The Wedge Method

The first step is to collect your dormant scion wood. Scions must be cut while they are still fully dormant for the highest grafting success rate. Be sure to cut wood on new growth that is disease free and growing vigorously. The healthier and more vigorous your scion is, the greater chance of success when grafting and having a fast-growing young tree.

Once your scion is cut, label it and store it in the refrigerator where it will easily keep for at least a month until you are ready to graft.

Selecting rootstock is just as important as selecting what variety you want to grow. Most people think of height at maturity when thinking of rootstock, but disease resistance, vigor, lifespan, soil adaptability, suckering, and how well anchored the tree will be are other factors to consider. Most rootstocks are widely adaptable and resilient, hence their use as rootstock, but checking in with other gardeners/farmers in your area or your local extension agency can help you to choose the perfect rootstock for your location. And of course, trialing many different rootstocks for your location always yields valuable data.

We realized a few years ago in our grafting classes that using red fleshed apples is a great way for beginners to clearly see the difference between the pith, sapwood, cambium, and bark. The pith is that white spot in the middle, the sapwood is red in this case, and the cambium is the lighter layer beneath the dark red bark. The cambium is the most important part here as it is the layer that is lined up between the scion and the rootstock in order to get the vascular tissue to fuse and form a successful graft union.

Be sure to sterilize all of your tools before you begin grafting to avoid the potential spread of pathogens across plant material.

When choosing which piece of scion to graft onto which rootstock, it can be helpful to find diameters that are similar so that both sides of the graft match up, but this is not essential. Often the rootstock or scion will vary in size and if you can get one side matched up perfectly then you’ll have success.

The first and easiest graft that most folks start with is the wedge graft. The take rate on these grafts is typically pretty high and you don’t need to have that skilled of a grafter’s hand to have success with it.

First, make a split down the middle of the rootstock. It is important that the knife cuts the wood cleanly rather than having it split so that a more solid connection between scion and rootstock is achieved.

TIP: We often put our thumb on top of the blade and above the rootstock to ensure that the blade stops when our thumb hits the top of the rootstock. This ensures we don’t cut our other hand that’s holding the rootstock and keeps the blade from making too deep of a cut.

Next, cut the scion wood on both sides to form a wedge that tapers down to a very slim point. It is important to cut at a direct angle rather than “scooping” with the grain of the wood so that there are no air pockets between the cambium layers.

The scion should then fit neatly into the wedge you’ve created in the rootstock with no gaps between the two pieces of wood. It is better to line up one side perfectly than to put the scion right in the middle of the rootstock. Eventually as the young tree grows, it will fuse on both sides.

Once the scion is situated, wrap it up with grafting tape and tie a rubber band around to hold it tight so the rootstock is squeezed to the scion. Some growers will wrap the scion completely to keep it from dehydrating, but with apples it’s usually sufficient to put a small piece on the top like a little hat unless it’s a very old or dehydrated piece of scion that you’re trying to save.

The Whip and Tongue Method

Once you’ve gotten the hang of wedge grafting, you can try moving on to the whip and tongue method. The take rate is similar with both methods once you’ve mastered them, although, the whip and tongue has the advantage of lining up the two pieces in a more fluid way. It also has a bit more structural integrity for the young graft because of the interlocking wood.

To create a whip and tongue graft, you’ll make a cut about 3/4″ long from one end of the scion diagonally across to the other. After this cut, make the “tongue”, a little incision into the middle of the wood – usually right where the pith is. Create a mirror cut on the rootstock then interlock the two pieces together. The trick here is getting the two tongues on either side of each other. We’ve found the budding tool on grafting knives can be helpful for opening the tongues up a little more so they easily fit into each other.

The interlocking pieces will help the young graft be more resilient to anything knocking it out of place. Follow the same finals steps from above to secure it with grafting tape and a rubber band.

