Planning for succession on the small farm?

Hey my fellow permies,

I have a small (4.5 acre) property on the southern gulf islands. It has historically been both an organic vegetable garden and a flower garden. Up until now we've been focusing on building our house, but the economic downturn has meant less work from my day job and I'd like to use my extra time to get the land back into farming shape. We have about 2 acres of excellent soil that just needs some TLC.

The eventual goal is 1 3/4 acres of primarily apple orchard with a perennial cash crop understory and 1/4 acre market garden. However I plan to grow annuals on 1/2 acre while we wait for the trees to start producing.

Where we live, our primary market is selling to tourists and wholesalers, as almost everyone here grows some of their own veggies. I am looking at growing tasty snacks that don't require cooking and can be brought on a hike/to the beach, I.e. cherry tomatoes, snacking cukes, personal melons, strawberries. Once the trees start to produce, I'd like to start selling our tree and cane fruit, as well as what we grow in the understory such as wild garlic and fiddleheads. We have a couple very fancy restaurants that buy such items and try to source on island.

My question is, has anyone transitioned from a more traditional vegetable market garden to a food-forest adjacent orchard? I know that people alley crop however our land isn't laid out for growing everything in straight lines. I worry that I am essentially doubling my work by having two ideas at once, and having to rebrand/market in a few years. Thoughts and advice very much welcome!

Since you will be having a 1/4 acre market garden and a 1/2 acre annual garden do you plan to use equipment to do the planting?

I cant answer your first question though I feel rebranding might not be a bad idea as you learn what works and what doesn't work.

Anne Miller wrote:Since you will be having a 1/4 acre market garden and a 1/2 acre annual garden do you plan to use equipment to do the planting?

I cant answer your first question though I feel rebranding might not be a bad idea as you learn what works and what doesn't work.

No solid plans for equipment yet. There have been some brief chats with a neighbour about going in one some but will require a lot more hashing out. Thanks for your response!

While we don’t have as much room as you do, we do have a food forest plus a raised bed garden. The food forest is 3300 square feet, where I am growing mediterranean and sub, tropical fruits and vegetables.
In the food forest I have a wide variety of trees, shrubs and ground cover. The top layer is a pecan tree, cashew tree, prickly pear and palm trees, some being bananas. Eventually my Barbados cherry will also get up there. The middle layer is plum trees, guava, lemons, elderberries,  tangerines and peaches. The shrub layer is Natal plums, tree collards, hibiscus, roses, rock roses, borage, coffee, cardamom, tea, raspberries, blackberries, pineapples, artichoke and currants. The bottom layer has strawberries, and a mix of herbs, onions, cassava, rams, wild garlic, bayleave,  clover medicinal flowers. For vines I grow black pepper, sweet potatoes, melons and passion fruit.
It has taken us almost 9 years to get to this point. We starts with some raised beds to grow annual and to start perennials in. Once the perennials out grew the raised beds, they were moved to the food forest. As the years passed, we added more and more raised beds, so we now have 20 of them. Out of those 5 are full of perennial vegetables and heat sensitive herbs and plants.
Have you thought about making the food forest into a tourist attraction and educational spot? I give tours several times a year, teaching people about permaculture, food production, pest control and wildlife management. I am sure that schools would love to visit as well.
As for cash crops for restaurants I would recommend mushrooms, herbs, dandelion leaves, dead nettle, and edible flowers. I know several people who do that mix, and earns a lot that way.
Last, I would recommend you do your planning on paper first. Did you take the permaculture design course?
I didn’t and have regretted it. Instead I used a program called garden planner 2, which works great, for our small homestead.

We do small wildlife food plots and a large sunflower garden.

This is what we use:

https://permies.com/t/120293/garden-scale-drill-seeder#970283

https://permies.com/t/59219/permaculture/Seed-Drill-Broadcast

https://permies.com/t/108805/seeder-Ruth-Stout-method

Anne Miller wrote:We do small wildlife food plots and a large sunflower garden.

This is what we use:

https://permies.com/t/120293/garden-scale-drill-seeder#970283

https://permies.com/t/59219/permaculture/Seed-Drill-Broadcast

https://permies.com/t/108805/seeder-Ruth-Stout-method

Cool, thanks!

Ulla Bisgaard wrote:While we don’t have as much room as you do, we do have a food forest plus a raised bed garden. The food forest is 3300 square feet, where I am growing mediterranean and sub, tropical fruits and vegetables.
In the food forest I have a wide variety of trees, shrubs and ground cover. The top layer is a pecan tree, cashew tree, prickly pear and palm trees, some being bananas. Eventually my Barbados cherry will also get up there. The middle layer is plum trees, guava, lemons, elderberries,  tangerines and peaches. The shrub layer is Natal plums, tree collards, hibiscus, roses, rock roses, borage, coffee, cardamom, tea, raspberries, blackberries, pineapples, artichoke and currants. The bottom layer has strawberries, and a mix of herbs, onions, cassava, rams, wild garlic, bayleave,  clover medicinal flowers. For vines I grow black pepper, sweet potatoes, melons and passion fruit.
It has taken us almost 9 years to get to this point. We starts with some raised beds to grow annual and to start perennials in. Once the perennials out grew the raised beds, they were moved to the food forest. As the years passed, we added more and more raised beds, so we now have 20 of them. Out of those 5 are full of perennial vegetables and heat sensitive herbs and plants.
Have you thought about making the food forest into a tourist attraction and educational spot? I give tours several times a year, teaching people about permaculture, food production, pest control and wildlife management. I am sure that schools would love to visit as well.
As for cash crops for restaurants I would recommend mushrooms, herbs, dandelion leaves, dead nettle, and edible flowers. I know several people who do that mix, and earns a lot that way.
Last, I would recommend you do your planning on paper first. Did you take the permaculture design course?
I didn’t and have regretted it. Instead I used a program called garden planner 2, which works great, for our small homestead.

