Help with layout for food forrest

Hello everyone! I am new here so hello all!

I have a small amount of land that will be ready in September and I am in the planning phases of building a home and establishing a food forrest.

I am in Australia and we have just entered winter. I have purchased some bare-root fruit trees that I want to get in the ground as soon as the land is ready. The house will be months to years away.

I want the food forrest garden to get a head start. There are no house plans yet, except that the property is likely to be U-shaped with the central areas facing North (best orientation for Australia).

So lets get started. First of all here is the land. Largely flat.



I have indicated my first thoughts on where to place the first food forrest but I am in so many minds it is getting noisy in here! The area marked is not exactly to scale and is approx 16m x  28m for a total space of around 448m2.

I have a list of initial trees that I have purchased, 18 in total. I have some other trees in pots which will be added later as I expand the area;

Apples (AP) Snow Apple 1
Gravenstein Apple 2
Cox's Orange Pippin 3
Braeburn Apple        4

Peach (PH) Blackboy Peach 5
Elberta Peach        6
Springold Peach        7

Cherry Bing Cherry      8
Rainier Cherry      9
Lapins Cherry     10
Sir Don Cherry     11

Chestnut (CN)
       Red Spanish Chestnut     12
April Gold Chestnut     13
Emerald Gem Chestnut     14

Apricot (AT)
       Tardi de Bourdonet Apricot     15
Fireball Apricot (dwarf)    16
Tilton Apricot            17

Pear (PR) Josephine de Malines Pear 18

My first draft thoughts are something like this, only very roughly to scale with each sqaure being about 4mx4m.



My goals are to have food forrest layers with the largest trees (chestnuts) being the somewhat center of the groves. I want them close enough to each other to get successful wind pollnation over time, but not so close that they will shade everything out. Smaller trees and understory trees will slide in and around.

The cherries I want down the driveway so we can ignore them. As this area becomes established I might expand it further, or start a new food forrest area in the future. I have a great number of other fruit trees in pots (heaps of figs and others).

I also have a secondary goal of establishing a protective microclimate for borderline and out of zone plants. This initial food forrest might end up having some borderline subtropical plants like white sapote and others interspersed, or added to thier own area. Because all of these initial trees are deciduous they will not provide much winter protection. I am thinking of adding some trees like citrus and loquats which can handle the cold well enough and provide some shelter for these. These might form their own zone I dont know.

In the pictures above, the fence to the left will back on to fields, there will be neighbour properties on both the top and bottom boundaries and a road at the front boundary. There is an easement about 3 or 4 squares up from bottom boundary.

My thoughts on placing the food forrest in top left quadrant initially is because it will have the least impact on the build of the home, of which there are no plans yet. The left fence is East and this area should get a lot of sun exposure. Large trees in future will not shade the house.  It is however out of the way, and might not be the easiest for accessibilty and daily work etc even though the block isnt huge, I want to get them in early so they have a year head start before the house is built.

Anyway this is a long and complicated first post but I would love the input of people here with experience and knowledge. Thanks!

First thought is that the spacing looks good, I have my trees on a 5m grid, the ones that are fully grown nearly touch so 8m spacing should leave some space to get light in, depending of course on how big the chestnuts will get.

Second thought is the chestnuts are tall trees? will the trees south of them enjoy the shade they cast or not.  

A final thought, I think you will have some pollination issues with the apples and pear.

You'll need another pear Josephine de Malines Pear isn't self fertile on any site I can find so it will need a suitable pollination partner.

Apples, Apple flowering is split into groups with 1 being the earliest and 6 the latest. apples can pollinate another apple from their group or one up/down so a group 3 apple can pollinate a 2, 3 or 4.
The snow apple and the cox are group 3 the braeburn is 4 those three should be able to pollinate each other. However you have a problem with the gravesten it's group 1 so it will flower before the other three, it's also a triploid variety which means it cannot pollinate any other tree, and is not self fertile.  You could buy a group 2 apple which could pollinate the Gravesten and in turn be pollinated by the snow and cox apples, but don't buy another group 1 as it would need yet another tree to pollinate it.

I don't know anything about the other types of fruit trees you are looking at but it would be a good idea to check flowering times.

Firstly thanks for the Apple advice, I have added a Mcintosh to my order and will make sure the Gravenstein is towards the edge so the pollinators are closer together. I have a second pear in a wine barrel in my current property, which I believe is a Dwarf L'Inconnue (but is possibly Durondeau) which will go in ground.

When driving to work I was thinking maybe it would be better to have the chestnuts in a triangle configuration rather than a straight line to help with pollination. I was originally going to have them right along the fence line for the shade, but was thinking of all the chestnuts that would drop over to the neighbours place in the future, although maybe this is not a huge issue. i could leave a few meters gap between the forest and that fence line instead of planting flush. A clear walkway might actually be a good idea. I want these over the next 10-20 years to grow massive and be feature trees as well as support for the forest so I think this is a good suggestion.