Final Steps

Pot up your newly grafted tree and put it in a frost-free location, but somewhere that is not too warm. We’ve found that for many of the more temperate plants, if they’re put into a warm greenhouse immediately the scion will break dormancy before the graft is fully fused and can then collapse. Other species such as figs and persimmons much prefer a hot environment while the grafts are fusing, but in the case of apples it’s best to either graft them after all danger of frost has passed or put them in a cool hoophouse or garage. The use of bottom heat can be helpful here too as it will cause the rootstock to begin growing and breaking dormancy more quickly while the cooler air above keeps the scion dormant. 

Grafting your own trees is a very fun and economical way to propagate young fruit trees. It is also an essential skill for orchardists, nursery workers, and anybody trying to conserve rare varietals. Experiment with different techniques, rootstock combinations, interstems, and materials and you just might discover a unique new way to propagate your favorite fruit trees.

Happy grafting!

The post A Step-by-Step Guide to Grafting appeared first on One Green World.

So, here you are with your new baby fruit tree, maybe you picked it up locally or received it in the mail. After all that winter planning, you picked out just the right spot so that it can grow into a beautiful fruiting specimen. Now, it’s finally time to plant!

You grab your shovel, maybe a pickaxe depending on where you live, a few soil amendments. Off to dig that mighty hole your new fruit tree will call home. With great care the soil is put back in the hole, gently you apply a thick organic mulch, water it in. Repeating the process until all your trees are in the ground.

But, when you stand back somehow it looks…rather disappointing. Just sticks with a few side branches sticking out of the Spring mud. You notice that 8-15 feet of barren ground between all those trees, it will take some years before the tree mature and their canopies fill in to fully soak up all that great sunlight. Surely, there must be some other way. Let’s fill up this empty space – companion plants for fruit trees to the rescue!

Which companion plants are the best has been hotly debated amongst gardeners for decades. There’s plenty of room to experiment. But, what is for sure is that good companion plants are the ones that are beautiful, ecology enhancing, soil building, pollinator attracting, drought tolerant, dynamic accumulating, pest predator attracting, and more. A list of beneficial plants could fill many a page, but we’ve come up with a list of our absolute favorites based on their ease of cultivating and their benefits to the young orchard.

Nitrogen Fixers

The first group of companions most home orchard and permaculture folks think of are the mighty nitrogen fixers. A special group of plants that are able to turn atmospheric soil nitrogen (N2) into a form of nitrogen that can be uptaken by plants (Ammonia – NH3 and Ammonium – NH4) through a symbiotic relationship that occurs in their roots with certain bacteria.

Many of the most known nitrogen fixers are in the Fabaceae or Pea Family. These associate with Rhizobia bacteria in root nodules. But, there are also many in other families, such as our native Red Alder, Garrya, Willow, Sea Buckthorn and Elaeagnus, or the Ceanothus genus that instead associate with Frankia and other bacteria to convert atmospheric nitrogen into a usable form. For our needs, it is one of the most useful adaptations in the plant kingdom . Prior to the chemical fertilizers, farmers and gardeners alike relied heavily on the nitrogen fixing powers of these plants. But instead of going down that rabbit hole, let’s list some of our favorite nitrogen fixers in the perennial garden…

