Establishing a new forest garden

This will be an on-going series to document our forest garden journey.

We bought our home in spring 2021.  Our southern neighbor (who lives elsewhere) had just clear-cut their 20-acre lot, so our adjacent 10 acres now had sun (and wind!) for the first time in forever.  Most buyers were put off by the clear-cut, but we embraced it as a chance to establish a forest garden.

We then found Martin Crawford's excellent book, "Creating a Forest Garden."  We're at his latitude with quite a similar climate, so that's our bible.  We're using lots of other resources also (Permies.com!), but Martin's book hit us at an impressionable moment and built our momentum.

Most of our planned forest garden began as mixed overgrown/wooded terrain with hardpan soil. (photo 1, the real estate listing).

In the first windstorm last fall, we lost 22 trees (photo 2).  Overall, we've taken down over 50 trees, milled them into lumber, chipped the branches, pulled or made our peace with the stumps, and burned about 8000 pine boughs.  (The current view of photo 1 is photo 3.)  My wife's armour-plated state of constant happiness saw us through what otherwise would have been a miserable, long, dark, wet, cold, labor-intensive winter.

We started with a soil test, but our terrain is so varied (ex-pasture, ex-woods, ex-scrub...), it wasn't all that informative.  We started amassing wood chips (signed a hold-harmless with the county), bought a ton of dolomite lime, and began cutting/burning/pulling.  It was a crash-course in chainsaws, axes, and come-alongs.  "To Fell a Tree" by Jeff Jepson was our guide.  Highly recommended.
 
After the trees blew down, we discovered our next hurdle, poor drainage.  La Nina brought us an exceptionally wet first winter, and by December, the ground was too wet to do anything with our tractor.  It stayed like that into June!  Finally around July 4, we got our Kubota L4701 tractor out, assembled our Woodland Mills HM130Max saw mill, and got to work on the timber (photo 4).  For this phase, we leaned on the excellent youtube channel, "Sawing With Sandy".

50+ trees down, 100 logs milled, 1/2 acre cleared, and 5000 gallons of rain harvest water storage installed (photo 5), we're now starting the Forest Garden proper.  The first step is to subsoil (EverythingAttachments 24" subsoiler) to improve drainage and lay down 8" of wood chips to improve retention (photo 6).

Much more to follow!

This Forest Garden is an age-in-place solution.  For the more work-intensive annuals, we are building a scattered network of raised beds throughout the forest garden to reduce bending/kneeling/lifting later in life.  Having a saw mill and an endless wind fall of timber means our raised beds can be pretty robust.  The style will change depending on the lumber available, terrain, and our learning curve.

We started this first one with just a vague idea and got amongst it.  We had a growing pile of Doug Fir bark slabs, so that's what we went with (photo 1).  We started with 6 5' 4x4s burried about 24" deep (photo 2).  Then came the slabs, bark facing in, screwed in place with 4" or 6" Timber Loc lag bolts (photo 3).  (On the ends, the bark had to facing out to provide a flat screwing surface.)

We installed a 6-mil plastic liner between the bark slabs and soil space (photo 4).  Keeping the slabs a bit drier will hopefully extend their structural lives.  If this fella is standing 10 years from now, we'll know the plastic was a good idea.

These raised beds are are also part hugel, so the bottom 1/3 of the 36"-tall raised bed is an assortment of logs in various stages of decay (photo 5).  The next 1/3 is wood chips (photo 6), and the top 1/3 "lawn soil" from our excellent local nursery (shout-out to Maillards).  Dressed with compost and ready to plant (photo 7).

[It may not come up anywhere else in this Forest Garden series, so let us note here our primary use of Doug Fir slabs:  Corduroy roads (photos 8 and 9).  We have several areas along our forest road which get mushy in the winter, so we layered our slabs over those areas -- after subsoiling them to break up the hardpan -- to hopefully keep the road passable all winter for our tractor.  Time will tell.]

Hugels hugels everywhere...

We've no experience at all with any of this tree-stuff before buying this home.  One of our first lessons was delivered us by an innocent looking stump.

