My orchard is a constantly evolving space. I have spent most of my time mowing, weed eating, occasionally glyphosate spraying, and conforming to what a tidy orchard space could look like.
I’ve starting thinking more and more about moving to a more natural area. I know many of you have already adopted this mindset. Whether planting in an open unmowed field or adding companion plants in a guild method, I’m asking if you can help me decide if I should move in this direction.
I’ve tried this before, but I felt that it looked like I abandoned the area. Can I achieve this natural planting idea without looking completely ragged? I already have comfrey so that’s a start.
I’m looking forward to your ideas and suggestions.
Depending on where you are, tall grass = tick and other nippy insects would like to hide out unless I’m mistaken. Plus other animals may like to nest there too.
I would do companion planting but neat and keep everything low as well so that you don’t have to worry about hitchhikers.
Also depending on where you are: abandoned looking = free to passerby’s
Oh, i wouldn’t use weed killers or anything though. Grow low growing clover or other very low growing plants if you can. Too much weed killer may leach into the soil and plants and stuff from my understanding. Gotta be careful with that stuff, especially if you have pets because they can track it into the home as well.
A natural setting would only contain natives that spouted from naturally disbursed seeds. This means that all introduced non-native plants – feral or otherwise, would be removed.
The now ragged southern U.S. forests plowed into by hurricane Helene are a natural setting.
I found my nursery bed that had become covered with growth became a haven for voles. The other issue there was the growth of carolina horsenettle and briars. Unfortunately, most of my orchard space is infested with carolina horsenettle which is considered non-native here. The other problem I noted the past two years was I was getting burr knots on trees that had thick vegetative cover around the trunks. The plant matter was retaining moisture against the trunks, and this was encouraging burr knots. As soon as I knocked those weeds down and allowed air movement and sun in those spaces it stopped. I would think there still needs to be some maintenance to keep that growth away from the base of the trees. Just a couple issues to consider, perhaps not a deal breaker.
its a work in progress but it can be done. i used wood chip mulch to control the weeds and added all sorts of medicinals, flowers , Egyptian walking onions, chives , herbs, wild improved strawberries, nitrogen fixing fruiting shrubs, lowbush blueberries, cranberries and lingonberries. over 7 years everything grew in nicely. i rarely have any weeds but when i do they are easy to pull. dont put any of your fruiting bushes too close to your fruit trees you spray or you might wind up killing the bees. other than that, go for it. mine looks alot like your bottom pic but more filled in and no grass. some stuff will flourish and some will fail. just try something else in its spot. my only regret is putting lemon balm in there as it wants to take over the yard. i just pull it often and feed it to the chics.
ive found that if you keep the grass in between the rows short, the voles feel exposed and dont stay in there. i also snowblow a strip in front of both chicken coops and they dont like to cross it to get in my trees. i still put out pvc pipe with bait chunks around the edges of the property just before the snow flies, to keep their numbers controlled.
The first picture is so much better, I wish my orchard looked like yours…
Note that the tall vegetation around the trees is a perfect cover for voles. It can also harbor deer ticks, which can jump on you as you care for your trees. For me it is a definite no.
I spray my trees, so I keep my main orchards mowed short. I don’t want to be killing any more pollinators than I already am.
I do have a bunch of pears and apples growing amongst wildflowers/forbs in another area. Those trees only get dormant oil and copper in the spring. I like how both mowed and unmowed areas look here, but I’ll stick with the mowed orchards for production.
I’m not bothered by ticks, I’ve been bitten several dozen times in my life playing in the woods. But you could always use birds to control them some, ducks, chickens and Guinea fowl. Wish I had area and laws which allowed me to do this. I’m trying to accomplish something similar with perennial flowers surround my trees, mostly tall verbena and echinacea purpura.
Yes, you can do it and it can still look neat. Mulch will be your friend. I’m a fan of straw and wood chips, personally. I don’t mind a wild look within manicured spaces, but you don’t have to have your look like that. Using plants like strawberries in a matted system will also help keep weeds at bay and keep your area neater looking.
There’s two different questions here: a horticultural question and an aesthetic question. Horticulturally, I mix all my plants together in layers, but I don’t have a problem with voles, I don’t spray, and I tend toward a somewhat hands-off approach to garden/orchard management. So that depends on what you are willing to do and how you want to manage it.
But, aesthetically, the key to not make it look like you abandoned the area is to employ an orderly frame. The concept comes from landscape architecture, where more naturalistic planting styles have become celebrated in recent years. Think Piet Oudalf’s installation of the High Line in NYC. But the problem with naturalistic planting styles is that viewers can see them as untended areas. The plantings don’t present themselves as managed landscapes. So the way that landscape architects communicate intention and care is by creating some kind of orderly frame: a line of hedges that is clipped, a wall or sidewalk, or even a path that runs through it or is mowed, which frames the disorderly space. That is how the second landscape (above) works as a landscape. The mowed squares around each tree communicate intention and care by creating an orderly frame around the more naturalistic planting inside the square.
If you want to read more about this, check out this article:
And if you are further interested in this sort of thing, you might check out the book, Planting in a Post-Wild World, which is where I first read about orderly frames:
Thank you. I like the look but I’ll be 70 soon, and it’s getting more difficult every year. The year I tried glyphosate it looked nice and was low maintenance but drift harness some of the trees. I’m probably not going to do that again.
Great puzzle to ponder, and I’ll add my 2-cents’. For context, we are reclaiming (as in, putting back into production) portions of a nearly 300yo family farm that had fallen to wrack and ruin as a relative aged in place. So, this is a work of decades and we’re less than one into it. Which is fine; it’s a labor of love. My job is primarily the scheming and plotting
From my readings over the years so far, both aesthetics and maintenance fall more into the category of motivations to change one’s approach, or not, than reasons to develop tree guilds. To be a tree guild, most or all flora in the package are doing something beneficial to the specific tree leading the pack, while also (optimally) benefiting from processes of the tree and/or other plants in the guild. Guilds themselves are designed to either to maximally benefit one piece of it (usually a tree) or to create a systemic balance or microcosm/climate favorable to the symbiosis. Plants with deep roots or otherwise specialized (e.g., comfrey, yarrow) draw nutrients the tree can’t access (to feed back through chop and drop or natural die-back) while they’re protected from harshest sun and wind, for example. If your central tree is a particularly heavy feeder of nitrogen, say, your guild plants should feed more on different nutrients and ideally fix nitrogen for your tree, keeping soil composition in better balance over years to come. That sort of thing.
We’re doing several experiments so I’m not the most experienced person in any of this! It still seems worth pointing out for the (even) less experienced that planting natives around a tree, or letting it go wild beneath a tree, is not a guild in concept or practice.
Getting back to tidy appearance as the goal, a set of neatly arranged but carefully selected fit-for-purpose specimens (greatest benefit to your specific type of fruit tree) would be closer to a guild than wild grass or clover-only. That’s kind of the direction I’m going, for what it’s worth, with our apples and pears. Messier around the pawpaws. Anyway, whatever you do, I say enjoy it!
