Request - Urban homestead - plant guilds

I love the podcasts and would like to hear more on the small footprint urban homestead landscape space and specifically I would love to see and hear a couple of shows on plant and tree guilds.  I would love to plant some fruit trees on my urban city space and would love to know more about plant selection and what other plants work well with them.  For instance with my small space I am looking at dwarf variety fruit trees like apples, pears, plums etc and would love to know what types of companion plants would work well with those trees and maximizing my minimal space.  Thanks again!

Longsnowsm

This may be a question better posted in the permacuture forum.

I can tell you that we stared last year building a guild on our small steep slope which is on a little over a 1/4 acre lot.  We put in 3 semi-dwarf apple, 1 self fertile semi-dwarf montmorency cherry, two paw paws, 2 serviceberry, 3 chokeberry, 2 blackhaw, lowbush blueberries, highbush blueberries, raspberries and 1 Italian everbearing fig.  Then added red and white clover, nasturtium, foxglove, yarrow, cosmos, lavender, bergamot, bee balm, tuft grasses and some others which I can't remember at the moment.  So, ours got off to a good start, and we will be planting some veggies in there this season as well.  It appears like all or plantings have survived the winter.  We used primarily native plantings to help insure success.

Hope this helps.

I thought the tinkerer forum was the place to request future podcast shows and topics for Paul to do.  That is why I put this as a request for a podcast on plant guilds.

Longsnowsm

Podcast #5 was about urban sized lots and permaculture practice.  I could be wrong, but I don't think all of what you were asking for could be covered in one podcast.  It is probably easier to have the membership flesh out some of the specifics for what you are looking to do.

I am sure the members will step up to give you some suggestions, as I did.  One book that helped me a great deal was Gaia's Garden.  You can find a link at the bottom of the home page and it will take you to Amazon if you wish to purchase it.

Good luck with the project.