Orchard People

[00:00:00] Introduction to Fruit Tree Planting
If you're planting a fruit tree or designing a food forest, one of the first things you're going to ask yourself is what type of fruit you want to grow. Maybe you love apples or apricots or mangoes. You'll decide what types of fruit you want to eat and then you will probably go and buy the trees.
You'll plant them and then you'll deal with the problems as they come along. But maybe this is actually the wrong approach. Instead of asking ourselves what fruit we want to eat, Maybe we should be asking our landscape what type of fruit it wants to grow. Today we're going to talk about the importance of listening to the landscape when you design your food forest.
[00:00:46] Guest Introduction: Lincoln Smith
My guest on the show today is Lincoln Smith, who runs Forested, an experimental forest garden site in Bowie, Maryland. He and his team at the 10 acre site test forest gardening methods. And his goal is to produce nutritious food while working with nature rather than against it.
So Lincoln, welcome to the show today. Hello, good to talk to you.
[00:01:14] Understanding Forested and Food Forests
So tell me a little bit about forested. It's a food forest, but what does that actually mean? Yeah, forested is about 10 years old and for this period of time we've been trying to grow food in a way that restores and works with the forest of the eastern United States.
We're located just outside of Washington, D. C., the mid Atlantic, so we're trying to figure out what does this ecosystem want to produce and how can we work with that. So how is a food forest different from a farm? I think it is a type of farm, but it's one that along the spectrum from, say, monoculture at one end and wild forest at the other end of the spectrum.
We sit somewhere in the middle there where we're trying to strike a balance between wildness for the sake of biodiversity and efficiency enough so that we can derive a yield. So tell me a little bit, how is it that you came to start Forested? How did that come about?
My background had been landscape design with ecology as an important priority, and as I designed landscapes for a variety of different mostly residential clients, and we planted native plants and we tried to reduce lawn and, take care of stormwater runoff, I became more and more interested in the close connection between people and their ecosystem. So it's all very well if we grow native plants in our backyard, but where is the food that sustains us coming from? It's mostly industrial monocultures, which we are lucky to have these systems, but they are also not functioning as well, ecologically, as they might. So I became more and more intrigued with the idea of how do you reintegrate people with the ecosystem so that the food that lets them live their lives is also coming from a landscape that is functioning well as an ecosystem. So, who was the Lincoln all those years ago who started this food forest and what were your plans and ideas?
What did you think it was going to look like, what kinds of fruits did you think you were going to be growing and how has that changed over time? I guess I had a list of dozens of different things that I wanted to try, which certainly included the usual suspects like apples and pears, and also more unusual things like pawpaws that I'm sure you've talked about on your program.
And I guess I decided to start the project when I realized that I would love to do this, even if I don't end up wealthy or famous or anything like that, by the end of my time on this earth, if I have grown a lot of fruit and tried to share the joy of doing that with different people in the region, perhaps help them to enjoy doing the same.
That would be a satisfying way to live. So that was the mindset that I was in at the time when I started it.
[00:04:39] Challenges and Learnings in Forest Gardening
Okay, so you talk about the usual suspects. You plant them. When was the wake up call? Was there some point where you realized that maybe my first plan isn't working the way I thought it would?
sure. Yes. And I planted and killed plenty of trees along the way. Not that I didn't expect that, but for example, planting into an old cornfield and tobacco field, like that's the site where I am, this soil has been beat on for hundreds of years, pretty low in organic matter from a lot of tillage. And some of the early things that I tried, like cherry trees, the Japanese beetles just came up and ate a lot of the leaves, and I did lose a lot of the early trees. But as the years went on, actually, I think it actually took about two years, we would find wild trees starting to come up in the field and, because it is a forest garden, we're interested in what comes up naturally and we don't immediately mow everything. There are large areas that are not mowed, which allows us to observe what type of biodiversity comes up. Sometimes it's wild invasive things that we will eventually remove.
But one thing we observed, and I couldn't even identify for a couple of years, is tons of little tiny American persimmons. And on the occasion when we would try to remove one of those from the ground, I noticed that the root of this tiny little sprout, the root was often thick and long and embedded in the soil so that it had actually been there for who knows how many years prior to me starting my project persisting in the cornfield. So that tree existed inside the cornfield and was mowed or tilled or disked from time to time, but survived that kind of treatment. So it's an incredibly tough and well adapted tree for this particular time and place and soil. Interesting. Okay, so things start popping up that seem to want to be there and you're paying attention.
