new fruit trees - mulch donuts or permaculture guilds?

Hi, I was hoping for some advice / perspective.

Last fall, I planted four fruit trees (all between 5 and 9 feet tall) and lay wood chips around them. In early spring, I raked back the wood chips, planted comfrey cuttings, and seeded white clover underneath the fruit trees in the hopes of establishing little permaculture guilds underneath each tree. Fast forward to today. Some of the white clover is coming up, but most of the comfrey cuttings have not. The trees, in the meantime, look a bit stressed, due to the exposed dry ground around them. (The soils here are definitely well-draining.) Also, since the ground around the trees is exposed, some small weeds have started to come up.

So I'm kinda wondering if I should give up on establishing the guilds for now and replace the wood chips around the trees to keep in the moisture. Perhaps establishing these guilds makes more sense for larger, more leafed-out trees, that can already provide some of their own shade? So wait a few years and then try again?

I really appreciate your thoughts in advance.

Thanks,
Boris

I have a small orchard on my farm and I do mulch donuts. And on some of those donuts, last year I mixed in some comfrey seeds, and in some of them I now have comfrey plants. Clover and other things are showing up on their own around some of my trees. It's now time for me to add more mulch to widen things and make bigger donuts. Mmmm. My suggestion is to get the soil covered back up in mulch, and if there are particular things you desire to be growing under your trees, just plant or sow directly in the mulch.

I just read a super cool and informative article from the people at Brooklyn Bridge Park about mulching.  See below link.  

https://www.brooklynbridgepark.org/plants-wildlife/plants-and-wildlife/horticulture/

These people are doing some groundbreaking things in the field of ecological horticulture!

why not both? i think the mulch plays an important role, but so do the interactions between guild members. i’d be planting comfrey around the outer edges of the ‘donuts’ so they get some of the benefit from the mulch, and they’ll still be very much in the trees’ root zone as they grow.

i think our tendency as newer growers is to plant too close to the trunk anyway, resulting in companion plants that are completely underneath the canopy once the tree matures some. keeping to the outer edges of mulched areas can help fight that tendency a bit.

Thanks everyone for your replies. I was thinking either/or, but you're suggesting both. Do the mulch, but plant into the mulch or around the edge of the mulch. Greg, quick question - I understand putting comfrey on the outer edge of the mulch ring, but any thoughts on establishing a ground cover, like white clover? I imagine for that, the mulch would have to be (mostly) raked away.

And Joshua - that is a very in-depth article on mulch! I look forward to reading it. Sometimes they publish articles at ecolandscaping.org as well, such as this one - https://www.ecolandscaping.org/03/landscape-challenges/pest-management/managing-pollinator-habitat-reducing-invasive-mantids-at-brooklyn-bridge-park/.

Keep in mind, it is actually good for the tree to have more than one kind of mulch. So what ever portions of clover don't sprout, dump whatever Mulch you have on the bare spots, in a haphazard way.  A pile of twiggy branches, a pile of leaves, the clover, a pile of grass clippings...

The feeder roots will select the nutrients that the tree is needing today. The Holistic Orchard has excellent information. The author includes how to make herbal teas to treat your orchard...

The author addresses the challenges of dealing with disease and insect and animal pests along with the need to accommodate trees' annual needs for nutrients; he uses approaches that seek to promote within orchards a diversity of beneficial organisms as well as methods that promote the plant's immunological response via phytoalexins. This book is richly photographed and contains well-placed sidebars with pertinent information. It was a delight to read. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All undergraduate students, general readers, and professionals/practitioners.

From Amazon.

The comfrey should be able to come up through the mulch and if you add the mulch back slowly the clover should be able to continue.

Boris Kerzner wrote:And Joshua - that is a very in-depth article on mulch! I look forward to reading it. Sometimes they publish articles at ecolandscaping.org as well, such as this one - https://www.ecolandscaping.org/03/landscape-challenges/pest-management/managing-pollinator-habitat-reducing-invasive-mantids-at-brooklyn-bridge-park/.

Boris, interesting article about mantids.  I actually had no idea that there were that many types of invasive mantids!

Both. Mulch plays an important role while establishing the trees and any associated guild plants. The big problem with fruit trees is that their root zone is heavily competed by grasses, so the don't thrive where grass grows in the root zone. Good mulching really helps with both root zone development and grass suppression.

I have also seen highly successful guild plantings of comfry around apple trees, where the comfrey grows sufficiently vigorously to entirely suppress the grass. But it takes a few years to get to that stage, and the vigour of the comfrey itself seems highly dependent on available soil moisture and organic content. My comfrey does less well on my dry chalky soil for example.