• Baptisia australis, also known as Blue False Indigo, is like the Danny DeVito of perennial nitrogen fixers, growing only 3-4 feet in height but is incredibly deep rooted. This prairie native is so vigorous, more often than not, we have to cut the pot off the plant because it’s vigorous root system has made it impossible to get out of the pot otherwise! It is not the most multifunctional of nitrogen fixers but it can be used to make an indigo dye, bees love the flowers, and last season’s flower stocks and seed pods are beautiful in winter. Blue False Indigo deserves to be lifted from its benchwarmer status on the nitrogen fixers all star team to a full time starter.
• Lupines! Who doesn’t love Lupines? They hold the spring rain water droplets on their leaves like the precious jewels each drop truly is! Their large spikes of pea flower towers in mid-spring are a cause for pause and wonderment. Yeah, we love Lupines in all their various cultivated forms. Deep rooted, drought tolerant, and tolerating a wide range of soils, Lupines always deserve a place beneath your young fruit tree especially in drier climates.
• Ceanothus, also known as the California Lilac, is an impressive genus that comes in many forms from ground covers and tiny shrubs all the way up to a large shrubs, there is surely a Ceanothus variety out there that will fit the bill and it seems the nursery industry finds new varieties to introduce almost every year. This genus might be exclusively useful to all of us here on the West Coast as most are not hardy below USDA Zone 7 but there is not a flower more enticing in the entire Apiary Candy Shop than the Ceanothus flower. Its drought tolerance, compact evergreen foliage and variety of forms place it as a perennial starter on the Nitrogen Fixers All Star Team.
  • Vandenberg has dark green crinkled leaves and beautiful fragrant blue flowers in late spring and grows 3-5 feet tall by 4-6 feet wide
  • Julia Phelps Ceanothus has been one of the more popular Ceanothus for the past 50 years and continues to be one of our favorites!
  • Midnight Magic is the perfect Ceanothus for small spaces or a low growing hedge. Compact dark evergreen green leaves contrast beautifully with the fragrant blue flowers. Midnight Magic grows to only 3 feet high and spreads 5-6 feet.
  • Centennial Ceanothus  this ground cover is a multi-functional and extremely tough plant. Centennial Ceanothus explodes with blue flowers in late spring as hundreds of its tiny blue blossoms open up, much to the delight of bees that seem to cover every blossom. If that weren’t enough, Centennial is also a nitrogen-fixing and drought tolerant evergreen. A truly wonderful plant for a permaculture guild planting or as a companion plant to one of your young fruit trees.
• Sea Buckthorn! Yes, you can have your nitrogen fixer and eat it too. We have gone on and on about the abilities of sea buckthorn to heal degraded soils and grow in the most gravelly nutrient deficient of soils, but suffice to say Sea Buckthorn really is a mighty vigorous nitrogen fixer with incredibly nutrient dense fruit and leaves as well. Plant it between your fruit trees and reap a wonderful harvest of sea berries until the canopy closes in on them at which time you can cut them down and get that big old boost of nitrogen in the soil. Dig up the suckers and repeat on a new planting area!
• Goumi! The more humble and equally as handsome cousin of the sea berry in the Elaeagnaceae Family, Goumi is one of the more well behaved fruiting nitrogen fixers, can tolerate a wider range of sunlight conditions and has some of the most unique fruit you will ever taste. It tastes like it sounds, goumi-ish! The dormant twigs are a gilded and speckled Winter pleasure. In the early Summer, red fruit hanging from the shrub must have surely been placed their overnight like a hundred little ornaments hung by an army of fruit bearing elves and fairies.
• Autumn Olive is similar in some ways to goumi, but with a tarnished reputation on the east coast, Autumn Olive grows larger with a more slender leaf shape and produces smaller but equally tasty fruit. Amber is a personal favorite here at the nursery and is proof that gems do grow on trees…nitrogen fixing trees!
• Silverberry is the elegant evergreen matriarch of the whole Elaeagnaceae family, boasting evergreen, or rather ever-silver foliage year round. Silverberry is unique in that it flowers in October-November and ripens its fruit overwinter to be eaten in mid-Spring! How wild is that! Not as cold hardy as goumi, or autumn olive, but it makes a great hedge. Try alternating Pineapple Guava and Silverberry for the ultimate nitrogen fixing, fruit producing evergreen hedge!
• Crimson Clover– If all this perennial nitrogen fixing sounds like too much work or if you’re the type that can’t bear to cut down a plant in the name of ecological succession than perhaps the annual nitrogen fixers are more up your alley, Crimson Clover makes the top of the list for its ability to fix boatloads of nitrogen per acre and it’s incredibly ornamental flowers, and maybe most importantly how easy it is to manage. Unlike it’s cousin the Dutch White Clover that doesn’t know how to take a hint when it’s time for it to leave, Crimson Clover with gracefully bow out after its spring flower show if mown down before it sets seed. Or let it go to seed and repeat its beautiful dance next year. With anything in the Pea Family, try a Rhizobium inoculant boost to insure your young plants have their bacterial companions alongside them at the time of planting.