[00:06:46] Listener Questions: Vegetables and Urban Food Forests
We've got a quick email here. Let's see who it's from. Shaw says, Hello, Susan. Hello, Lincoln. Does Lincoln work with vegetables as well as fruits? Oh, and I'm from Louisville, Kentucky. Cool. Hello. yes, I grow some vegetables, although my priority is woody perennial crops, nuts and fruits and berries.
But I do have vegetable garden areas inside the forest garden, and we try to arrange the garden so that there's a good amount of sunlight coming into those vegetable garden areas. Even as the trees grow larger, we try to arrange the trees to allow for sunlight into the vegetable gardens, and I do love some of the unusual perennial vegetables that you might not run into. Sure, we grow tomatoes and peppers and that kind of thing, but we also grow, for example, something called sea kale, which is a beautiful perennial kale. And just in the last couple of years, we've been growing sochan which is in the Black Eyed Susan family, I believe, and it's a really good green. It was important to the Cherokee Indians. One of the things I love about forest gardening is there is so much to learn, so much diversity. Our industrial diet is actually much less diverse than most traditional cultures and bringing those foods back into my diet and the diet of the guests that come to the forest garden is a total pleasure.
sochan, how do you spell that? S. O. C. H. A. N. Oh, okay. We got to look that one up. We've got an email from Bond writing from Peterborough, Ontario. Bond writes, I'm creating a small food forest in my backyard using permaculture principles. What tips do you have for smaller urban food forest design. Also, what are your thoughts on bareroot trees and plants versus pot grown.
The second one is easier. I do like bareroot when I can get it. If you grow, if you bring in a tree in a pot, I would recommend take the pot off and then carefully remove the soil from those roots and untangle any roots that are going around and around the pot so that you can avoid potential girdling of the tree later as it grows.
For a smaller site, I would certainly just bear in mind that you can't grow all the hundreds of things you might be interested to grow. Speaking from experience is my house here. I quickly maxed out my area to grow. let's say just enjoy the things that you do have space for and you can produce an enormous amount in a small space, especially if you think vertically If you try to layer your crops together, that doesn't mean crowding your fruit trees together if a tree wants to become 12 feet wide at maturity, that doesn't mean plant 12 foot wide trees at three feet apart is just going to become a mess unless you have a particular intentional pruning plan.
Rather, grow that 12 foot tree, but above it, you can grow perhaps a nut tree if you have the space for it or you can make use of the vertical wall space of your house to do arbors where you could grow kiwis or passion fruit or other climbers. So you can do a surprising amount in a smaller urban space.
Those are really great ideas. we've got an email from Pat and I think it's an email saying hello because there's nothing written in it. So thank you, Pat. hello.
[00:10:21] The Persimmon Journey
So we were talking about your persimmons and you were talking about your apple trees. Tell me what happened with the apple tree adventure.
we try to grow the most disease resistant varieties we have here, but it's just not, in my experience, the best climate for apples, in the mid Atlantic of the eastern United States. Apple trees around here, they're susceptible to fire blight and scab and cedar apple rust, all of which is pretty high pressure.
Then if they survive all of those things, the pests set in. And also in terms of my particular philosophy, I do not spray any kind of insecticides or herbicides in my landscape, which is for a variety of different reasons. One of them just being the practical consideration that we are growing more than 100 different species and it's not practical to do a different care regimen for every one of those plants.
So we very much want to see what plants are extremely well suited to this particular landscape and will almost take care of themselves. certainly we go in and we weed and we prune from time to time, but it's pretty minimal. We want to keep, if a plant is going to need lots of babying, and changing the soil around, and insecticides and herbicides, it's not the right plant for this particular system that we're trying to employ. I appreciate that because we want to make it easy for ourselves as much as possible. And sometimes it's like in my introduction, I talk about, we dream of growing apple trees, but actually they are amongst the hardest trees to grow. There are something like 36 different pests that attack apple trees. There are diseases. when we spoke earlier, you described, watching your persimmons grow and then looking beside at the apple trees, you said those apple trees look pretty sad, but the persimmons looked really happy.
