Forest gardening
We are working hard to transition our orchard to a forest garden or food forest. Our springtime tasks included a compost tea spray, mulching, spacing pear branches and beginning to convert the grass to cover crop.
Compost tea spray
According to Dr. Elaine Ingham, instead of spraying our fruit trees with toxic chemicals multiple times a year, we can spray with a fungally dominated compost tea and three times should be sufficient in protecting the plant from disease. Once during budswell, then during bud break, and then a month after. So we purchased a kit which consists of a 5 gallon bucket, an air pump and tubing to keep the water oxygenated. We then let the compost brew with fungal foods like fish hydrolosate for 48 hours. If we wanted to make a spray for our garden, we would feed it with bacterial food like molasses, since vegetables prefer it. Using the sprayer was fun, but 4 gallons on your back does get tiring after awhile and we had to make sure we filtered out the compost particulates or else the nozzle would get clogged.
Pear branch spacing
Since pears have a tendency to grow vertically, it helps if you either weigh them down with weights or use spacers to have more of a 60 degree angle. The previous owners had used rope and weights, but we decided to go with spacers since due to neglect, the pear branches are now growing around the rope girdling themselves and will eventually amputate the branches.
Mulching
Mulching benefits the trees by retaining moisture as well as feeding the tree and beneficial mycorrhizal fungi. It also reduces the competition for nutrients by the grass. Sheet mulching can be complex, however, we chose a simple method since this is all we had.
Mow grass and lay cardboard
Wet cardboard
Compost and mini clover seed
Woodchips
Mulching complete!
Black fabric mulch
While not the most environmentally friendly method, we decided to use Martin Crawford's method of using black fabric mulch to kill the sod in between the fruit trees. Since it's such a large area, we won't have enough materials or time to sheet mulch the entire garden with cardboard, compost and wood chips. We'll apply the black fabric mulch in sections for a year, then cover crop it in the meantime until we decide what we would like to plant where. Ultimately we are going to plant guilds around the fruit trees as well as turn them into patches and start to form our paths. I'm using Martin Crawford's book, Creating a Forest Garden, Toby Hemenway's Gaia's Garden, and many awesome Youtube videos as resources and I'm so excited to see how it all evolves!
Fruit trees flowering
Right now it's so exciting to see all of the fruit trees flowering! Let's hope there are no frosts coming.
This plum was the first to flower. Hoping our other plum starts to flower as well for some cross pollination.
Update: The plum flowers fell off and left these behind. I'm hoping they're the fruit?
Peach flower
Peach fruit forming?
Apple Blossoms!
Using the seasons to mark the passage of time beats the calendar and clock any day!