Dynamic Accumulator Companion Plants

What exactly is a dynamic accumulator? You can think of them as deep soil miners that send their vigorous deep root system far below the depth where most plants send their roots, bringing to the surface nutrients that have slipped down through the soil horizons and concentrating it in their leaves. Over time, these types of plants rejuvenate soil by pulling up more and more nutrients and creating humus around their root zone.

The most famous of these is Comfrey and has long been touted as the best plant choice for “chop and drop” mulching, where you simply chop its abundant foliage back a few times per year and use that as a nutrient rich, weed suppressing mulch. Comfrey also has many medicinal and therapeutic uses and is an incredibly multi-functional plant. It has gotten a bad rap for its ability to rapidly spread via seed, but the varieties we carry cannot produce seed and are much more manageable.

One such plant is the Bocking 14 Russian Comfrey which is a clumping variety which can only be spread if you till and spread the roots through the soil. For a more aesthetic garden look, consider the gold leafed Variegated Axminster’s Gold Comfrey. It looks like a soft leaved hosta, and though it is not as vigorous as the Bocking 14 Russian Comfrey, it still has all the same wonderful properties. If you wish to remove comfrey after your fruit trees are established a thick sheet mulch will easily do the trick and you can take great joy in knowing that your comfrey plant’s root mass will act as a deep soil compost for your fruit trees.

Chives and perennial onions are an often overlooked companion plant. They are not only easy to grow, but many are worthy additions to the kitchen. Carpets of these plants may confer some immune system benefits to surrounding plants. Their beautiful small flowers provide nectaries for many beneficial insects including tiny harmless parasitic wasps that hunt pest insects. Many onions often intermingle very well with other forbs planted in the understory.

Globe Thistles (Echinops ritro) and Green Globe Artichokes  and Purple Italian Artichokes are huge clumping plants that produces tons of biomass, habit for beetles, and are great insectaries – while pulling up nutrients from great depths with their huge taproots! All the power of soil building properties of thistles but with without the spines. Plant these giving them plenty of space to flop around.

Yarrow is our other most revered soil miner! This plant can be found growing in lawns and fields nearly all over the temperate world and the reason for this is that it loves growing in disturbed soils. Like a diligent soil repairman, yarrow sends its deep roots into even the toughest rocky soils. Many new cultivated forms have been selected for their graceful foliage and flower colors, so you can now customize your ecological plantings. Yarrow is also a beneficial insectary plant as well as a useful medicinal herb.

Time to Go Get Planting

This is a short coffee-fueled morning rambling of some of our favorite companion plants chosen for their multifunctionality, ease of cultivation, and beauty in the landscape, but many other species can fit the bill as a companion plant. Water needs for your site may increase but by planting a diverse array of ground covers, small shrubs, and herbaceous perennials you bring in all sorts of beneficials to your site which decreases weed pressure by filling up the empty spaces.

Go out and experiment, try all sorts of new plants between your fruit trees and other plantings. Plant up those edges and borders. If the hydrozones are managed correctly, drought tolerant and xeriscaping plants will thrive amongst your more water thirsty fruiting plants. Don’t be afraid to cut things out if they get overcrowded. Study nature and copy examples you see using analogous plants of your choosing. Try alley cropping with vegetables. Create different patterns, textures, and smells! And plant more Monkey Puzzle trees – they are long-term human companion plants. Your grandchildren will thank you!

The post Companion Plants for Fruit Trees appeared first on One Green World.

Bags of dried fruits and a universe of jars of wonderful treats. Winter salad greens and fresh cut herbs could grace your plate. Your onions and potatoes seasoned with parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme, and more – if you’d only planned (or maybe you did!) Like they say, it was best to have planted a fruit tree 7 years ago. So, let’s get started on garden planning!

Well, what do you want to grow?

Focusing around economics, kitchen recipes, and personal/family/friend preferences will help shape that list. What do you spend most on in your monthly food budget that you could instead begin to grow? Think of the produce items that never look great or are devoid of flavor at the grocery store, especially in the winter. What does your family enjoy eating? That vegetable or fruit your friends really adore when they come over for a shared meal. The ones that the kids get excited about. Or, maybe that they should get excited about. What will make the neighbors squeal with joy when you share your abundant harvests? Hmm… Create a list to grow based on those considerations.

