Intelligently-designed, low-maintenance and moderately self-sustaining food forests, orchards and plant guilds feature a wide variety of benefits, including food & therapeutic options, crafting materials, income opportunities, and more!
While many conventional orchards are centered on single-crop fruit plantings, many orchard crops actually originated in bio-diverse woodlands, and did not need to be mulched, watered, or fertilized.
Following that more natural approach and leveraging the inherent interactions of flora and fauna, we can design more bio-diverse orchard plantings and food forests, complete with multiple layers and levels of plantings (from trees to groundcover) to produce more resilient and largely self-sustaining plots.
Incorporating food-bearing, therapeutic and other target plants along with plants to provide biomass, accumulate nutrients, entice pollinators, and confuse mischievous animals and insects – all together can result in a thriving guild where maintenance is minimized, and largely centered on harvesting.
And fortunately, there are numerous options for each plant-type and layer of a food forest/ orchard guild, with succession plantings often warranted as plants grow and the canopy fills in.
I have successfully designed various combinations, and am honored to assist others. More information can be found here.
If you have a quick question on any of these options, please feel free to contact me at kindness [at] BackardNourishment.com.
Note: the “[at]” should be replaced with “@”, as is customary in email addresses.
If you have more in-depth questions or are seeking help with consultation or design, I am grateful for heart-centered honorariums in compensation.