An orchard in your backyard – think of it! A virtual grocery aisle, providing a ready crop of fruit and livestock to provide your family with healthy, nutritious, free food, enough to enjoy in season and put up for the cold months.
This was what our friend and guest instructor, veteran orchardist Stefan Sobkowiak had in mind from the time he was just starting out. He set up his original silvopasture orchard as a monoculture, with just one variety of fruit and sheep grazing beneath the trees. “It grew great,” he said later, but the harvest was limited, and he wanted more.
Permaculture orchardist and Verge guest instructor Stefan Sobkowiak
1. Find Your Goal: What Do You Want?
And that’s where it begins: with the wanting. Out of that grows your vision, and out of your vision grows your design.
Stefan’s vision was clear: He wanted to produce fruit at scale, and as a wildlife biologist, he also wanted to involve wildlife.
So during the long nights of that winter, he went back to basics, and poring over Bill Mollison’s Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual for more diverse solutions, he came up with an answer.
Stefan shares how he came up with the idea of trios:
Mollison urged that an orchard be designed with rows of alternating fruit trees and nitrogen-fixing trees. Stefan, however, balked at having an orchard with 50% of the trees not producing fruit. Worse, some of the best nitrogen fixers not only did not produce an edible crop, but also demanded an extreme amount of care and attention.
That was when he came up with the idea of trios – a system of planting that could be scaled from a small backyard to a commercial orchard. He realized that he could plant two fruiting trees with each nitrogen-fixing tree: for example, a redbud (nitrogen fixer) with, say, a Magness pear tree and McIntosh apple tree.
This solved two problems at the same time: the nitrogen-fixing tree would help to nourish the two fruit trees, while the variety of trees would increase resistance to pests and disease.
Next to this trio would be another nitrogen-fixing tree with two fruit trees of different cultivars or different species: say, a Luscious pear and Jonathan apple, or perhaps a plum tree and cherry tree. Nut trees such as pecans, hazelnuts, and walnuts are also possibilities (though walnut trees have their own challenges – more on that later)
Also see: YouTube Video – Plant 3 fruit trees in your orchard, not 1.
Surrounding each trio can be a guild of supportive plants: berry bushes, herbaceous plants, bulbs, and vines, each serving their own function. Learn more about fruit tree guilds in our recent post.
2. Start with a Prototype
When you extend this concept out across multiple rows of an X-acre orchard, the possibilities are endless. But before your head begins to spin – stop. Stefan’s second tip comes in here: don’t overthink, “just start!” he says. Find one thing you can do today, this weekend, or this week.
Remember permaculture principle #9 – Use small and slow solutions. Empower yourself by starting with a small, experimental prototype: plant just one or two trios. Even a relatively small backyard may support a mini-orchard of this size.
This is the laboratory approach that Stefan, with his scientific background, adopted for his orchard.
3. Learn All Along the Way
When you’re pouring your energy into researching, planting, and tending your mini-orchard-in-progress, it’s easy to hold high expectations…and then be devastated when, say, a herd of hungry deer comes in and gobbles up the crop you’ve been nurturing, or a late freeze wipes out blossoms before they have a chance to set fruit. “All that work, for nothing!” you might be saying to yourself.
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Learning experiences, says Stefan. Early in his orcharding journey, his entire planting was eaten down; only stumps remained. His response? Take the lesson, research and implement preventative solutions, and keep going. Bear in mind that you will inevitably make mistakes – so set your sights on how you can do better next time, and forget about perfectionism; it’s progress you’re after!
4. Create Metrics
But how can you tell if you’re making progress? Metrics: find one or more element that you can compare from year to year.
Careful record-keeping is your friend here: noting temperature and precipitation patterns and events, appearances of insects and birds, the dates when you administered treatments to your plants, the dates of harvests or crop losses, and so on. As you compare your notes from year to year, you’ll start to see the outcomes of all your hard work.
This demonstrates how your orchard’s growth and challenges differ from one year to another.
Check out our crop planning template HERE to gain inspiration on how to plan out your orchard plantings.
One of Stefan’s early metrics was tent caterpillars: during his early orcharding days, they were all over the property. Now, using permaculture techniques of guilds, interplanting, integrated pest management, and so forth, they’re a rare sight.
5. Set Goals for the Future
Once you’ve gathered data over several years, it’s time to set new goals: based on all you’ve learned, where will you go from here?
For Stefan, the next step was to tweak fertility. Not only to boost his harvests; he wanted his trees to be so healthy that they would repel pests and disease on their own. Looking back over his records, he could see which organic amendments he had or hadn’t been using; how would they affect the health of the orchard? He gave himself three years to experiment in his “orchard laboratory” and see which solutions worked best.
So, What Kind of Orchard Do You Want?
Beginning your own orchard doesn’t need to be a laborious, angst-filled process – with a clear vision, inquiring mind, and experimental approach, it can be an ongoing adventure!
Learn more about Stefan’s approach here: YOUR PERMACULTURE LAB
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