Always. Yep. So then. You started on a persimmon adventure. Tell me, for somebody, I've never tasted a persimmon. I don't know anything about growing them. What are they like to grow? And are there cultivars? And or did you just stick with what you found that was planting itself in your space in your forest.
Sure. when we started to find that there were hundreds and hundreds of wild persimmon trees coming up in the field and eventually figured out what they were, we realized that the land was sending us a strong message, like, this is what ought to be growing here right now. And persimmons were somewhat on my radar at that point, but they became over time and emphasis in response to again what was being offered for free.
Funny little side note, whenever the persimmons are ripe, you find all through the landscape from here in their little fox poops that are full of persimmon seeds. So the foxes, the wild foxes that live in the area, they like to consume this fruit and they're a major, one of the major vectors, that helps move the seed around.
And they planted all these little trees through the landscape while it was still a cornfield. Probably the foxes out there hunting mice in the cornfield and planting persimmon trees as it goes so that when we transition the field, from a cornfield into a forest garden, all these trees were there, their root systems were established.
And as soon as they stopped being mowed, they sprung up with great speed, a much faster wild growing tree compared to a fruit tree that I might've planted. Certainly faster than the apples, as an example. But a persimmon is a neat little native fruit. It is orange in color and usually an inch or two in size.
The wild ones are decent. The only thing is, as many of you will probably know, you should not eat an underripe persimmon. And if you ever have, you may think that it's the worst fruit in the world because, if you consume it when underripe, it will turn your face inside out with its astringency.
It's, very nasty. but you give it a little while and wait until that persimmon turns nice and soft, even a little bit wrinkly. And, and the calyx at the top of it, the little leftover part of the flower, when that pulls off really easily, it's a beautiful, wonderful tasting fruit. So the landscape is offering these things and they're good, but they are very seedy and very small.
So one thing that we've done over the years is to learn more about persimmons and discover some of the varieties, the selections that have been made. in the last few weeks, I've been harvesting one, for example, that is called Prok, P R O K, and that is a fruit that's at least twice the diameter, probably four times the weight, of the wild persimmons that are growing in the area.
Less seedy, more sweet, more consistent in its quality. In many cases, the wild trees that are growing already, we will take and cut those and graft them. So we graft onto the wild trees that are growing out with improved varieties of persimmon, which has been a way of us having this conversation with the land.
It's okay. you're offering all these persimmons, can we take this in a direction where it's a little bit easier for us to use, a little bit easier for us to harvest and enjoy, but still working quite close to what the ecosystem is offering us. So essentially, all these new cultivars you're bringing in, you are grafting onto existing rootstocks.
You're not planting new plants, you're getting scionwood and you are grafting it onto the rootstocks, these tough old rootstocks that are already there. Yes. Yep. Okay. As a side point, I will say if, let's say you're at home or you're in your neighborhood and you're looking around and seeing what's growing.
Even if I were planting persimmon trees, that would be a fine way to do it. If you don't know grafting or aren't inclined to learn it, the presence of the wild ones there, are still a good indicator like, Oh, this is a good spot to grow a persimmon. Whether you graft or you plant based on what you are seeing growing in the landscape. Both can be a successful way of going. But I do love the grafting. It has some special advantages. It's interesting in our local ravine we've got some crab apple trees and they're doing quite well. No disease, so there's a sign. Actually this might be a good site for apples.
There's a lot of plants nearby. So it's a great way and I like how you talk about having a conversation with the landscape a little give and take. We don't just say, Okay, you're giving us persimmons. They're good, but they're a little crappy because they got too many seeds. Okay, let's kick it up a notch here.
So we've got a few questions. First one. Let's see who this is from Karen from Waterloo, Ontario writes. I want to know if Lincoln is his real first name, and if so, what is the history behind it? Okay. And she says, I love it. She loves your name. yeah, my dad had a family friend with the name Lincoln growing up. And as it turns out, I ended up very tall and skinny. I'm six five and not a lot of extra weight on me, just like the president. So who knows, be careful what you name your kids. They could influence how they turn out. And maybe you'll turn into the president.