We started by trying to just push/pull it out with the tractor...10 minute job, right?  Didn't budge.  Started digging, cutting roots, digging more, a full day of serious toil, then tried again with the tractor.  Didn't budge!

Then came fire.  Easy, right, one day of burning and it would be gone.  Hah.  Two days of burning (even down to the roots, fire hot enough to smelt titanium...) and I tried again with the tractor.  Not the tiniest movement.  Wow!  The roots were still soaked clear-through with water.

So we came up with a new game plan:  stump hugels.  There were another 5-6 stumps close by Mr. Immovable, so it was a great way to avoid work yet still preserve garden space.  We have about 6 such stump gardens in our 1-acre forest garden, so 6 hugels it is.

The first is shown in photo 1, again from the real estate listing.  Mr. Immovable is just beneath the surface of this mulched area.  Who knew there were another 5, most in stump defilade?  Darn realtors and their clever staging.

With 9 acres of forest, we have essentially an infinite supply of logs of every stripe -- decay state, size, shape -- so building hugels is double-win.  We also have an infinite supply of arborist chips since we signed a hold-harmless with the county.  Every wind storm (quite a few here on Whidbey Island each year), we get another couple loads.  2 just yesterday : )

This first hugel is already sporting a Santa Rosa Plum guild (photo 2), doing great.  It's the standard hugel model: logs, chips, soil, more chips.

Another early lesson:  We added a layer of finer branches over the base log layer of that first hugel.  The branches were 1/4"-1" diameter, several feet long.  Talk about a nightmare for planting later!  It's near impossible to dig into a webbed network of fine branches.  Now we just do logs - chips - soil - chips, and let 'er settle.

Hugel 2 is in photos 3-6.  These hugels will be scattered throughout the forest garden, testaments to our third great lesson in this new home: Always look for ways to avoid work.  Gardening jiu jitsu.

So now we're starting on the forest garden, proper.  We have several hugels, trees we've planted here and there, a greenhouse, a couple fenced gardens, and a raised bed, but now it's time for mass production, so to speak.  We're developing about 20 guilds on 500 sqft plots each, one plot/guild at a time.  With storage, paths, and other infrastructure, that'll be very roughly an acre.

While the theoretical basis of our forest gardening (that is, a garden that grows like a forest) is Martin Crawford's book, we draw inspiration from lots of places.  In this case -- first establishing the soil -- most credit should go to James Prigioni and his gardening channel on Youtube.  He did a series of videos on preparing soil for forest garden planting that is fantastic:  Actionable information, attractively packaged, thoughtfully arranged, and enthusiastically presented.  And he's good to his dog Tucker, which goes a long way with us.

So photo 1 is kinda the beginning.  Almost, I say, because when we moved in here a year+ ago, there was a giant Douglas Fir dead center of this plot (plus several other trees).  That fir was blown down in the first windstorm, and literally missed the barn by a hair.  We milled that tree and cleared the stump, but it was a helluvan education in reasons to leave stumps right where they darn well are, if at all possible.

Another influence was a local orchardist who recommended we subsoil the plot to break up the hard pan and loosen the soil.  We did that (photo 2), and added 30 lbs of dolomite lime to the 800 sqft plot, per our county soil test (photo 3).

Next was cardboard (photo 4) to prevent unwanteds, followed by 6" of year-old composted wood chips (photo 5) and another 6" of fresh chips (photos 6 and 7).  The fresh chips serve mostly as a thermal barrier for the still-composting chips below:  Bacteria need a little warmth to do their job.  Now this plot sits through the winter, and we'll plant the "anchor trees" in early spring, plus some secondary and tertiary guild participants.

None of this works w/o wood chips, and the only source for the amounts needed to establish a forest garden is the county/city.  [We just received another truck load as we were writing this (photo . Yay!]  We have an excellent pto-driven 6" chipper (Woodland Mills WC68) and a 3" gas-driven chipper (Landworks), but our experience with them is that it is completely impractical to generate large amounts of chips on your own.  It's just too much darn work.

