Help & ideas needed small fruit and berry orchard on a clay slope : o )

Hello! My wife and I have been noodling on ways to incorporate a variety of fruit trees and berry bushes into this sloping area on our property here in KY. It is an extremely dense, slightly acidic clay-based soil. We'd like to get bare root trees in the ground next month so we are trying to think of a way we can plant while slowly addressing draining and amendment over time. I've attached a pic of the area, please forgive my lack of photo editing skills. We'd like to go with apple, paw-paw and pear up where you see the green dots while having blue and blackberries down lower on the slope with the blue dots.

Our current plan is an array of raised beds (plenty of lumber available) for the berries down lower on the slope. It is somewhat hard to tell from the photo but the slope is fairly aggressive. For the trees, we plan to dig and amend large pits with our small backhoe. Soil drainage is around 1" per hour so we'd like to get some organic material in the holes to help break it up.

We'd love feedback on the above plan as this would be our most ambitious endeavor. We want to get it right, especially so that our children can enjoy them later down the road but we keep dragging our feet and feel like yet another season might slip away before we do anything. We've had great success with our veggie garden & greenhouse back up at the house and our catfish are getting nice and fat down in the pond. This fruit and berry orchard though... We just feel somewhat paralyzed out of fear of doing it wrong.

Any suggestions would be HUGELY appreciated, thanks a ton in advance!

Welcome to the forum, Mike!

That area looks like a great place for berries and fruit trees.

what we do when we plant fruit trees is to make a small swell at the base of the tree.  This way the tree would catch the water as it goes down the slope.

You have a beautiful place and I think it would work perfect.  Fruit trees actually prefer to be planted on a slop since they hate wet feet.  We just dig and plant bare root in the soil we have.  Filling the hole with a different soil can cause problems with the roots staying in that spot, sort of like planting it in a pot.  We add compost and mulch to the top, but be careful and don't let it touch the bark.  Don't dig your hole any deeper than the root or the tree will sink over time as the soil settles and your graft may then be too low.  

As for berries, we've found them to thrive just about anywhere.  Good luck and please keep posted pictures as you progress.        

Thanks for the help! We're so excited and plan to head up to our local nursery this weekend to learn what will be coming in next month. We learned that Persimmon is native here in KY and plan to incorporate a few of those as well. We'll be sure to post pics along the way.

We've got a few hollows where the soil alongside the seasonal creeks looks incredible. Would it be safe to do a 50/50 mix of that along with the existing clay or would that be too much amendment?

Thanks again!

I have a small orchard on a slope.  Pawpaw, persimmons, Asian pears, jujube and soon Hazel Nuts.  And Blackberries.  
My land is bumpy and has a lot of self made swells and berms.  I just let the rain tell me where the water wants to go. Wood chips tell me a lot on the direction and speed.  I can bring a small front end loader of dirt and put in a little berm to slow down the flow.  

I'm no expert, but that looks like a great place for berries and I'm not sure you'd need to do much besides maybe make some swells to help the plants establish. I'm relatively new to tree fruits, so I hazard to give my opinion there. I will, however, say that most of the orchards I've visited have had much more slope than you do in your photo. Best of luck!

Howdy folks, I just wanted to circle back and post a pic of the trees we recently planted. The holes were big (at least for me) at around 3.5' deep and 3.5' across. The freshly scraped sod was just flipped over and dropped into the bottom of the hole. We then added a small amount of decaying leaves, branches and sticks from the tree-line and topped it all off with a healthy 4" of mulch. The dirt was shaped to hold a bit of water and I've been watering them every few days for the past 2 weeks. They all seem to be doing great so far.

Thanks a ton for the tips, we noticed 10 or so raspberry clumps shooting up so we decided it would be the first area we'd focus on from a guild standpoint. Its that area in the upper right, we laid cardboard and mulch over the area leaving just the raspberries exposed and watered it all with a fairly decent soak.

We still have about 7 trees to go but we may wait until next spring, the heat is really starting to kick in. I could tell the trees were stressed the first couple of days. Anyhow, thanks again!!!

Are those Juniper trees? If so make sure your apple and pears are Rust resistant.  (Cedar apple rust) and Pear Quince Rust) are two examples.