Growing in sun limited small backyard and short growing season (cloudy skies) my objective is to maximize harvest in the given growing season. I’d do a permaculture based approach if I had an acre of land with abundant sun.
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There may be a disconnect between farmers here and there. Most farmers here are not good stewards of the land, but a few are. I have farmed all my life as did my parents, grand parents, great grandparents , great great grand parents as far back as i know. Many things i have done wrong and realized later. The problems are numerous and we both know what they are. If what farmers are doing is sustainable they are the few. Most farmers grow gmo and hose the field down with chemicals to kill the weeds. Thats fine but uses a lot of chemical and causes a lot of errosion. Then cows etc. are fed the grains that came off the depleted fields. Many cows never graze they head to the feed lots. The runoff gets in the water. It gets worse from there. Growing brome grass dont pay as well but it just needs fertilizer.
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yeah, those himalayans are CRAZY out your way @murky, I can vouch for that. I remember seeing one near Discovery Park in Seattle that had basically scaled a telephone pole from a low (maybe 4’) fenced bank. It scaled the fence and then shot up the pole easily 15 ft. or more. Funny how some plants just thrive on abuse given the right setting. And some of them just seem like monsters almost. Himalayan blackberry is definitely in that camp.
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Yeah, I had hundreds of feet of them, in places 20 feet high. They climb elderberry, cyclone fences, stumps, and other things to get a head start.
edit: they make a sweet smell and good mulch when mowed down with brush hog. And they don’t compete well with grass when mowed regularly.
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Weedwhacking is not vanity. If I didn’t do that in places I wouldn’t be able to find some of my plants.
Once in a while it can work out- I was able to eat some red currants one time because the weeds hid them from the birds. I pulled the weeds, ate about half the currants and when I came back in a day or two, the rest were gone.
It might be more in balance for the weeds to out-compete my plants, but I’m not looking for balance. I unapologetically want results 
I wish I could spend enough time and effort to ensure there was no habitat for animals in the area. That would save me a lot of effort in battling with them. Of course, I would probably need more land too, or they would just live next door and commute into my orchard.
When I talk to guys from the farmers market who have a real orchard (not 0.5 acres), they have a lot less trouble with animals, since there isn’t as many places for them to live in a big open area (more sun for the trees too).
Same here. When I was a kid there was a ~2 acre field (not in their yard) out behind my grandparents place in MA which was 95% blackberries. Unfortunately, the ones that spread so well had large thorns and formed an impenatrable thicket. Still nice to go around the outside edge picking…
Of course, while the wild thorny ones are so good at competing, I’ve actually had some thornless blackberries decline. Usually it is in an area where I’m not good about keeping the weeds down, though there could be other factors (maybe a few winters where some of the canes were killed, cane borers, etc).
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By now everyone sees many perspective here. The title “Fruit growers become victims of their own prosperity” hopefully makes much more sense to everyone. As we intentionally create an imbalance to favor ourselves nature will attempt to corrext these things. The more we produce the more imbalance exists. Nature will push back in many ways. We need to discuss all aspects of orcharding as a group Reading your trees , bushes, weeds to determine soil needs and type
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30 brix is very high sugar content. I’m not sure getting away with that will be long term. In my area ants, wasps, yellow jackets and other insects quickly begin arriving when sugar moves up. I have to rush to harvest pears sometimes. @fruitnut gets higher brix from fruit , but he controls his environment. Dry farming acres of fruit outside is a different situation.
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Lots of extinction events have happened and are ongoing… so obviously you are not alone in your wish.
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This is an age-old tension. We want to contradictory things. We want wildlife to prosper and be commonplace, both for our own enjoyment and as a good in its own. And we want people to prosper and eat well and we want to tend our gardens and for them to blossom in luscious splendor and abundance. Those two goals are more at adds then not.
Nature is a strict dietician with a fondness for hunger and nutrient deficiency, so man has learned to feed himself instead. Gardens and farms are not the wilds, and intentionally so. While to some extent we want wildlife to have a (controlled) presence in our gardens (birds and bees and such things), even the most died-in-the-wool, Kool-Aid chugging hippie would draw the line somewhere around prairie dogs, rattlesnakes, or mountain lions. And I imagine that were there more of North America’s original flora and fauna still around, even @krismoriah would get a lot more picky about just how close the mastodons are allowed to get to his pear-trees.
The real trick, then, is probably not in figuring out how to combine the wilderness with our farms. Sure, we should be putting more effort into making our farms less inhospitable to wildlife, insofar as that exacts no great tax on human welfare of course. But we hardly want our National Parks and our cattle ranches to be one and the same–for both their sakes.
So, given that farms are doing pretty well, but wildlife is in a crisis, we probably need more land set aside for the wildlife, especially if we get ambitious and want to do some real rewilding. The only way to do that is, of course, shrink the human footprint. Now, we could do that by decreasing the surplus population I suppose, eat the Irish and all that. I am told that our population is far to large for the Earth’s chakra balance, or something along those lines. I’m a bit less sold on the notion that human lives are a bad thing, though. In which case, we’d need to have the same number of people require less space.
Of course, Suburbia is an easy target. And, in all honesty, there are some very valid criticisms of Suburbia even from the human flourishing side of things (they promote dysfunctional cities, which is a way bigger deal than people realize, they force a particular lifestyle, one that we’re learning is actually not very conducive to human happiness, etc). But even that wouldn’t free up all that much land, and there’s an argument that Suburbia, more so than most other human occupancy schemes, is a wildlife habitat of its own.
