Living mulches in bush and cane fruit

Triallist Josh Berry was busy on his farm in Kent this week getting the trial plots ready, after poor weather last spring delayed the trial for a year.

Josh is establishing his mulches before planting bushes into them later in the year. Other triallists are setting up the trials in the rows of established blackcurrants.

Treatment 1: woodchip mulch

The first load of woodchip is brought on site

Treatment 2: micro-leafed wild clover living mulch

The field is prepped and ready for sowing the micro-leafed clover

Treatment 3: creeping thyme and chamomile plugs

Dry soil meant the plugs had to be irrigated after planting. The creeping thyme and chamomile plugs are more expensive to buy and more labour-intensive to plant than the clover seed, so Josh is only trialing a small area to see whether they work as weed suppressants.  Both varieties can be bought and sown as seed but take a long time to establish, so for the purpose of the trial they were bought as plugs.

The trial will be carried out on three sites.

Site 1: Josh Berry, Faversham, Kent (living mulch drilled prior to planting of blackcurrant crops)

Site 2: Rosie Begg, Dereham,  Norfolk (living mulch drilled into young, already established blackcurrant plantation). At site 2 two soil samples will be taken at the beginning and end of the trial to measure the impacts of the living mulch on the soil bacteria:fungi ratio.

Site 3: James Wright, Kington, nr Hereford (living mulch drilled into young, already established blackcurrant plantation)

Trials will focus on living mulches both pre-planting and in young established plantations.

Trials would have an untreated control, standard herbicide management, 2-3 main species) of living mulch. All treatments will be replicated twice. Plot length will be approximately 100m.

In addition to the main living mulch species two of the growers (site 1 and 2) are keen to experiment with a woodchip and a cardboard/woodchip mulch as additional treatments, following on from the ‘Alternatives to plastic mulch’ field lab (https://www.innovativefarmers.org/field-lab?id=3fcc0fc7-ce4c-ea11-817e-005056ad0bd4)

Alongside these main treatments we will experiment with some smaller plots (10 metre length) of a few novel candidate living mulch species.

Assessments would measure percentage living mulch and weed cover, blackcurrant vigour, yield assessment and the information would be summarised in a final report.

·       1.2-2m wide x c.100 m long plots

·       X2 replications and/or multiple monitoring locations up the row to add replication

·       Species mixes/Sowing densities – to be guided by seed merchants

·       Growers also keen to experiment with wood and cardboard mulches and lesser used species e.g creeping thyme, creeping cinquefoil, chewings fescue. These would be sown on smaller plots and just assessed for weed counts and vigour of blackcurrant growth and NOT yield

·       Whole row plots - machine harvest to calculate any yield differential

Main living mulch species

·       Kings living mulch mix (20% yellow trefoil, 50% white clover, 10% small leaved clover)

·       Wild white clover (3kg/ha)

·       Wild white clover + yellow trefoil (3kg/ha)

Novel candidate living mulch species to be trialled in smaller plots to assess suitability as a living mulch

·       Creeping thyme – Thymus serpyllum

·       Yarrow - Achillea millefolium

·       Bugle – Ajuga reptans

·       Creeping cinquefoil – Potentilla reptans

·       Lobelia angulate

The weed assessments, data analysis and reporting will be done by ADAS. All ground preparation, sowing of living mulches and any other treatments (bio-mulch/woodchips) will be done by the growers at no additional cost to the project. The assessment timings are detailed in the milestones section of the proposal.