Each truck load the county brings equals about 2 days of us chipping our own debris, like 5 hours per day.  And chipping is loud, dangerous, bone-jarring work.  2 hours of chipping is like 8 hours of hard labor.  If you need biomass, seriously, talk to the county/city and get on their list.  Let them age at least a year before using them.  We dump all of our urine on these chips as they're composting, plus pickup truck loads of coffee grounds from the local roaster.  Whatever it takes to add nitrogen.

Very nice work. Really beautiful place you have there!

Another 500 sqft plot today, subsoiled, amended with lime, cardboard, and 12" of composted chips (plus a little extra pile of chips in the middle, just cuz I was tractor-happy and brought way too many over).

The composted chip pile we draw from is in the background.  Because it was so close to this plot, we just went with all composted chips this time instead of the 6" composted layer under 6" of fresh chips (which are much further away).  We ALWAYS look for the easy way.  70% solutions are our zone.

But delays, delays...  Darn Wrens love to inspect every square inch of the plot during the cardboard phase.  They just love looking for bugs under cardboard.  We don't disturb them or hurry them, though we do offer a good deal of running commentary.  The extra 30 minutes is worth it, making them feel welcome, part of the forest garden process.  It's as much for them as for us.

We're confident the forest garden will "work".  It's gardening jiu jitsu, pampering the soil now so the soil can later in turn pamper the rest of the flora and fauna.  This part of the process -- way early, years away from fruit, etc. -- is really the funnest part, we think.  That fat, curious wren's foraging is a wonderful memory in our forest garden journey.

And the final plot of phase 1 just finished.  This one is about 30'x30' with a 9'x9' raised bed in the middle (made of our own 2"-think milled lumber).  That raised bed has a pretty big stump in the middle plus significant roots around, all conveniently contained within the raised bed itself or underneath the 3'-wide path that goes all the way around.  This raised bed is 24" high, built for comfy sitting, yet high enough to keep rabbits out.  It's 1/2-filled with very rotten wood, and later we'll add soil on top, likely a mixture of forest soil plus a yard of lawn soil from our local nursery.  Then mulch with compost and wood chips..

The particulars of the rest of the bed (the ground-level part) are the same as the other portions of this part of the new forest garden ("phase 1", we creatively call this year's installment):  Subsoiled, amended with dolomite lime, covered with cardboard or heavy construction paper, then a full 12" of arborist chips.  We also added a full pick-up truck load of coffee grounds this time.

Photo 1 is the new plot, photo 2 is the entire Phase 1 area, settling in, getting ready for planting.

Bare root cherry trees just arrived yesterday, so we're starting to plant today!

First trees in!  Three cherry trees (Bing, Ranier, Stella) arrived a bit earlier than we expected.  That's probably a good thing, given the number of things we learned in the process.

Our major take-away from this first tree-planting experience was, wow, we gotta find an easier way.  Three trees took 4 hard days of work, often with two people.  That probably sounds funny to y'all, and frankly we enjoyed it, but it was wayyyy too inefficient.

Here's what we did:

1) Clear away the 12" of wood chips, down to bare ground.  (photo 1)

2)  Conduct soil drainage test (photo 2).  We dug a 12" wide 12" deep hole and filled it with water.  We let it drain overnight, then filled it again and measured how far it went down in 1 hour.  4", which is very good drainage.  Problem is, it didn't go down nearly that fast on the first fill!  So we had hard data that said our drainage was good, and equally hard evidence that it was bad.  (BTW, any scientist worth her salt knows there's always conflicting data.  "Follow the science" is a quest, not a one-time act.  But I digress...)

We then removed and set aside the top 6" of topsoil (to be added back in later).

3)  With drainage uncertain (but a preponderance of evidence over the last 2 years that it is not great), we removed and discarded another 4" of soil, just to make room for all of the amendments we were going to add.

4)  Post-holed two 6"-wide holes another 24" deep (so a total of 34" below ground level).  We filled them with 6" of gravel, then added posts to tie off the new tree, packed with gravel to 6" below the top of the hole.  This post hole was purposely over-engineered to not just steady the posts, but also to provide drainage paths through the hardpan.  