So it’s farms we need to shrink. But I can’t conscience reducing the world’s food supply, either in quantity or in quality (and I do consider animal protein to be a big step up in quality, so no, we’re not going to just eat beans). How, then, do we massively reduce farm acreage, while maintaining at least the same quantity and quality of food, or ideally increasing both? Sure sounds like we need to find a way to make our farms, which are already more productive than at any point in human history, far, far more productive, on the order of two, five, or ten times more productive.
Just about the only way I see that happening is some potent combination of widespread and cunning use of GMOs and modern breeding techniques in concert with a vast decrease in the costs of energy–an order or two of magnitude below current day. Perhaps the widespread adoption of mass-produced and highly economized (which means sacrificing some of the ludicrous degree of redundant safety we build into those things) nuclear power could do that. Maybe. I doubt fusion will be cheap enough, personally, and I am highly skeptical of Green energy ever getting much below current prices (I mean, getting Green energy down to current prices is a good thing, I’ll freely admit, but if we want to change the world, we need to do better than match current prices, we need ten or a hundred times lower prices).
Until energy is so cheap that we can afford to desalinate and pump enough water to irrigate each and every acre of farmland in the country, and until breeding and genetic engineering techniques are sophisticated enough that we can brush aside petty but pesky things like fireblight and HLB in much the same way that we’ve brushed aside the Black Death, we will continue to require farmland to blanket the earth. I look forward to the day, if it comes, when instead, most farms are segregated away to the dusty and desolate patches of the earth and kept productive simply through the might of human ingenuity, industry and productivity, while the naturally ecologically rich regions of the world are at least partially changed from industrial farms over to a patchwork of great National Parks, nature reserves, gamelands, and, as you get closer to cities, a mixture of more artisanal farms and state/city parks offering the kind of semi-manicured exposure to nature that the vast majority of people prefer.
Yes, that’s a highly idealized and fantastical vision, but it’s a vision, and one I’d contend is a lot nicer than the vision of depopulated cities and deindustrialized societies scratching a merger livelihood from the organic soils of their communal subsistence farms.
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If you can get really cheap energy, then you can more things into indoor/hydroponic production. That would save you a lot of area, as you could have a 40 story tall (or 40 stories deep) building growing strawberries.
In terms of getting that cheap energy, tapping into deep geothermal is another possibility. A few months ago, I heard something (NPR I think) where the guy had been working on it for a long time and seemed optimistic that would eventually be able to scale it. Doesn’t mean it will, but there is plenty of heat energy deep in the earth.
I think a lot of extinction happens through indifference and making changes in the environment which the species is not adapted to. I on the other hand actively want the animals in my local vicinity to no longer exist and take as much action as I can to ensure that.
I’m fine with them existing somewhere…Squirrels probably fill plenty of roles in the wild (spreading/planting nuts for example). Just NIMBY.
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Very true.
From what I’ve read of RAS systems, the biggest issue is mostly just energy costs (the engineering is tricky, yes, but a mostly solved problem. An energy-intensive solved problem). Far cheaper energy means we could economically farm high quality seafood inland, right next to the cities where it’s consumed, and leave the oceans be.
That’s a major win. Heck, I’d go so far as to say that’d be worth the cost of a nuclear meltdown or two over the next century.
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The Dystopian Orchard
What a novel idea for a book or facebook group.
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I’m still waiting to become a victim of my prosperity. My 1/4 acre yard is a jungle. My yields increase every year, now going on for ten years. My yard sticks out like a sore thumb compared to the neighbor’s uncluttered yards.
On a side note my dogs feel the same way Bob does about squirrels. Daring them to come into the yard so they can shake the squeak out of them. Did you know when squirrels are shaken in a dogs mouth they sound just like squeak toys. My dogs love that!
When my oldest dog is not making squirrels squeak he likes to watch tv.
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Me too, I have less than 1/7. While I’m subscribed to some the idea on the OP thread, but I have to say the blackberries are growing wild here if I let them, same with raspberries. They are plants for the lazy gardeners, haha.
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Till it comes time to trellis them 
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I had a big bed of blackberries at my previous garden that I didn’t do anything to the plants, we got tired of eating them after a while.
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your yard looks like mine. im sure my neighbor across the street and downwind of me looks at my yard in disdain yet he has never said anything. he fertilizes and puts down broadleaf herbicides all summer on his lawn. its what alot of people consider a perfect yard. not to me and all the creatures that call my yard home. my wife used to think that way until i converted her. 
my dogs love the national geographic channel!
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Agreed, that’s my point. If I’m trying to grow painstakingly selected varieties, and in such a way to bring specific remarkable fruit to harvest year after year, that is not an endeavor of balance with nature.
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The guy behind me does the same thing. He lost some grass that could have been repaired with seed easily. Instead he ripped it all out and put all new sod in. Wow, what’s wrong with these people? I like to have some grass for the dogs, they like it. I do keep it as nice as possible, but it does have a few weeds and bare spots. His is perfect no weeds, no bare spots, uniform in appearance.
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Lawns are one of those weird things that are both a social signaling tool, and an outlet for bored men’s meticulous attentions.
Squeaky clean, impractically kitted-out, and over-sized “work” trucks fit the bill too.
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