Thank you all so much for your advice! I was actually thinking about doing small pits in a diamond pattern and fill them up with
mulch, but wasn't sure. Another idea was to dig large 3'x3' pits, put good dirt in, and plant
fruit trees in them, in a diamond pattern about 6 ft apart.
Now, here are some pictures of the slope that we have. It's 4 acres, and all of that goes down the eastern slope. All of it is terraced. This means, there are large 20-ft wide steps that then drop off to the level below. The hill is pretty steep at around 45 degrees in some places, then levels off, then goes up again. On the lower part of the property, the slope goes less steep, I'm not sure how steep, but there's an
acre or so of usable lot that slopes slightly. On that more level spot we wanna put paddocks for chickens with paddock shift design, pecan trees, and just as many fruit trees as we can possibly fit. Given that about 50% dies of everything I plant, we need a bunch. On the steeper slope up the hill we also need to plant fruit trees, and possibly make it so we don't have to water them. Fruit trees that aren't watered give fruit that's healthier anyway.
So this is the steeper terraced area:
This is looking up the hill and the terrace is rimmed with rocks where it levels off.
This is the area at the bottom of the hill:
It still has terraces that are about a foot tall.
In this area, all of the soil is suffering from overgrazing that happened over hundreds of years. There's barely any grass, the soil is rocky, the topsoil is 6" tops, and most of the organic matter washes down into rivers and lakes. I will probably need to bring some
wood chips to cover most of the
land. We are about 40 miles from town, so I don't know if any arborists would be willing to drop their woodchips on our lot.