The paper plan is definitely happening! My fiancée is about to get her horticulture red seal so very good at making garden plans. She may get a PDC as well.

As for the tours and such, I would consider it, but farms and permie stuff isn't that out of the ordinary on our little island (there is a very public Food Forest run by the local conservation society). We are really focused more on growing food. Your property sounds great!

C Murphy, we live in interesting times. Your location and ability to grow and ship fresh veg may be of national importance very soon. We have the resilience and the will to push past the current nonsense. My 2c.

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:C Murphy, we live in interesting times. Your location and ability to grow and ship fresh veg may be of national importance very soon. We have the resilience and the will to push past the current nonsense. My 2c.

Thanks, I happen to agree with you! Almost all our apples are currently shipped in from Washington. No reason they can't be grown right here. We also have a burgeoning craft cider movement that is pretty exciting!

David the Good developed the perfect system for you called ‘Grocery Row Gardening’. It is a very productive system. He published a great little book you can buy and you can check out his YouTube videos covering the method here:

https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLc-iSYQchLQ_RNZwSjrQpXqWzwWhklflU

GREAT BOOK:
Silvohorticulture   A Growers Guide to Integrating Trees into Crops
by  Andy Dibbens & Ben Raskin

Clear, extremely helpful details

Hi Meredith,

Welcome to Permies.

Ulla, I'm surprised that I didn't see pistachios or avocados. Is there a reason why you don't grow them? Are the palms date palms? If I had the climate, these would be on the top of my list! If I ever win Powerball, I'd get some land where it's warm and grow all the things I can't grow in Vermont...Right now, there is half an inch of snow on the ground...Ughh.  

Ulla Bisgaard wrote:While we don’t have as much room as you do, we do have a food forest plus a raised bed garden. The food forest is 3300 square feet, where I am growing mediterranean and sub, tropical fruits and vegetables.
In the food forest I have a wide variety of trees, shrubs and ground cover. The top layer is a pecan tree, cashew tree, prickly pear and palm trees, some being bananas. Eventually my Barbados cherry will also get up there. The middle layer is plum trees, guava, lemons, elderberries,  tangerines and peaches.

Barbara Simoes wrote:Ulla, I'm surprised that I didn't see pistachios or avocados. Is there a reason why you don't grow them? Are the palms date palms? If I had the climate, these would be on the top of my list! If I ever win Powerball, I'd get some land where it's warm and grow all the things I can't grow in Vermont...Right now, there is half an inch of snow on the ground...Ughh.
 

Ulla Bisgaard wrote:While we don’t have as much room as you do, we do have a food forest plus a raised bed garden. The food forest is 3300 square feet, where I am growing mediterranean and sub, tropical fruits and vegetables.
In the food forest I have a wide variety of trees, shrubs and ground cover. The top layer is a pecan tree, cashew tree, prickly pear and palm trees, some being bananas. Eventually my Barbados cherry will also get up there. The middle layer is plum trees, guava, lemons, elderberries,  tangerines and peaches.

We have one avocado tree, that we are harvesting from, for the first time, this year. The pistachio is more about room. Also, I didn’t give the complete list of the plants. We grow a lot  more plants than these. I grow a lot of herbs and spices like for example black pepper and grains of paradise. Many herbs and spices had dual purpose being both culinary and medicinal.
We also grow coffee and tea plants, lots of different berries and perennial vegetables like mushrooms, tomatoes, asparagus, celery, kale and collards. I grow over a hundred different plants, so I hope you understand why I didn’t list them all.

I totally get it.  I am in awe of some of the things you're growing!  I thought pistachios were quite small (They max out by25- 30' and are only 15-30' wide...although they do require a male and a female), that's why I was surprised.  I read somewhere on this site that someone in Utah was growing pistachios, and I think he said he was in zone 5 like I am...that's when I wanted to find out about them.  But, Utah zone 5 and Vermont zone 5 are lightyears apart.  We are not nearly as dry as they are, nor as sunny. What you grow sounds very exotic to me!  Coffee and bananas...wow! You also grow stuff that we can grow in the frigid Northeast.  I'm feeling plant envy!