Who knows? We don't know. I hope not. We got a little time. But anyways, okay. Another, this one is from Lisa. Hello, Susan. Hello, Lincoln. Love what you're doing educating people with food forests. We have a small two acre property that we are developing into a food forest. We're trying to have a balance between native and food plants.
And of course, we want to reduce our lawns. We've planted some nitrogen fixers, black locust because of poor soil and some sea buckthorn. However, we're worried that they will be taking over and that we won't be able to contain it. Any advice on this? Thanks. And Lisa says, please enter us into your contest.
And of course we will. And I'm also voting for that question about sea buckthorn. We'd love to have it in our orchard, but I am concerned about it being a little invasive. So what do you have to say to Lisa? Sure. Nitrogen fixation and soil building is a priority for a lot of these projects for sure, especially if you're in an old agricultural or even residential landscape, the soils can be very low in fertility.
So you need to think about how you're going to grow fertility. I have not chosen to bring in sea buckthorn. So I'll grow fruit of just about any prominence. I'll try it out. For example, around here, Asian pears grow really well. I don't mind that's a non native plant. it's not an invasive plant.
I am pretty careful with the invasives and some of the native plants can be aggressive. black locust is a great example. I'm in love with black locust. I make many things out of the wood of black locust. It's a wonderful local rot resistant resource, but the ones that I planted in the garden, they love to send up their thorny suckers everywhere. So as a companion plant, I would say it's gonna be best suited to your more outlying areas. You don't want that near your vegetable garden, for example, where it's going to start sending up its suckers right into the vegetable garden.
Great plant. I would definitely grow it, but if you want to keep a single stem black locust over time, if you have a sunny site, you're going to need to count on cutting down a bunch of suckers every year over time. Which is beneficial. Of course, every time you're cutting a nitrogen fixing plant.
You are adding to the soil and so whenever we cut any plant out there, whether it's the wild, the wild elms, or even the silly old multiflora rose, whenever you're cutting plant biomass and it starts to rot down in the soil, you are helping to build the organic matter. But some of those nitrogen fixers can be pretty aggressive. In terms of less aggressive ones, I'm forgetting where this person is from, but I do love bayberry some of the alders, Alnus being the genus, those are often less aggressive. Amorpha, which is wild indigo bush. And then one more is partridge pea. That's a really tiny little self reseeding annual nitrogen fixer and super easy, like you can seed it and it'll form a reasonable good population, but if it ever goes somewhere where you don't want it, it's very easy to remove, unlike some of these deep rooted persistent nitrogen fixers. So I think you're asking a good question and you're on the right track, include some nitrogen fixers, but yeah, some of them are a bit aggressive. Good for her for thinking in advance.
We've got an email from Tom in San Diego, California. Hello. I'm brand new to trying to grow a fruit tree. Can Lincoln please tell me now what is the very easiest fruit tree to grow for someone who wants to start growing one? I have absolutely no experience here and I am in zone nine.
Thank you. that's a great question. I'm jealous of your climate there. San Diego I think of as being a very lovely place to grow, and I'm unqualified to comment on your area. I would definitely look up your local fruit geeks, like if there's a local fruit growing club or even as you walk around your neighborhood, if you see some fruit that's growing well, don't ignore that.
That is the most useful information you can possibly get. It is amazing how, that idea of familiarity breeding contempt, like people can totally overlook things that are very well suited to their area just because they're so used to them. But, yeah, I can't advise you for San Diego. I haven't ever grown there myself, but it is a great growing zone as far as I know, and also persimmons should grow there.
Maybe you could try the Asian persimmons. I don't know if the American persimmon is native over there, but Asian persimmons, I think grow well. Also on that note, I do a mini course. It's just a half hour course called Growing Fruit Trees, A Beginner's Guide, and that will give you some ideas of what kind of plants you might want to grow near you and what you need to do to care for them.
So hopefully that helps. So we have an email from Julie, from Shelburne Falls, MA. That's Massachusetts, right? Oh, cool. Yeah, I used to live in Conway, Massachusetts, which is a stone's throw from Shelburne Falls. Oh, so your neighbor Julie is writing. Hello, Susan and Lincoln. We're trying to start a community permaculture food forest in Shelburne Falls.
100 percent of the harvest is to help with food insecurity in our community. Experimenting and just starting year two with 30 mixed variety trees.
