A little less than four years ago, I read Edible Forest Gardens and got all fired up.  You can read my ambitious plan from that winter.  Now here's what didn't work:

• The kind of swales I made concentrate rather than drain away water.  Luckily, raised hugelkultur planting mounds saved my fruit trees (and created awesome, fungally dominated soil in the process).
• At least while young, the trees weren't able to compete with dynamic accumulators like comfrey due to the poor soil on the site.  So I changed over to mulching around the base of each tree, keeping other plantings beyond the dripline.
  
• Keyhole beds increase the edge area between beds and paths, which means a lot more weeding if you have grassy aisles.  I'm slowly changing over to more linear beds for easier weeding.

Four years later, the area is really more of an orchard than a forest garden, but a couple of years of adding high value vegetables beyond the trees' root zone has won the troubled area from the weeds, and I feel ready to start expanding back out into more diversified plantings.  Now I realize that my goals with non-fruit plantings should be much simpler, focused around building quality soil as quickly as possible so the trees will have something other than waterlogged clay to expand their roots into as they grow.

My new plan is to keep the soil directly under the current trees' branches completely mulched, at least until the trees are large enough to handle competition.  Meanwhile, a ring of annual cover crops (buckwheat in the summer, oats, oilseed radishes, or rye in the winter) will be building soil in the zone where tree roots will soon be growing.  I'll concentrate perennial mulch producers (like comfrey) beyond the eventual spread of the tree.

Stay tuned for more specifics on the mulch producers I'm thinking of branching out into in a later post.  Meanwhile, I'd love to hear from others who have started young forest gardens.  Which parts of your book learning worked and didn't work for you?

Want more in-depth information? Browse through our books.

Or explore more posts by date or by subject.

About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



Want to be notified when new comments are posted on this page? Click on the RSS button after you add a comment to subscribe to the comment feed, or simply check the box beside "email replies to me" while writing your comment.

Powered by Branchable Wiki Hosting.