5)  With the posts set, we broad forked the next 6" of soil, amended with a large load of composted wood chips, and mixed well.  We imagine that level to be the future primary root zone, so we were pretty careful there.  Photo 3.

6)  Next was the bare root tree.  We soaked the rootball for 3 hours beforehand, stretched out and directionally separated all the roots as far as they could go, then sprinkled layer after layer of broken-up top soil, coconut coir, and a dusting of Mykos mychorrhizol innoculant.  That brought the soil level back up to the original soil level.  We also tamped the soil in to ensure root-soil contact and watered it well.  Photo 4

7)  We tied each tree to two posts (the tree was planted equi-distant between to two poles 3' apart) with "Rapiclip" soft wire tie.

 Covered the root zone (3' diameter circle) with construction paper followed by 2" of EXCELLENT compost. Photo 5.

9)  Installed a 3'-diameter 5'-tall wired fence around each tree, anchored to the posts with sturdy wire.

10) Back-filled the entire area, except inside the wire fences, with 12" of composted wood chips.  Photo 6

11)  Drank.

This was all Too Hard.  We knew it was over-kill, probably, but we figured (correctly) that we would learn a bunch of things we didn't know we didn't know.

So knowing where future trees are going to go (this is a planned forest garden, after all), we plan to put up those tubular free-standing 5'-tall 3'-diameter fences one year ahead of time, over soil from which we've removed chips and broad-forked in compost.  We'll then grow beans, peas, zucchini, cukes, etc. on those trellises-to-be-fences for the first year.  That should prep the soil and avoid lots of this crazy-hard work.  We're initially thinking early peas on the north side of the trellises, then late beans on the south side.  We'll then harvest, cut the roots, and chop-'n-drop the greens.  Plus lots of compost to support all the growth.  This will temporarily push the soil in a bacterial dominated direction, but once we plant the trees and limit the compost (just wood chips), it should quickly shift back to a fungal dominated state.

That's our tentative plan, anyway.  We'de be interested to hear others' ideas.  Planting trees the way we just did is just too much darn work!

And now for fencing.

We hired a professional orchardist when we bought this home to look about the grounds and inform our planning.  1/3 of that conversation was about soil, another 1/3 about tree choice/propagation, and the last 1/3, fencing.  He's very big on fencing.  Not to further confuse the math, but 1/2 the reason we're obsessed with fencing is just so we never have to face him and explain why our fencing is not up to snuff.  He would be, Disappointed.

We're eventually going to build something like 400' of new fencing around this forest garden.  Other parts of that perimeter will be filled in with the house, barn, existing fencing, and thick bushes.  But 400' is a lot (to us), so we want to strike that balance between beauty, practicality, and effectiveness.  And for us, practicality means using our own milled lumber.

The fence is mainly to keep deer out.  34 years in the Army taught me that there's no such thing as a single barrier.  A fence is more than just posts and rails and wire mesh.  It's ease of approach, launch footing, distracting and uncertain objects in their sight-line, barrier height, barrier width, ability to view their landing, and certainty of that landing pad.  It's all about complicating their risk calculations!  Then of course there's the even more important factors of deer density, and food outside the fence vs. inside the fence.  There's lots of browsable greenery all around our property, and only about 6 regulars, so our deer pressure is moderate at most.  And we ADORE them, just not amongst our forest garden.

Fencing with wood is a particular brand of fencing.  Metal is easier, I think.  We could have pounded in 10' metal posts, put a robust wire along the top, then set some Deer Busters 7' mesh.  Seriously, that's probably what anyone should do.  But we have this mill, all this timber, and we prefer the look of wood.

So last year, we milled 30 5"x5" 10' timbers, plus a ton of 10'6" rails, 1" thick.  Now we're getting to use them.  It's really cool to see everything fitting together over these rather long-term theoretical timelines.  It amazes us that we have all this perfectly-dimensioned lumber at our finger-tips!  But that was A LOT of work last year.  The point is, fences like this take a ton of planning.