[00:23:45] Community Engagement and Organic Practices
Can you talk a bit about engaging community to get folks invested in the design of the food forest from the beginning, and also about what you do for organic sprays to limit fruit tree pests?
Yeah, community engagement is exactly the right question. Over many years of working on community projects, as well as my own, I have come to feel that the people are the more tricky and the more important side of the equation that the horticulture stuff is important. But if you get that right and nobody's involved, what's the point?
And we are pretty disconnected from the land in a lot of ways as a culture. So it takes some building back some a lot of engagement, as you say. There's a project near here, in Hyattsville, Maryland that I designed. And they have some people on staff who are excellent at putting flyers in the neighborhood and inviting people out to Earth Day, take care of the food forest and enjoy the fruit, those kind of things.
It's an ongoing process. And when you start a food forest for a community, I would count on that continuous effort to bring people and engage them and educate them about the space like that. That's going to be almost as much work as taking care of the trees themselves, and also very rewarding, especially with the kids get in there and they start stuffing their face with berries it's just incredibly satisfying and fun for everyone.
In terms of the sprays, I don't use a lot of sprays. There is something called Surround, which Susan may know more about than I do. It is a clay. It's merely clay that you can spray onto the trees like they spray it onto the apples just after petal fall to try to stop some of the pests, some of the 37 or however many species of pests that are going to try to prey on that apple.
And because it is just clay, it's not doing anything chemically. I'm not against use of organic and biological pest control. I just don't because I have such a diversity of things and I'm most interested in what plants can live in my particular landscape without that kind of treatment.
Excellent. We have lots more questions.
So Lincoln, this one is from Pat, who emailed us earlier.
I thought just to say hi, there was nothing written in there. But this is what Pat says. Hello again, Susan.
[00:26:12] Exploring Espalier Techniques
Actually, I hit send too soon. Heard you speak of growing vertically in today's show. Does espalier fit into your current or future plans? Thanks as always, Patrick. I think espalier is a really cool technique for those with small spaces and a lot of patience and consistency in how they maintain their landscape.
if you're a person that really if you're going to be out there every, at least weekly or more often, and you like pinching off the little side growths that aren't needed to create your beautiful espalier, you'll likely succeed. I don't personally use it, over the 10 acre site.
I'm not all that short on space. I also don't tend to do it for my clients designs unless they already know what it is and they're sure that they like that. That said, if you have a nice sunny wall, I think planting in front of it is certainly a good thing to do around here in the mid Atlantic where we're right on the edge of where pomegranates and figs and, like feijoa and stuff like that are able to grow.
I love a nice sunny south facing wall to grow those kind of shrubs in front of them and see if they'll fruit and they often do.
[00:27:27] Discovering Sochan: An Edible Plant
We have an email from Jim. I appreciate this, Jim. Jim writes, here's an interesting article about sochan, which you spoke about earlier, an edible plant, and it is.
It looks like it's a Rudbeckia, so it's Black Eyed Susan family. So he sends a website foragerchef. com slash sochan. I'm going to look at that. Thank you, Jim. That sounds interesting. Next. We've got an email here. small sidebar on sochan. We do chef dinners here and one of our breakfasts over the summer, we served sochan for the first time. We cooked it up over the fire and then use it as one of the ingredients in our omelettes. We have a flock of ducks out here so it's a duck egg omelette with sochan and a variety of other vegetables. And it has a lovely flavor. It's a really good green.
Oh, I'm really excited about that. That's awesome. I'm quite an omelette person myself so that sounds yummy. Okay.
[00:28:23] Listener Questions: Trips to Canada and Serviceberries
We've got Lori writing us. Hello, brand new listener to your radio show from Mississauga, Ontario. Is Lincoln planning any trips? tours or seminars up here in Canada? Yeah, good question. When are you coming to Canada?
You have a lot of really great growers up there. You may not need my mid Atlantic perspective, but I do love Canada and I'm jealous of your serviceberries. it seems like much of Canada is prime. And we can grow them down here. And that's like just, there's so many things that are almost my favorite fruit, but that's definitely one of my many favorite fruits. And if you're not growing them, please grow them. Canada, please grow serviceberries in all your backyards. And, if you ever have too many, they dry beautifully into a dried service berry raisin. They were used heavily by the Native Americans as part of pemmican, which is a dried meat pounded with dried berries, a wonderful travel food. You're a great serviceberry growing area, but that's about all I can probably advise you. Lincoln, do you want to know what the problem with serviceberries is? sure. They're so tasty that you go and harvest and you eat most of them and then there's nothing to bring home.
