To mulch or STUN to start a food forest

Mark Shepard's approach is survival of the fittest.

Others recommend laying a large layer of mulch to get started.

I can currently get truckloads of chips from a tree guy, at no cost, so that makes the decision easier.

Seems like Mark's approach makes more sense, but most people say you need to start with some sort of biomass to feed.

I will be planting all sorts of trees, bushes, nuts, fruits, etc.... Probably just going to use swales for water. I get 14 in rain a year, so pretty arid/desert-like. Zone 4-ish

What is everyone's thoughts?

Mulch, then plant.
In my experience,neglect happens, no need to work at it.

I absolutely agree.

If you have free mulch, take full advantage of it to improve the soil. Then plant and keep the strongest.

My aim when I grow anything near the house is to give just enough care so that half the stuff survives, otherwise I'll get no yield. Further away from the house I just plant whatever, wherever and let nature decide, giving minimal care on the terrace behind the house and zero care further up the mountain. I apply mulch near the house if I can get it, but nothing further away. There's only so much mulch I can lay my hands on, and only so much energy available to spread it, so most places get nothing.

A lot of folks may not know what STUN is.

(Sheer Total Utter Neglect)

Mark said, " On the 3-5 Acres of annuals that we do, I do quite a bit of work. In fact most of our fuel expense is because of the stupid annuals... tilling, cultivating, mowing, seeding, etc...
... establish and maintain an acre or three (once upon a time did 12 ac) of winter squash & or green peppers, harvest produce, check to see when crops are ripe, 

The only way it will happen is if you DO this.. Start where you are with what you have and keep on planting food systems everywhere you go no matter what... It will only take 15 years. It may "cost" a million bucks to do it, but what are the costs of NOT doing this? I refuse to go along with the destruction of my planet and will do everything I can to turn it around... 

https://permies.com/t/20694/Mark-Shepard-Yields-Started-STUN

https://permies.com/t/20657/Questions-Mark-Shepard-Started-Mistakes

You've already observed that access to woodchips matters in this calculus. But so does access to seed-stock. Quality chestnut and hazelnuts aren't free and when doing STUN, you might want to plant thirty times the number of trees you want. It seems like a tall ask when you're getting started. My approach is to start my own nursery with a little more care and devotion and once I have those trees producing seeds, I'll spread the planting across my acreage with more of a STUN philosophy.

Christopher Weeks wrote:You've already observed that access to woodchips matters in this calculus. But so does access to seed-stock. Quality chestnut and hazelnuts aren't free and when doing STUN, you might want to plant thirty times the number of trees you want. It seems like a tall ask when you're getting started. My approach is to start my own nursery with a little more care and devotion and once I have those trees producing seeds, I'll spread the planting across my acreage with more of a STUN philosophy.

Great points! I think I will do that. If Mark told us his survival rate, that would be nice. 1 in 30 seems kinda low unless you are working hard to kill them :)

William Bronson wrote:Mulch, then plant.
In my experience,neglect happens, no need to work at it.

Thanks. How much mulch do you like to use?

Yeah, I'm an expert neglecter.

Also just found this from Stefan Sobkowiak:

"Give the tree 4-5 years or 3-4 years of care to get it off to a good start then STUN. I made the mistake in one block of trying it from planting year and now have STUNted trees."

Mulch it is !!

pete parker wrote:1 in 30 seems kinda low unless you are working hard to kill them :)

I'm new at this and my impression comes from reading, not time with dirty hands. But that impression looks like this: If I plant thirty nuts by just soaking them a bit, and then stepping them into the loam and kicking some leaves over them, I'd expect ten trees to come up and that feels a little optimistic. Then half of those are going to be obviously inferior in the first couple years -- weird growth habit or dying in our long brutal winter. Of the five remaining, how many am I going to cut down in five or eight years when they turn out not to produce much? I'd guess three. So now I have two trees that are good. Fewer than one of those will be really great trees that I want producing genes in twenty years.

Ecosystems differ: My ecosystem kills thousands of sprouted tree seeds per year. I can totally believe 1/30.

Size matters: Mark Shepard is working with ex-farmland and planting rows on contour on acres at a time. I am surrounded by second-growth cedar/fir forest which has been badly invaded by both English Ivy and Daphne. I'm planting trees with useful fruit on a 1 or 2 per/year basis - STUN just isn't worth the failure rate considering I'm already feeling a little like I'm planting for my grand-children!

