All in all, I’m looking forward to the next gardening season and using the full potential of the newly grown area.