There's lots of fruit, but you just kind of stuff it in your face and it's just so delicious. So that's the problem. I can pick all day long on serviceberries and fill gallons and still be stuffing my face at the end of the day. Most fruits I get satiated, or sick of the taste, much earlier than with serviceberries.
It's something about them. They're magical. They are magical. Okay. This is from Holly. Hello. I'm a brand new listener to your show. I'm so glad Holly's with us. I'm loving it and I live in, are you ready? Where does Holly live? Lincoln, Nebraska. What a coincidence. That this is your first show and Lincoln Smith is our guest.
That's amazing. One more email here. Let's see what we've got. Okay. So James writes here, relating to Julie's email, Julie was talking about creating a food forest. So James writes, maybe Julie could check out the Community Food Forest Handbook. That's a really nice book. And James is from the school of forestry.
So he would know, from Arizona. So Community Food Forest Handbook. I've seen that one. It's a good one. Yeah. Cathy Bukowski. Yep. Yep. So that's a good one to check out. We got one more email here from Wichita, Kansas. That's from Larry. Larry writes, Lincoln is six, five. Forget farming. How about basketball? Love the show.
Yeah, not bad idea. Can you do basketball and farming? I don't know. I do volleyball. Volleyball's good too. That's excellent. What I lack in skill, I make up for in height. That's perfect.
[00:31:33] Mulberries and Raspberries: Easy-to-Grow Plants
Okay, so I wanted to talk about some of the other plants that your landscape told you that it wanted to grow. Can you give me some other plants that just grow really well there and are easy for you?
Sure, I'll try to pick just a couple. here's an interesting one, mulberry. So if you've had mulberries, maybe many of your listeners have had them, you might think of them as a sort of an okay, but not that wonderful fruit. If that's the case, I would encourage you to try to get your hands on some of the selections of mulberry.
there's one that I grow that seems to like it here called Illinois Everbearing Mulberry. And there are several other wonderful selections where the fruit is much, much more complex and a little bit better tartness and just is one of the best fruits in the landscape. It's a total favorite of all the kids that visit my particular garden here.
And as a side point on mulberry, the selections that grow well around here, they tend to be hybrids of the native red mulberry and the introduced white mulberry, and the introduced white mulberry is somewhat invasive. And the reason why I chose to grow it in my particular landscape is that the landscape is already full of wild invasive mulberries.
So in that sense, I didn't feel that I was bringing something to the site that didn't already have an established population. And where the wild plants, they produce an okay quality of fruit and there's so many of them across the whole neighborhood. We're not going to eliminate them at this point.
this is a super easy to grow plant and I highly recommend it. interesting in terms of the red, the native red mulberry, there is, in here in Ontario, a very small population that they have to protect. What is it about them that they somehow die off in the face of competition from the white mulberries?
Are they mixing too much? Yeah, I know they hybridize and that can mean that eventually you don't have pure strains of the original species. But in terms of the exact dynamic, I don't know what's going on. It's sad. I would like to, at some point, I keep meaning to do a show on it.
I don't know if it's something we can save. Just having a little sanctuary for the red mulberry. What about, I understand that you guys do raspberries well, that your landscape likes raspberries. For sure. Yes. The native black raspberry Rubus occidentalis is all over the place in our woods edge. Maybe it is too, up there, in the Toronto area?
Anyway, so even coming onto the site, when it was a cornfield, all around the outside is black raspberries and it's a fabulous fruit. And incidentally, it does love to grow. We also have a lot of black walnut and people are familiar with the fact that black walnut produces juglone, which will suppress the growth of certain other plants.
It's allelopathic and people know that sometimes fear it, but black raspberries and many others, tolerate it just fine. Indeed. We almost always seem to find black raspberries under black walnuts. So it may be that, certain other things being suppressed is good for the black raspberry.