Survival expectations: I have absolutely read reliable examples of STUN style plantings surviving what nature throws at the tree years after planting. Humans can describe what happens as "stunted" or "less productive", but from the plant's perspective, this is their version of survival of the fittest. Fast growth of a large human food source is *our* goal - not the tree's! So again, we need to balance our expectations and the land we have available to work with, and what we intend to do with the results. If we're looking to compete with grocery store huge, perfect apples, we aren't likely to achieve that without more input than STUN allows for. However, if our goal is to feed our family and neighbours when a 1000 year worst drought happens, or we have a "year without summer" because some volcano decides to blow its top off, those STUN, or "near" STUN trees may be the ones that survive and produce at least minimally. I work hard to "wean" my trees off extra water slowly and steadily, but in our bad drought summers (as opposed to our "usual" drought summers) if I need food, I need to help out with some water on the trees I'm counting on.

Modern Industrial Farming expectations: This isn't permaculture. I don't believe it's sustainable. I don't believe it's necessary to feed the planet (but just to feed the industrial perpetual growth/profit cycle)

The Miyawaki Method: This is a neat, fast growth native forest system that's being done all over the world. Its goal is mini Urban Forests on the model of what surrounds ancient temples in Japan. This system prepares a deep bed (3 ft), mulches baby polyculture plants, has people provide water as needed, weeding as needed and replaces some plants if they don't make it for the first 3 years, and then moves to a STUN type approach. They've been having good success.  The soil prep is based on "abused urban soil - give the plant some chance" philosophy. These forest patches (minimum size 10 meters by 10 meters) are being planted for Mother Nature, not human-centric (although urban humans receive benefits on many levels such as the reduction of "heat islands" and filtering of urban air pollution.)

There are so many tools in the Permaculture (and other names for permaculture-like things) tool-box, it often comes down to balancing what one "observes" in  their ecosystem, what one's "resources" happen to be, and balancing "goals" with all interested parties. If you need to make money, you need the inputs to do so. If you need to feed just your family and neighbours, you don't need to work your plants as hard. If you need some of both, I would do as Mark Shepard and have parts of the farm do different things, gradually transitioning areas as time/money allows until you have a truly sustainable system.

I stopped trying to improve my urban lot as a whole and now I pile up leaves in 4x4 beds.

The only exception is my "forest of spite " which is roughly 30' x4' x2' deep.

If I could have buried the whole lot 3' deep in woodchips,  I would have.
The lesser amounts I could obtain and spread, almost seem to disappear into the clay and rocks beneath.

So I focused my work on creating good, deep soil in smaller spots.
I planted into these lasagna beds, even though I often did not harvest them.u
This year I'm adding trees to these beds, but growing squash as well.
Eventually these beds will merge into ~30' ×4' long strip of food forest.
Till then they will host long season annuals as well as young fruit and nut trees.

The spite forest gets hardy yam, dumpster potatoes, Jerusalem Artichoke and Gobo root.
It also gets almost any woody plant that volenteers in any yard of mine.
Im hoping to create a dense planting of trees and shrubs that can produce privacy and biomass.

I try to make the best soil I can and use tough/expendable plants/seeds, because of who I am.

Being a gardener I enjoy tending to my plants.
Being of a permaculture bent, I have resolved to chose plants that can thrive under my erratic care.
Being erratic, I find out what works the hard way, by doing it.
Being poor, I try to protect my family from my obsessions by using cheap and free tools an materials.
Free mulch plus time makes great soil.
Trees can be propagated into forests.

Check out Sean at Edible Acres for a land steward who's model might fit your scale.
He propagates a lot of trees and plants them out with no mechanical protections, but he does use debris and plant guilds to bring them to maturity.
He plants a lot of nursery stock amidst annual crops, allowing the care need for one to affect the other.

Depends on where you live.  Here, mulch is the fastest way to kill a tree.  It's either too moist in the winter, so the tree drowns, or too dry and the mulch prevents the dew from getting to the roots.

We had a few hundred extra trees one year grown from seeds.  So we planted them out at the start of the second dryest/hottest summer in history.  None of them got watered in.

10 years later:
50 got nothing - 5 survived after 10 years STUN
100 got a mulch of rocks - 4 died total
50 got woodchips - all died within a month

But if you live somewhere that gets rain at least once a month, your results will be different.  It helps to have a walk around areas that are freshly cleared and growing new forests to see how the soil is building.  Is the moisture/heat right for the leaves to compost in place?  Then mulch is probably good for your climate.  If the soil builds almost exclusively through animal poo or the leaves turn to powder during the summer, then mulch may not be the best choice.

Of course, you can always do as I did and experiment with different techniques and see which works for your location.  It doesn't have to be one or the other.  We get more information by trying both.