I'm keeping an "Establishing a New Forest Garden" journal elsewhere on this forum. My last entry was about how my wife an I spent 4 days of hard work planting three bare root dwarf cherry trees. I figured by doing the Full Monty on this tree planting, we would learn how to do it better. Well maybe, but we certainly learned at least how not to do it. It was just too hard!
So necessity birthed this proposal for future plantings of bare root fruit trees: While planting these cherry trees, the only thing that seemed easier than anticipated was the fencing. 5' tall wire fencing cut 10' long soooo easily wraps into a 3' stable, self-standing structure. And since we want to fence our young trees anyway, why not work much much less by preping the soil a year before planting, allowing vegetable root growth and nitrogen fixing to lead the way?
So the idea is this: Put up the 3' fence cylinder the year before. Prep the soil first by simply clearing away the 12" of wood chips and broad-forking in an ample amount of compost. (photo 1, but without the tree).
In spring, we'll plant peas on the north side of the cylinder, which the peas can trellis up (photo 2). Gives us peas, fixes nitrogen, gets roots in the ground. As my good friend Sarah, says, always amend with life.
In summer, just before the peas max-out, we'll plant pole beans on the south side of the cylinder/trellis (photo 3). They'll grow while the peas die-back, adding more roots and nitrogen. We could even try zucchini and or cucumbers where the peas were (after cutting at the root line and chop-'n-drop the greens.) Our main goal is root development to get the soil ready for our young trees. Getting veggies is entirely secondary.
Perhaps for the winter, will do some leafy brassicas in the center of the fence/trellis.
This will get the soil leaning in a bacterially-dominated direction, but only for one year. When the tree goes in and we're back to heavy wood chip mulching, the soil web should tilt back to fungal-dominated.
I'm certain this is a half-baked idea. What do you think? How can we make this idea work better? My biggest concern is these annual veggie roots may not penetrate far enough into the future dwarf fruit tree's root zone to make much of a difference. Our soil is pretty clayey 6" down, and we don't want to handicap our fruit trees from the beginning.
Or maybe fruit trees simply are that hard to plant correctly and we just have to get used to it?
My philosophy is that trees are living beings, who got along for millions of years without human intervention. I prefer to dig a hole in the soil, plop the tree into it, and walk away. By this method, I can plant hundreds of trees in a day.
Joseph Lofthouse wrote:My philosophy is that trees are living beings, who got along for millions of years without human intervention. I prefer to dig a hole in the soil, plop the tree into it, and walk away. By this method, I can plant hundreds of trees in a day.
I do like Joseph. I personally would never mix compost into a hole that a tree was going to go in. How did you plant the trees that took more than a day per tree? I planted 400 trees in 3 days a couple years ago, and that was in pretty bad, hard clay soil. I can't imagine spending more than an hour planting a tree no matter how much care I put into it.
If you have a year to get ready before putting in a tree, I would do pretty much the opposite of your plan. I would pile a foot or two of wood chips on the spot and then leave it alone until I was ready to plant. When planting time came, I would pull off the wood chips that hadn't rotted yet, plant the tree, and put the wood chips back around it. It might take 15-20 minutes.
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