So if you have black walnuts, I would definitely give a shot to black raspberries. they tolerate some amount of shade and still fruit well. Very low care. So based on the wild ones being present in the landscape, we have like with the persimmons, tried to make a collection. We try to get every variety of selected black raspberry that we can and grow those.
There's one that's fruiting right now, which is extremely late now. It's almost October. very late for a black raspberry it's called Sweet Repeat. And that is a variety that fruits in the spring along with all the other black raspberries and also fruits again in the fall. So it's been really fun to learn some of these selections of black raspberry and they're happy here which we were pretty confident of based on the wild ones.
[00:35:53] Designing a Food Forest: Tips and Insights
So let's say you are designing a food forest for somebody, what is it that you do? When you go to the site, how do you speak to the landscape? How do you find out, is this something that takes time or can you give people a head start by just looking at their landscape? I look at the site itself, of course, but if it's a say a suburban area or even urban, I will also try to take the time to visit local forests and fields, if any, a variety of different ages of forest type landscapes so that I can see what type of a forest naturally occurs here, because it varies quickly as you move across the landscape, obviously, whether you're in a low land like down by the stream, something a different forest community will grow in wet soil versus up on the hilltop where it's dry.
And like here I am in a in the coastal plain, which is very sandy, out to the east of Washington, D. C. But if you go out to the west of Washington, D. C., up, you get into the Piedmont and then the mountains and different sets of trees grow in those places, trees and indeed whole forest communities. So what you can do is go and key into what are the main trees growing.
For example, like around Bowie, Maryland, where I am, you'll often find tulip poplar forests, like tulip poplar is a second growth. after a land was farmed and let go, it often turns into a poplar. In the streams that run through these tulip poplar forests, you'll often find pawpaw trees down by the stream side and in the swampy areas.
So if you go into a landscape and you're seeing tulip poplars, maybe you're not seeing pawpaw trees, but if it's a, sort of a swampy stream situation in a tulip poplar forest or in a suburban yard, perhaps it's a little boggy and it backs up to a tulip poplar forest. This is very likely to be a pawpaw type of an environment.
So that's the sort of thinking that I try to use when going into a new piece of land. So it's like there's no one size fits all solution. It's when I started to grow fruit trees, the reason I wrote my book is because I found books about fruit tree care or different cultivars and I'm reading them and I spoke to the park supervisor that I was working with to start our community forest, our community garden and our community orchard.
And I said, Oh, I'd like this cultivar and that cultivar. And he said, Susan, we don't have these in Canada. They were like zone eight or somewhere else, and I felt like I needed to write a book for people like me wherever they were so that they could research local things that will work for them. So I think if there's one lesson from speaking to you, it's that you've developed a really wonderful sensitivity to the landscape, and instead of dominating the landscape you are collaborating with it.
Yeah, that's, the goal. Yep. And there's always more to learn. There's so much more going on in the landscape than any of us can know. It's a wonderful complex network of different organisms. But yeah, definitely start with that and make use of the online groups. No matter where you are, there's probably a local Facebook group or meetup or something among people that had been growing fruit for a while and can give you such a huge headstart so that you don't have to waste quite as much of your time growing things that aren't as well suited to your locale.
[00:39:37] Biggest Gardening Mistakes and Lessons Learned
I think before we finish up I want to hear what was your biggest oops in the whole time? Was there one thing that stands out at you? It's like oops that didn't work. I've learned my lesson. Yeah, so hard to pick There have been a lot of oopses.
I was just harvesting shiitakes yesterday. Shiitake mushrooms. Do not let your mushroom logs dry out. that is an oops. I know that's not a fruit thing. let's see. I guess maintenance. I would say try to grow a number of plants that is really sustainable for you to take care of.
Because if you go really big, Okay. Especially those plant catalogs, those beautiful nursery catalogs with all the beautiful fruit pictured. Those are great information, but they will also tend to, like it sounds great in February, but when it's July and it's 95 degrees out and very humid, and the weeds are just going bonkers and you have to get through an acre of, an acre doesn't sound like much but it can be a lot when you got a full time job and you just come home from work and you got to go take care of your little mini orchards. I have occasionally bitten off more than I can chew, or done so on behalf of clients.
