Fruttorti Parma

Thank you John for your valuable suggestions, especially the one about inoculating some fungi soil.

We are getting a bit overwhelmed from the grasses growth. It looks like if we leave it up to them the system will be too high maintenance requiring very regular and extensive hand cutting especially if we want to grow things like aromatic herbs, strawberries, beans and salads around the trees.

Maybe we shall treat the fruit tree guilds as vegetable gardens and use hay to mulch and suppress grasses.
If we only use the meadow cuttings as mulch, might the mulch start fermenting/rotting in an "unhealthy" way?

Very likely is just matter of time (so that we slowly replace spontaneous herbs with other plants)

It seems that in a way or another we have to kiss goodbye to the original meadow...

Hello there,

We started an edible garden in an urban green area. The starting point was a meadow characterized by a high diversity of spontaneous common herbs (plantain, dandelion, Bellis perennis, Crepis sp, various Gramineae and many others.
The idea is not to disturb the soil (like by plowing or hoeing) thus we started planting other edible plants (aromatic herbs, annual and perennial veggies) by simply making "a small hole" for the seeds or the seedlings in the areas around the fruit trees we planted (trying to develop some sort of fruit tree guilds).
To your opinion, is this a meaningful permacultural approach in such a context to start an edible garden?

The spontaneous plants grow very fast and some become quite tall so we produce quite a bit of green mulching (we use scissors and a hand mower for the cutting). Is it ok to leave it all on the ground as is, once cut? Is there the risk that we get overwhelmed by more aggressive spontaneous gramineae or even mud as we continue somehow disturbing the “original” meadow by cutting, mulching and stepping?
The areas planted are quite wide (1.5 to 2.5m radius around each tree).
Thank you for your suggestions!