So this is it:  Photo 1 is one of our posts with its base painted with preservative, wrapped in tar paper, and taped.  Wood rot is caused by air + water + wood, so we're trying to eliminate the water and air as much as we can.

Lots of string and levels make it all work.  All this effort and material deserves exact siting, so we put quite a lot of time into making sure everything is in it's right place.

Photo 2 is the fence!  Just a small portion so far, plus an elaborate 400 sqft fruit tree cage taking shape on the right.  All posts are dug in 40", with 4" of gravel in the bottom.  The post is then set in gravel with repeated tamping and leveling.  As soon as we set the posts, we brace them to adjacent posts so things can settle w/o drifting, sagging, or leaning.

The base rails are timber slabs, dug-in slightly to complicate the voles/rodents digging under the fence.  Those bottom rails are then back-filled with clay and gravel.

The majority of the barrier is 5' galvanized welded 2"x4" wire mesh, secured to top and bottom rails by 1/2" T50 staples.  The 1" rails (of varying height) are themselves secured with 1/4" lag bolts.  Very solid.

Roy Therrien wrote:First trees in!  Three cherry trees (Bing, Ranier, Stella) arrived a bit earlier than we expected.  That's probably a good thing, given the number of things we learned in the process.

Our major take-away from this first tree-planting experience was, wow, we gotta find an easier way.  Three trees took 4 hard days of work, often with two people.  That probably sounds funny to y'all, and frankly we enjoyed it, but it was wayyyy too inefficient.

My heart hurts for you here. Not just because of all the work you did, but because it may not have been the best for the trees either. Something I've heard from multiple sources, and have a little anecdotal confirmation of, is don't amend the planting hole. If you have a bunch of good stuff right in that hole, and regular stuff outside of it, the tree roots won't want to leave it, resulting in a potentially unstable tree that may not reach out to its dripline. Also, I'm curious about the logistics of your drainage test. Why do it after the trees arrived? It just seems like something you would do before you even order them, so you can plan to put in species tolerant to the conditions of the locale, or be able to amend the situation ahead of time.

Lastly, I am in the camp of not tying up transplanted trees. There may be some situations where it is needed, but the ties are effectively a crutch for the tree; they hold it upright so it doesn't have to on its own. If the hole is deep and wide enough, and you did a good job spreading the roots and backfilling the hole, then pressing out any air pockets, the tree should be able to support itself just fine. Then as wind sways it around, it will generally shoot out roots in the opposite direction to stabilize itself. If it relies on those crutches, it never has to develop the stabilizing roots, and may be prone to coming down when it's mature.

You guys sure have pampered those trees, and I'm not knocking you for it, but you are very correct in assuming that there is a much easier and faster way to do it. Trust the organism and it's ability to adapt and thrive.

Hi Roy, Thanks for the detailed posts and great pictures - I've just been catching up. You've certainly got a lovely place coming on there.
Were the cherries planted where the soil had been subsoiled? I'm assuming not since you felt it was still poorly draining. Another option is to plant the trees on little humps so they don't have their feet in water. I've found that they grow well here, even in quite wet ground, so I wouldn't worry too much anyhow, although I think apples are a bit fussier. Will you need the individual tree fencing after the peripheral fencing is complete? Or is this against your own future livestock? I suspect that grazing animals will not mix well in an establishing forest garden!
As regards tree staking; I tend to do single stakes low down at an angle, so the tree trunk can move but the roots are stabilised. I usually use an old inner tube as a tie with a twist in between tree and stake to prevent rubbing. This video illustrates it quite well:gardeners world although he uses a proper tree tie. I guess it depend on the size of the tree however, and your wind conditions how much support they will need.

Thanks so much Nancy and Jonathan!  Wonderful timing, too.  My wife and I are 1/2 way through planting 55 more trees which just arrived this weekend.  Natives (cedar, fir, maple, native elderberry...), not fruit trees, but still.  We're riding that learning curve, and thanks for a push up the hill!