Part of the garden planning process is remembering what worked and what didn’t turn out as well as we hoped. Sometimes we get lucky and even get to figure out why things turned out as they did. When planning, whether you have a small backyard, patio garden, or even a full-on farm, it’s good to take an inventory of what we have and where we want to go. What’s growing well? What’s been struggling all along? “Right plant, right place.” Sometimes the plants we had high hopes for our growing conditions for whatever reason limp along while other times it’s nothing but uncontrollable gangbusters from the start!

Planting varieties proven for your growing area is essential especially if we don’t have a large area to experiment with. It’s good to strike a balance between honing on the tried-and-true, what provably works, but going out and trying that wild-hair experimental idea. Strike a balance, that way you won’t get in trouble with your spouse for being too “out there”. Thankfully, OGW’s got you covered with the right plants no matter where you live!

Designing Your Garden

Creating a map of your site and how everything relates to each other is important for best long term success. Gaia’s Garden by the late Toby Hemenway remains one of the most important works toward understanding the basic workings of an integrated garden design. Worth checking out and digesting its contents.

First off, we’re going to be interacting with the space, right? So, that means thinking about how people including yourself will use that space. How can they move around efficiently. Plan around what tasks currently happen there, what tasks you will want to happen there in the future, and how people need to move around in that space to complete the tasks. Design your garden so that it is both easy and safe to move around that space quickly and with ease but also so that physical movement time is minimizing by grouping tasks around the function they perform. This will look different to each person and that’s perfectly fine.

What are the permanent features of this area? The buildings on the property, the water features like ponds and downspouts, the paths and how they fit into the lay of the land, the trees, shrubs. What about the surrounding neighborhood and greater area. Then think about how the annuals fit into that scheme.

Think of your garden in terms of time. Creating a four-season plan for your garden that includes season highlights, planting schedules (both short-term growing year goals but also long-term), rotations, and processing storage time estimations can really help ensure you make the most of your growing season and also that you have the time to “put away” as much of your produce as possible. We all know the person that grows a ton of tomatoes but never finds the time to can! Maybe this means getting together with your neighbors to help share and preserve the harvest. This is obviously a huge subject, just broad-brushing over some greater concepts that we’ll touch more on later another time.

Timeliness and Garden Planning

Part of successful winter gardening is often starting with planning the year before. Many of the garden vegetables we love like Brussels Sprouts (Mar), Garlic (Sep-Nov, or Jan), winter hardy salad greens (July) require planning ahead usually at the height of Spring or Summer. Not a time our intuition screams WINTER! and yet, the seasoned gardener knows how to plan in advance during that time. To the maxim “right plant, right place”, add “right time”. Of course, the entire practice of gardening or farming revolves around starting and finishing tasks with the correct seasonal timing.

You’re in luck because there are many different books, guidelines for your bioregion, and blogs that have been published for pretty much any region of the US or Canada. For us in Cascadia (Vancouver Island to Northern California), Seattle Tilth’s Maritime Northwest Garden Guide Second Edition continues to be a great for not just winter, but throughout the seasons as well. Strangely despite its popularity, it’s been out of print for the last year, but it’s still easy to find and pick up a copy online. Two other excellent books on this general subject continue to be Binda Colebrook’s Winter Gardening in the Maritime Northwest despite the planting dates being a bit off and a number of the Elliot Coleman books like The Winter Harvest Handbook and Four-Season Harvest. Here is our recommended books to plan your own food forests and gardens – OGW BOOKS

When planning for winter gardening, we need to pay attention to not only how we are going to help our plants cope with the typical lows and winter conditions like snow or ice, but also provide some planning for how to do with the occasional extreme winter weather. Getting to know your areas first and last average frost dates can help with planning ahead. It’s a bit technical, but NOAA publishes this information. Just select your state on the website to get your list.

It All Starts From the Soil

Speaking of temperatures, remember that soil life is basically dormant below 45 F. Which means if the compost doesn’t have core heat, no composting will happen. It means that the nitrogen fixing soil organisms are dormant and not ready to feed your plants. Which is part of the reason many plants stay dormant during the cold months. Which leads us to chatting a little about soil health.

