The Grounded Orchardist

So we have been trying to think of ways to mega boost the biodiversity in this orchard. We are an organic (not yet certified) orchard so encouraging beneficial wildlife is very much needed and welcomed. However, as a formal space it needs to be tidy and guests need to be able to freely wander at their leisure. That creates a challenge in terms of allowing and gently guiding nature to do its thing.

We have lots of ideas but it made sense to allow what is already here to grow. Now in my mind this wouldn’t work as a long term easy solution but, if you don’t try…how would you really know! An added benefit to this approach was to see what naturally likes to grow in that soil. Giving clues as to what might like to grow if we underplanted with carefully chosen ornamental/edible plants. This would give us a head start…and an idea of what kind of plants would grow well here.

A lot of the weeds (or wildflowers if you will) grew too big particularly for our trained fruit. Our standard trees were ok apart from the odd comfrey, nettle or dock which basically used the tree to climb. However, that’s OK as I can easily cut down the flower spikes before they self seed.

We effectively have two micro climates in the orchard. The trained fruit provides an area for sun loving plants, the standard/Bush varieties create a shaded more humid area. One problem we faced especially in the standard/bush varieties was the trunks of the trees ended up with a lot more woolly aphid than normal close to the ground. Now maybe this would be better than if they were higher up. I did wonder if beetles on the ground would work to eliminate them for us.

A hidden blow to the underplanting idea is the drought we’ve had this year. On the assumption this may happen more often we need to be prepared. We would need shallow rooting plants to limit competition from the trees and that means they will be thirsty plants as they will dry out sooner than a deeply rooted plant. That will quickly become labour intensive.

However, letting nature do its thing with mowed paths for guests to walk and minimal effort isn’t going to work for us. So we had to mow it back in the trained fruit section. However, we’re not beat and we’ll come up with a solution! It wasn’t a wasted effort…or lack of. A lot was learnt, we can move on and learn some more. We already have the beneficial wildlife in there, we just want to boost them. I’m currently visiting different orchards to swap ideas and see what has and hasn’t worked for them. A hopefully mutually beneficial arrangement.

In terms of rewilding…If you have a crop involved it still needs to be managed. Maybe under the standard trees I can let nature do her thing with minimal input but not for the trained fruit.