How many of us giggle when we see that inevitable note on seed packs, plant stickers, or tree labels:  "Prefers moist, well drained soil with full sun."  Nancy, on Skye, you definitely know what I mean.  Permies is about challenges, not the yards with bright sun and a uniform coat of moist, well-drained soil.  They probably don't read Permies.

Here on Whidbey, it's clay, hardpan, deer, and wind.  An un-staked first-year tree is a goner.  I'll be re-testing and improving drainage forever.  Preventing deer damage means defense-in-depth.

I should add "Clay, hardpan, high winds" to my profile.  My bad.

It's an interesting question, "How many raised beds should we build?"

Well, we all know the answer, it's the same one every time: One more.

This is raised bed number three, and like the first two, it's completely different than anything we've done yet (heh).  Each location is different, our lumber at hand is different, and our ideas are evolving.  This one is a weird shape (a polygon with no equal sides), over two stumps at the confluence of paths (photo 1).  We have an entire pile of 6x6 Red Alder, and while it will decay rather quickly, it is 6x6, so we're hoping the bed will last at least 5 years.

To maximize the amount of alder we could use up (a slew of varying lengths), we went with a Lincoln-Log structure.  The bottom timbers in contact with soil are Doug Fir, which should stand up to the rot slightly better.  Each of the 4 overlapped corners are secured with one 2' piece of 3/8" rebar (photo 2).  We drilled a 1/2" hole in each end of each timber and slid it onto the 2' rebar as we added layers.  This required us to measure and mark very carefully, but it all went surprisingly smoothly.  Each timber slid into place with a satisfying *thump*.  And truth-be-told, much of our lumber (these were our very first cuts with the new mill last year) is crooked, twisted, checked, uneven, and wavy.  The only thing we did carefully was mark the holes for the rebar.

The gaps between the Lincolned Logs are fit with shorter logs, then secured to structure via the 1/2" plywood on the interior (using 4" Timber Loc lag bolts, which conveniently pull and secure the otherwise floating logs into position).  The soil inside pushes the plywood out, the plywood pulls the logs in. (photo 3)  When the plywood rots, we can add braces to the outer surface and extend the life another few years.

Time for asparagus!  This is just one of the many totally foreseeable spring projects that we totally did not foresee, so we kinda had to make up something quick.  A friend alerted us that the local Country Store had just received a shipment of massive, super-healthy asparagus starts, so the first day of spring instantly morphed into Asparagus Day.

Asparagus, we hear, benefit greatly from the better soil temps of a raised bed.  But our current 3 heavy-timber raised beds are all fully committed to other projects, so we needed another raised bed, quick.  A recently emptied rain harvest IBC caught our eye, and 20 minutes later with a sawzall, voila, two raised beds.  With the top 1/2 of the IBC bolted to a wooden pallet, both are now movable with pallet forks, which is always a nice option.  

Defying the forest garden principle of diversity of planting, this will be one of the very few plants concentrated in one location.  We at first had considered companion planting with our Albion strawberries, but the strawberries' row covers (necessary to prevent the birds eating all of them) would have interfered with the asparagus' large fall growth.

The photos tell it all:  We drilled 50 x 1/2" holes in the bottom of each IBC bed for drainage.  To prevent water accumulating in the now open hollow metal IBC ribs, we plugged the holes of one raised bed with foam cut from an old gardening mat (those are the little pink accents on the top), and the other with 2x4's drilled with 3/4" holes for each IBC rib.  The 2x4's did nicely increase the soil volume of the second raised bed, but in our opinion, was not worth the extra  work.

The bottom 8" is well-rotted crumbled wood from our forest.  The next 8" is garden mix soil from an excellent local nursery (30% sand, 70% composted woody debris, plus an admixture of rich poultry/steer/bat-based compost).  Then the 12 asparagus starts per raised bed, positioned with 12" spacing on small mounds of soil.  Another 6" of soil on top (covering the crowns by about 3"), then watered in.

Feels great to finally have asparagus growing!  We're city folk, never planted asparagus before.  What a fun way to kick off spring!

I just stumbled across your thread Roy.

How's it all looking a year on?