Tree Plans

It’s been a busy month.

I’ve been working on a plan for tree planting, mostly. We want lots of tree crops (some conventional: think apples, peaches, plums; some not: pawpaws, seaberries, aronia). We’re also planning on trees that produce leaves edible to animals (intensive silvopasture systems).

We’re going to be moving livestock around using electronet, so after much pacing around flags in the lawn, I decided to space tree rows 42′ apart. This allows for a 36′ alley (or, three electronet sections) and three feet of weed control/ground cover on either side of the tree.

We’re going to make the rows parallel, which makes it easy to mow around, and to wrap our minds around. We’ll measure a reference contour, and offset our other rows from there. This way, water can be drawn towards drier parts of the topography (there aren’t many).

Top left to right : asian pear leaves; jostaberries with very large root systems (hat for scale); cherry buds; and seaberry leafing out.

We’ve ordered many trees, and are working on the plan for where they’ll go. In the meantime, I’ve been heeling them in in a nursery bed of excavator-fluffed soil. The plants come bare-root, so they need to be surrounded with dirt while they await their final homes. They are managing the transition well.