Planning a Food Forest

I drew this map while trying to figure out where to put a few flowering crabapple trees that we'll hopefully be receiving soon from the Arbor Day Foundation.  The crabapples on this map aren't planted yet, but everything else is already in place. I have posted pictures of parts of this area in a previous post, Clearing in the back.

The driveway from the front leads all the way to the Northernmost corner of the property, there is a turn around we cut and a little area we normally park in shown on the map, it's all dirt forest floor road with no improvements.

The rows of muscadines in the upper right of the map were already in place and are approximately twenty years old. The blueberry bushes planted between them were also planted by the previous owner, but I don't think that they're quite as old. Just above and below the muscadines are two large bradford pears. The top tree on the map to the North of the muscadines has many seedlings growing under it which we may be able to use for grafting material for other fruiting pear species.

Just to the South of the Southern bradford pear is the first persimmon we found on the property, in a little cluster of trees, some of which have not yet been identified. The rectangular area is an area that I intentionally didn't clear with the brush cutter in order to let some wild blackberries come in so that we can train them to tomato cages this year. Meredithe recently cleared the area by hand. There is currently a mimosa tree just to the North of this patch; to the West is the beginning of a rough 20'x20' grid coming into place for the larger fruiting trees which we're putting in first. After we get the larger trees in we'll be able to go back through and add other species underneath stacking the biodiversity as deeply as we can. Right now it's just a baby orchard, some day it'll be a thriving ecosystem, a food forest.

We started with the paw paws in the Southernmost row, then the Fuji and Mollies Delicious apples the next row North. I have them labeled on the map, but I'm not really sure which is which at the moment, I accidentally mixed up the tags during planting. There is a big pine North of the Fuji which I'm hoping to trim up and leave in place. The crabapples will go in 20' to the East and West. This grid could potentially continue along the North side of the driveway to the West for many of the larger fruit and nut trees we'll be putting in during future planting seasons.

So far the system has worked fairly well, first, removing a lot of privet and vines by hand. Then following with the brush cutter to clear the area down to 3" on any smaller brush and grasses. This gives us the space to remove the smaller pines. We like to leave some of the smaller hardwoods for cover while we get the newly planted saplings established.

This area had already been cleared of larger pines, there is even some well cleared area to the North of the crabapple row. Clearing farther West, however, will require removing some larger pines. I'm taking suggestions on what to do with the pine logs, I'm thinking of using them to build a chicken coop and a goat shelter. We just recently removed a large Juniper from next to the big pine. We seem to be removing all of the Juniper, it harbors cedar apple rust which is a disease it shares with apple trees. We have other evergreens everywhere and apples here, and it just doesn't make sense to keep them in our specific situation.

We're hoping to put in 12 trees in the next couple of weeks including the crabapples, but the rest will be planted up front. The other 10 are of various flowering varieties mainly planted for their beauty and attracting songbirds and pollinators so we'll be planting those up front by the driveway and garden. Come back soon and I'll post a map of that front area after this first year of planting and show you where those 10 trees will fit in!