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?
Thanks in advance for any comments/ideas!
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