Once the ground begins to thaw, typically in Feb, it is a great time to get a comprehensive soil test. I personally recommend the company Ag-Source – they are geared towards organics, very competitively priced, have great customer service that make the process simple, give excellent recommended fertilizer recommendations. and have offices throughout the US. Often us in the “ground yer own” crowd are driven by a desire to produce food that is not chemically contaminated and flavor rich. A big part of flavor equation is ensuring that our harvest is not only nutrient rich but nutritionally balanced. This is part of insuring that our homegrown isn’t an empty promise – having been chemically contaminated and/or devoid of nutrition. For more information about soil fertility in layman’s terms, see the book The Intelligent Gardener by Steve Solomon. Biology also plays a role of central importance with which Dr Elaine Ingham has extensively written about. The marriage of these two ideas achieves balance.

On the biology side of things, as you are cleaning up your garden and assessing winter damage, remember to recycle those on site nutrients as well! One of best ways to build soil fertility is by feeding it all sorts of vegetation. It has been said many times that composting is both an art and a science. But, by adding those clippings and woody debris to all those vegetable scraps you’ve been dumping on the pile, this will both help keep the compost pile aerated, heated and active, but will also help balance the carbon to nitrogen ratio in the pile which will make the best compost and in turn the best soil. Sometimes I like to compost in place for some things in layers, but for vegetable scraps I like to make layered piles in new locales over time, slowly enriching more and more space. Bio-intensive Approach to Small-scale Household Food Production shows the mineral makeup of different compostable materials. The rest of the guide is pretty cool, too!

By working on that compost, you’ve probably already checked on your tools a bit. But, take the time to clean, sharpen, repair, and replace those trusted tools that allow us to complete our vital work every day. Fix that wobbly wheelbarrow, repair or replace those leaking hoses and water lines, etc. Also, don’t forget about those motors! Periodically starting and briefly running will prevent later work flow problems in the early Spring or Summer when you need them most! Two-cycle engines like weed wackers and chainsaws don’t like their fuel/oil mixture just sitting in them indefinitely. Refer to your equipment’s owner manual for specific information about how to preform maintenance tasks for them.

A Lil’ Bit about Seeds!

Are your vegetable seeds still fresh? Check the dates. Try to keep records of when/where/who they came from. Save and learn the stories. Memorize like the keepsakes they are. Even if its scribbling on an envelope. Periodically check over your winter squash, potatoes, bulbs and tubers to keep your produce and planting stock in good order.

Seeds can be started early for transplant using southern facing windowsills and a chamber to keep humidity high. A great place to start those slowest growing seeds for transplanting months later. You can also test the viability of those heirloom tomato seeds that you got at that seed exchange several years ago. Taking out a few and planting them to see if they germinate in warm indoor conditions, will save later wasted time. A good wealth of information for starting seeds inside can be found at Wintersown. Some great local companies to check out are Adaptive Seeds,  Green Journey Seeds, Nichol’s, Peace Seedlings, Siskiyou Seeds, Uprising Organics, Wild Garden Seed and many more. OGW also has a great selection of seeds from these amazing NW growers in online and at OGW’s Garden Center in Portland. Don’t forget your local seed exchanges either!

Maybe you want to build some infrastructure? A bigger dedicated space to growing like a full-on with lights indoors grow space or a heated greenhouse. Perhaps building heated propagation beds in simple hoop house is the way to go? It’s also very easy to build germinate beds in a hoop house using a thick layer of finished compost a top fresh manure or hot compost bed. Also, cloches and cold frames can both help us start plants earlier, protected from winters worst, but also extend the growing season into the Winter. Floating row covers help keep winters worst off already established plants. Decisions, decisions.

Some Things to Think About

If you live in a more maritime climate or a milder area, January and February are excellent times to prune many types of fruit trees. While thinking about pruning, it’s good to also think of pollinators like mason bees. Check out our Mason Bee Guide. Check the bases of your trees for signs of girdling from voles or mice. There are various products you can add to the bark of tree bases to prevent damage. Learn the difference between mosses and lichens. Lichens as they fall to the ground over time actually feed the soil and thus the trees nitrogen while mosses, if not gently rubbed one, can actually cause harm to trees over time. Finally, most bareroot and potted plants can be placed into the landscape if the soil is not frozen.