Barbara Simoes wrote:I totally get it.  I am in awe of some of the things you're growing!  I thought pistachios were quite small (They max out by25- 30' and are only 15-30' wide...although they do require a male and a female), that's why I was surprised.  I read somewhere on this site that someone in Utah was growing pistachios, and I think he said he was in zone 5 like I am...that's when I wanted to find out about them.  But, Utah zone 5 and Vermont zone 5 are lightyears apart.  We are not nearly as dry as they are, nor as sunny. What you grow sounds very exotic to me!  Coffee and bananas...wow! You also grow stuff that we can grow in the frigid Northeast.  I'm feeling plant envy!

A lot of what I grow, right now, are experimental, to see if they can grow here and how to do it. I am slowly getting better. Our grow zone is 10b, so we rarely get any frost. I am planting a lot of palm trees like bananas to create some shade while my cashew and other taller trees, have time to grow. Right now we have 90F outside.
I use shade for my raised beds, which helps a lot. We harvested our first wine cap mushrooms this month, after inoculating the bed in October. Shade and mulch are essential when it get this hot.

I can't speak to what your growing environment is like, but as I've poked around the soil food web concept and learned through experience on our acreage, succession is something to consider.

That is, the succession in the soil occurs in concert with succession above ground.  So, since trees prefer more fungal dominated soils, if you just plant them into a bacterial dominated soil (like from continual annual cropping environment), they may not get a good start.  Thus, I think it depends a bit upon how your land was used over recent years.

For us, a portion of our land was used for industrial agricultural cropping on the Canadian prairies (over the years a mix of grains, canola, navy beans, and perhaps others I've forgotten), which implies bacterial domination.  Where we attempted to plant trees right away into this environment, they didn't do well.  Each year, I'm seeing succession move forward - the first year, many of the annual weeds in the soil seed bank sprouted and grew like gangbusters.  I'd broadcast a pollinator cover crop mix, but it germinated later, so only worked where I removed the "overstory" of things like red-root pigweed.  Each year has changed, with more grasses and other native perennial species taking hold.  Succession moves from annuals to perennials to woody plants (shrubs) to trees (and potentially a succession of trees from fast-growing to slower growing trees).  

Thinking along these lines is where I believe the ideas around support species for trees in permaculture works.  We plant a variety of other plants along with our desired fruit / nut / overstory trees that will protect them and help them grow while they establish and if we've chosen our plants well, we'll get a yield or yields from them in the interim.

To sum it up, I believe that planting trees without support into soil that has been used for annual plants is a recipe for disappointment.  At least that's been my experience.  I just wish it didn't take so many successive growing seasons to learn my lessons.

It may be of value / interest to look at what Stefan Sobkowiak has done - he's in Quebec physically, has an extensive YouTube channel as well as a web site for his Miracle Farm.  He likes to call what he's doing a permaculture orchard as he's transitioned from a conventional organic apple orchard to a much more diverse operation.

Good luck.

We have more room & more existing diversity - but less planning! So, great topic (even though I thought it was going to be about how to keep the farm in the family... that kind of succession, which is more daunting, even depressing, so I like dwelling on this idea better!).

Mainly the family farm is cattle and hay. But our piece of it has cleared land (currently a lot of lawn) as well as the bull pasture. Technically I get to decide all of the planting stuff, but practically we have requirements that are fixed, such as places I can't plant anything (because that's where the trailer needs to go when we're moving bulls, for example). Indeed a lot of the property is set aside for one reason or another, and we have giant white oaks that cast shade over much of the rest. Maybe I have an acre? But also wooded acreage around the edges. As we move toward retirement from both day jobs, we've done a fair amount of revisions to meet varying needs, and frankly just this year I'm starting to see something like a strategy emerging.

1. Medicinal, herbal, useful, sustainable.
Besides not-very-serious veg farming, this is the original foundation of our approach. First, things that meet our own health and welfare needs, with about a decade now learning what will grow easily or not, and establishing areas for this and that, especially focusing on perennials and root-harvest things that need time to sustainable harvest. We have this and that all over.

2. Two gardens.
The upper garden we built first. Because of deer, groundhogs, and assorted other felonious beasts, it's fortified with 9-10' fencing of three to five types: "rabbit" type down low, then alternating barbed wire and electrified, with reinforcements in a few vulnerable places. Then we added a lower garden on the other side of the bull pasture, but I'm still broadforking that one into submission. The upper garden gets planted every summer, rotating sections with our favorite stuff, and last fall I used a section for winter garlic, while the lower garden so far has been more experimental. Each one is about 15x25'.

3. Trees berries guilds and forest.
We started with a few apple, plum, and pear trees from big box stores and suboptimally situated. Then I got interested. Now we have heritage apples all around, mulberries, and a wide variety of other berry/fruit/other productive patches in the open areas and edging all of the woods. We also have black walnuts (their own special opportunity and challenge!) and pecans. I'm now encroaching into the woods with my schemes, but all of this is far less developed, mostly unplanned and evolving as we go. Some of this is medicinal, as well.

So that's the big picture! It's kind of sprawly and a ton of work, but I can hardly wait to retire and enjoy the process full time. Hope this may spark some ideas for a few others.