Everyone has given you some great suggestions though I like both Greg and Joylynn's suggestions about both.

In addition to the mulch donuts and the permaculture guilds, put those wood chips back away from where the guilds are.

I feel your trees are sad because you took away their wood chips.

I don't consider white clover to be a ground cover in the context of a mulch bed. In mulch, your ground cover would be plants that pop up in one place and spread out laterally over the top of the mulch.
White clover is more like a turf replacer. Still a ground cover, but not compatible with mulch since clover is many many small plants reaching up, rather than one plant that reaches up from one spot below the mulch to spread out.
There are other bush-type clovers that would do the job better through mulch.

Matt Todd wrote:I don't consider white clover to be a ground cover in the context of a mulch bed. In mulch, your ground cover would be plants that pop up in one place and spread out laterally over the top of the mulch.
White clover is more like a turf replacer. Still a ground cover, but not compatible with mulch since clover is many many small plants reaching up, rather than one plant that reaches up from one spot below the mulch to spread out.
There are other bush-type clovers that would do the job better through mulch.

This is a really important insight about living mulches. Took me a while explicitly understand this. Comfrey works so well because the huge leaves shade out the grasses and other small plants beneath it, while allowing the roots of your trees and shrubs to thrive in the fertile soil produced. Creepers like clover send down lots of rootlets and add nutrients to the soil, but actively compete in the same root zone as your desired crop plants.

I get a similar benefit of shaded soil beneath our rhubarb patch, slightly undermined by my enthusiasm to pick the stems and expose the soil!

Add me to the list of people that do both.  I put really thick layers of wood chips around my trees.  I put rings of comfrey around almost all of them.  In my climate, comfrey establishes really well the first season.  To plant it, I either plant it before mulching and it puches up through, or I open a hole in the mulch, plant the comfrey, and put a couple inches of wood chips back over the spot.  If I want to plant anything else, I just open a spot in the wood chips.

Why not have the clover grow up through the woodchips/mulch?  

You could always sprinkle the mulch back over the clover and gently shake the clover for the mulch to fall under the clover.  Then just water or wait for rain to get any remainging mulch (sitting on leaves) under the clover (even if just an inch of mulch). Most plants will just grow a little taller as long as they are not smushed.

Even adding back in an inch or two or chips/mulch will probably help the trees/soil hold more moisture in the summertime.

Best. wishes!

Michael Cox wrote:Creepers like clover send down lots of rootlets and add nutrients to the soil, but actively compete in the same root zone as your desired crop plants.

Yeah, I was kinda wondering about that too. Like if we don't want grass because of competition, does white clover not carry the same concern, or does it provision of nitrogen balance out the competition?

Okay, so the verdict across the board is do both. I plan to reinstate the woodchip mulch donuts, maybe putting less where patches of white clover are in the process of establishing, and the comfreys will go around the mulch donuts. Excited to see what comfrey can do. It's my first time working with this plant. I planted ~18 root cuttings of Bocking 14 over a month ago, but only 2 have come up so far. I dug a few up to investigate, and it seems like many just didn't take.

Thanks everyone!

Boris Kerzner wrote:
Yeah, I was kinda wondering about that too. Like if we don't want grass because of competition, does white clover not carry the same concern, or does it provision of nitrogen balance out the competition?

I read somewhere that grass can be particularly competitive, due to allelopathic effects as well as competition for water and other resources.

Gardener and Orchard-to-be Newbie here:

We have *lots* of problems with voles - how do you get the advantage of cover/tree-guild plants and mulch (living or otherwise) and yet mitigate/avoid voles eating up young (and expensive) baby fruit trees (along with everything else)?  Voles are especially bad on a slope (for example the side of a Hugel) and also specially bad under heavy growth or heavily mulched areas.  I understand animal predation techniques (no snakes here, alas, and voles vastly outpace aerial predators here also) and am considering renting a neighbor's cat who is already skilled (ha!).    

I am having difficulty integrating all that I have read about mulching and guilds w/what I see actually being implemented/successful where I am here in Zone 2b/3  which is: grass or nada up to drip line of fruit trees, with ZERO mulch/companion plantings within the drip line, or anywhere within the toss-of-a-rock from the tree trunk.    Most first hand advice I'm getting from those in the local "trenches"  is that the "usual" vole deterrent's here are not successful (Castor oil, tech, objectionable bulb plants, hot pepper powder, onions/garlic, etc).  

My apologies if this should be in the pest forum (which I have read all of... I think), but my question is more about guilds - which I really want to implement, but in a feasible way.  Thoughts or Suggestions? (for anyone who has the time)