January is also your first window to start planting those early vegetables like cabbage, onions in trays to transplant, peppers and tomatoes (indoors). While in late January/early February it is a great time to direct sow certain flower seeds like poppies that need to settle in and stratify (receive cold wet conditions) for some time before they will germinate. Some vegetables can also be direct sown like peas and fava beans directly into fresh earth.

While it is perfectly fine to prune many fruit and nut trees as well as small fruits, it is best to wait to do summer pruning on peaches, plums, and cherries due to the potential to cause disease issues in cold wet conditions. Grapes should be pruned and trained late Jan/ early Feb. In fact, I’ve laid my eyes on more than one old farming book relating that the best time to prune is actually in late Spring/early Summer but that they’d always learned to prune in the winter because they didn’t have time to do it when it’d actually have been best. Something to think about.

Winter is a great time to do some pest management. The organics-approved Dormant Oil can be used to stop a wide number of pest organisms that are living dormant on or in the wood like certain aphids, mites, and scales. And, don’t forget to set out those crowns and divisions like asparagus, rhubarb, horseradish, onion sets, potatoes, artichokes, dahlias, lilies, gladiolas, and friends.

March is typically the month where many of our plants are awakening and is a great time to make divisions of many clumping or spreading plants like hostas, mint, strawberries, raspberries, bamboo, iris, daylilies, etc. It is also a great time to prune more winter sensitive plants like blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, etc.

Speaking of friends. I think of plants as friends, some are old friends, some I’ve just met. During the winter, it’s nice to have some plants that call out their presence during the silence of the winter. Some of my favorite winter interest plants include Garrya x issaquahensis which the males have these long white catkins, Jerusalem Sage  (Phlomis russeliana) which has interesting persistent flower heads, and the beautifully vivid yellow flowers of Witch Hazel and ‘Winter Charity ’ Mahonia. Winter flowering fragrant plants like some types of Jasmine, Winter Flowering Honeysuckle, Sarcococca, Daphne, ‘Dawn‘ Winter Flowering Viburnum (Viburnum x bodnantense).

Okay! It is time to reach out beyond your garden! Garden planning is more than just being an indoor study. Get to know your neighbors. Find ways to bridge differences and strengthen ways to collaborate. Go to workshops and outings. Gain inspiration from those neighbors. Get to know your county’s extension agent. Join the local garden clubs and fruit societies, many are actually really lively and fun! If you live near Portland, OR come check out Home Orchard Society events and within Western Oregon, the Agrarian Sharing Network propagation fairs. And.. don’t forget to visit OGW and say hello!

~ Chris Homanics – OGW Community Coordinator.

The post Garden Planning This Winter appeared first on One Green World.

There are many different strategies for planning out your forest garden or orchard succession. It can be as simple as planting squash or any cucurbit underneath the tree. This suppresses weeds to some extent, gives you a harvest of delicious food that same season, acts as an indicator plant for when the soil needs water, and functions as a human attractant so you actually get out there to see how your trees are doing. But we can get much more detailed and dynamic than just planting out a squash plant underneath our young trees, although that is a great start.

What if we utilized the permaculture concept of a fruit tree guild. A fruit tree guild at the simplest level is a collection of plants that are chosen and placed in relation to each other based on what the needs of your fruit tree are and the functions those other plants can provide.. In the drawing below we can see a young tree planted with Comfrey, Lupines, and Strawberries. The comfrey acts as a weed barrier to runner grasses, as well as a dynamic accumulator that pulls nutrients up to the surface from deep in the soil, which is very important if you live in a climate like ours West of the Cascades where winter rains leach out a lot of nutrients from the topsoil. The lupines are perennial legumes, meaning they fix nitrogen in the soil and come back year after year. They also put on a beautiful display of flowers that attracts pollinators, and if you choose the right kind of lupine you can even grow edible lupine seeds! Wowzers! Throw in some strawberries as a groundcover and you have yourself a wonderfully simple little fruit tree guild that is immediately producing something of value, not to mention beauty.

