on forest gardens and plants to choose

We have quite a few dwarf fruit trees in our garden: 5 in the little orchard and 3 more spread over the garden. With a little creativity, I might be able to use the model of forest gardens or food forests using these trees as a starting point. A forest garden is an easy maintenance and bio-diverse food producing garden - somewhere between a natural forest and an orchard - with a healthy eco-system supported by companion planting and inter-planting.

With the so-called "seven layer system" (term introduced by Robert Hart), one can mimic a natural forest:

Seven layer system of a forest garden as developed by Robert Hart

Some general guidelines for the selection of all my plants:

1. to choose perennial above annual plants;
2. to give preference to plants with many functions (e.g. shelter for birds, shade, food, green manure, wind barrier, aeration of soil, ground cover, prevent erosion, provide building materials, nitrogen fixing or nutrient accumulator, pest repellent, lovely fragrance, medical use, attracting beneficial  insects for pollination or predators of harmful insects, etc.);
3. to find locally thriving and non-invasive species;
4. when possible, to find several varieties of one species in order to get more biodiversity;
5. when possible, to choose “old and forgotten” species;
6. to avoid double flowered hybrids (not easy/possible for pollinators to enter) and of course GMOs;
7. when possible, to opt for plants and seeds from organic garden centres.

I collected a lot of seeds over the past half year

With several fruit trees at hand, I was able to design different guilds. With the little orchard being so close to the neighbour’s garden, I will not be able to plant taller trees next to them. Some individual low fruit trees elsewhere in the garden might be luckier. The first thing I did was to use some rope to fence off the future paths around the dripping line of the canopies and to use cardboard and grass clippings to suppress the grass close to the stems.

The fruit tree orchard with our five little trees in early spring 2014 

In my next posts, I will present each guild of the five trees in the orchard and then the tree individual ones.