Sod mulch for apples
I
learned last week that the
worst thing you can do to your soil biology
is to grow grass under your fruit trees. So I was surprised
to
read that Michael Phillips grows grasses in his orchard. His
technique, though, is nothing like the often-mowed lawns found in other
orchards.
Michael uses gravel
directly around the base of his trees to prevent any weed growth.
Outside this gravel circle, he mulches his young trees with rotten
hay. Once the trees have reached bearing age, though, the
purchased mulch gives way to what he calls a sod mulch system.
Under these mature
trees, grasses and broad-leaved weeds are allowed to grow outside the
gravel ring until the petals fall from the apple flowers. Then
the groundcover plants are cut and the resulting hay is spread beneath
the trees, shading out most of the plants it initially grew from.
The quickly rotting hay combines with compost to give the apple tree a
quick boost of fertility, but the weeds are able to grow back through
the next spring to create another year's mulch.
A 1923 study showed that
this sod mulch system gave two to four times the yield compared to
simply growing lawn beneath the apple trees. On the other hand,
some apple varieties responded slightly better to the surrounding soil
being tilled and planted with a cover crop annually. I like the
direction I've been going in with comfrey under my fruit trees, but
sod
mulch would definitely be worth a shot if I was running an entire
orchard and needed to mechanize the process.
| This post is part of our Growing Organic Apples lunchtime series.
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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.
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