We have a total of eight fruit trees that we are going to create fruit tree guilds around. The basic idea around a fruit tree guild is using companion plants to perform most of the tasks that I would have to do manually, such as weed control, fertilization, and pest control. You can learn more about fruit tree guilds, here. Our trees were planted last spring, so this will be their second summer in the ground. Our first step in creating our fruit tree guild is to clear away the grass from around the tree to a diameter of about six feet. You can skip this step, but you’ll need to put down more layers of newspaper in the next step.
With all the grass and weeds cleared away I put down a couple thicknesses of newspaper. To keep it from blowing away just wet it down as you go with a sprayer attached to a garden hose.
We had three maples trees that had to be cut down and we ran their smaller branches through the chipper. There were a lot of leaves on the branches which is great to help start the wood break down and feed the soil.
I spread about four loads of wood chips on the newspapers to bring the thickness to about 4 inches. An application of blood meal will jump start the decomposition and make sure that there is enough nitrogen. All the different components of the guild are now ready to plant, but the key is that I have to plant them into the soil and not try to grow them in the wood chips. In a future post I’ll show what I end up planting in our fruit tree guilds.