And so I try to get a very good sense now with clients of who's taking care of this landscape and start with the things that you're most excited and jazzed and inspired about. And then add more things over time, but there's no terrible rush with this stuff. Oh, I think that's such a good idea.
Start small and expand slowly because if you buy all the trees all at once and then you realize, oh, maybe they should have been disease resistant or whatever. I think that's great advice. We have one more email. Okay. Michael is from Eagle River, Alaska. Greetings everyone. Thank you for the show.
[00:41:44] Topography and Forest Garden Planning
Could you speak on how the topography of the land can affect the planning for a food forest?
Is there a topography that is preferred and what are some of the gotchas to watch out for? Interestingly, I have come to prefer starting a forest garden on an open site versus trying to work with an existing forest, and you can do both things. There is a great field you often in the United States is called non timber forest products, where you are growing mushrooms and herbs and vegetables that are tolerant of the shade, but, In terms of the macro picture, I think what gives me a lot of satisfaction is bringing land back into forest that had been field or non forest because you're re establishing a functional landscape and you do have a lot more light to work with.
You tend to have poorer soil than what you would find in the forest, but you have that light. And when I design forest gardens and indeed mine, even where we're starting from an open field, I have a thinning plan. I don't want it to become dark. As my nut trees grow, somewhere around 20 years in, we will be thinning these nut trees out because I still want to be growing berries underneath, and this is again, drawing on what the Native Americans were doing. You can choose to create a forest garden that has a dark closed canopy, but then there's less and less berries and understory fruits that are going to want to grow in total darkness. topography wise, I tend to look for an open situation, or if I'm going into an existing forest, I'm going to look at harvesting some of those trees for lumber, or other uses, to open up new opportunities for growing fruit in the lower layers. That's a great question, Michael. Thank you for asking that.
[00:43:43] Show Wrap-Up and Announcements
And I want to thank you very much, Lincoln, for coming on the show today. So it was so much fun to talk to you. We have spoken before. The very, very first episode of the urban forestry radio show on podcast. And this was many years ago, you were the guest and we talked about acorn trees and acorn flour, and it was a fabulous show and somehow that show got lost in the ether.
So that's the only podcast I don't have. Is that sad or what? It is. The oak trees are still out there making acorns. we'll talk about that another time. We're going to have to get you back to talk about that another time. So thank you so much for coming on the show. and, I really appreciate you being here and, we'll talk to you soon, maybe about acorn flower.
Yeah, it's been fun talking to you. If anybody wants to, my website is forested. us and there is a forest garden design guide there. It's not long, but it is illustrated, ideas that you can use when you're planning out your forest garden. And the way it's set up is like you can download that for free if you give me your email address, and then you'll be on my email list and I send about an email a month about forest garden stuff.
Oh, I have to get myself on that list. Somehow I'm not on your list. I look forward to getting the guide. Okay, so tell us again your website. What is your website? It's forested. us. Okay, everybody sign up and let's see what we can learn from Lincoln. That sounds great. Thanks, Lincoln.
I want to end the show today with a little bit of news and some updates for the Orchard People community. Recently, I told you that this radio show won an award. Silver medal from GardenComm, which is the garden communicators international group. And that was an award for best radio program overall.
So I really want to thank the listeners for your participation in the show, because that's what makes it so special.
And I'm also really grateful for my amazing guests and all the experts who come and join me on the show. recently, I also discovered that my website at orchard, people. com won a gold medal.
Yay! It was a gold medal of achievement for overall website and I'm really happy about that. So if you haven't visited OrchardPeople. com yet, I hope you will come and check it out. You're going to find in depth articles and podcasts. And courses and all sorts of good stuff. Finally, before we wrap up the show, I want to thank those of you who are leaving reviews for this show on iTunes or on your podcatcher.
It really means a lot to me. So thanks to Mike. This is a recent one, a lovely one. Thanks to Mike who left this message. Mike writes on iTunes. A great find in podcast land with a library of 70 episodes, anyone who's interested in growing fruit can find something that gets their attention. The guests are terrific.
The topics are timely and informative. And most of all, there is an underlying theme of working with nature instead of against her in trying to maximize quality production and joy in one's fruit growing endeavors. Mike, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. So for all of those of you guys who are sending in feedback and writing little reviews, keep it coming.
It makes me feel wonderful. So that's it for today's show.