Is this photo on the left some kind of crazy SeaBuckPine GMO!?? Nope, it’s a stone pine planted with a seaberry. The seaberry provides nitrogen and yields fruit for years before the stone pine eventually shades it out and begins producing nuts! Polyculture can be as simple as that.

This style of planting can also help you achieve a much fuller look in your landscape compared to if you were to just plant your desired fruit tree or bush and then walk away. For example, we could have just planted blueberries in the example that is pictured below, but instead we threw in tons of strawberries that produced fruit their first year, also included in the understory planting are arctic raspberries, white clover, kinnikinnick, saffron crocus, and lingonberries. The blueberries are now mature and cranking out berries and the strawberries thrive underneath them and don’t seem to mind the acidic soil conditions that we’ve provided for the blueberries. Here is a simple sketch for how you can plant your own blueberry polyculture.

Try messing around with different species. This isn’t an exact science. For the blueberry polyculture shown above we got the idea from walking around the huckleberry fields in the Gifford Pinchot wilderness. Huckleberries are very close relatives of our cultivated northern highbush blueberry, genus Vaccinium, so we thought maybe nature could provide some hints as to how we might grow blueberries in a more ecological manner. There are many species that thrive alongside the huckleberries in the wild, but one we always notice are lupines. Well, it turns out blueberries actually need a good amount of nitrogen to be happy so planting nitrogen fixing lupines alongside them seems like not too bad of an idea. We then put some lingonberries, another Vaccinium species, between the blueberries knowing that they could handle the acidic soil conditions we would be providing the blueberries and then stuck in some strawberries or arctic raspberries beneath the blueberries. When you put it all together it looks a whole lot nicer than the blueberries would on their own and you get multiple yields off of the same space! Sure, you might need to water a little bit more to compensate for the competition between the roots of your different plants but the diverse yields more than make up for it.

You can take this same polyculture planting concept and apply it on a larger, less detailed scale. Say you want to be a paw paw farmer, so you go out and you buy 500 paw paws and stick them in the ground in full sun. You’re probably going to have 500 dead or struggling paw paw trees very soon, and even if they did survive their establishment years, you are now waiting on a tree that will probably take 5 years before the orchard is yielding much of anything. But what if, in your infinite pawpaw farming wisdom, you decided to interplant your paw paw orchard with a quick growing, nitrogen producing, and fruit yielding plant, such as sea berries or autumn olives. You could throw a seaberry plant in between each paw paw planting. The s nitrogen fixing shrubs would not only provide the much needed shade for your young paw paws, but they would also increase soil fertility over the long run, and produce an incredibly nutritious crop of berries. Five years down the road you might see that your pawpaws are really starting to come online so you might start hacking your seaberries back to provide more light as well as nutrients that are released in the soil through the corresponding root dieback events. In five more years your pawpaws are really cranking and you can then cut your seaberries down entirely. Take the wood and put it through a wood chipper, spread it all beneath your pawpaws and then sit back and watch as your paw paws explode with vigor as they eat up all the nutrients left below ground by your former seaberry orchard.

One thing to keep in mind with these diverse high density plantings, especially if you are in an area with wet springs like we are in the Pacific Northwest, is that not every species will perform well under high density plantings. Species that are susceptible to fungal pathogens already will be even more susceptible if you crowd them and reduce airflow between branches. For example, don’t go throwing an apple tree into your food forest unless you want a super scabby and anthracnose ridden tree. But you can certainly still plant low growing ground covers, grass barriers, and nitrogen fixers with those species that are more susceptible to diseases and fungal pathogens.

Go find examples from your local ecosystem. Do you notice assemblages of plants that grow together in the wild? Try growing those plants, or closely related ones, in similar relationship to one another and see what happens. Observe nature, try to mimic it, and something cool will probably happen. At the very least you’ll learn a ton.

Let us know if you’ve found polycultures, guilds, or an Orchard Succession that has worked well for you, or maybe more importantly those that have not worked for you and why!

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