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Building Tree Guilds for Creating Diverse Backyard Orchards

Author Bio

Jonathon Engels, a long-time vegetarian turned vegan, is currently on a trip from Guatemala to... Read More

When most people picture orchards, they imagine rows upon rows of some certain type of fruit tree. They don’t think about what’s growing amongst these trees, probably because modern agriculture has not focused much on that. Other plants are not part of the pretty picture we get on packaging.

But, for the backyard orchardist (any orchardist really), those clean, monoculture rows are the antithesis of what we should be after. Just as with corn and so on, monoculture orchards are rough on the environment. They don’t offer a diversity of food to the wildlife, and they typically require a lot of spraying and fertilizing because they don’t function as nature (the world’s most successful grower) does.

Instead, we should be building tree guilds, especially in backyards where everything is picked by hand anyway. Instead of rows of one type of tree, we can conjure a mixed collection of fruit trees with all sorts of other productive and beneficial plants around them. It’ll be healthier for the plants and healthier for us.

Prepare the space

Before planting anything, it’s important to prepare the space well so that it gets off on the right foot. For most backyards, that means addressing the water and subduing the grass.

For spaces that tend to dry out, it might be a good idea to make small swales or water catchment spaces so that the planted areas get adequate water even when it isn’t raining regularly. Mulching heavily around the plants will help with this, too.

Grass is competitive with young trees, and it creates the wrong sort of soil (bacterial) for trees to grow best (fungal). Sheet mulching with tree parts is an awesome route. Cover the space with a couple of layers of wet cardboard, top that with a thick layer (3-4 inches) of autumn leaves, and weigh that day with 3-4 inches of wood chips.

Know food forest layers

A natural forest doesn’t just have rows upon rows of one type of tree. It has all sorts of plants in the mix, particularly at the edges of the forest, where the sunlight gets in a bit more. It’s this mix of plants that keeps a natural forest healthy and vibrant. This biodiversity is why forests don’t disappear unless humans cut them down.

With that in mind, it’s important to be aware of the layers of wild forest and, thus, a well-conceived food forest. Forests tend to have overstory trees with understory trees and shrubs growing beneath and between them. The forest floor will have herbaceous plants (non-woody), groundcover plants (low-lying spreaders), tubers, and climbing vines. Forests also have fungi, hence our goal of fungal soil.

A tree guild should keep all of these layers in mind and hopefully include components of each one.

Identify plant functions

Beyond recognizing the type of plants in each layer, it’s important to recognize the roles the plants we choose are playing.

For example, an apple tree will primarily be a food producer and an overstory tree. That’s its primary function, and it acts as the center of the guild.
It could be flanked by three or four understory trees like dwarf mulberry (food, good for wildlife, good for chop-and-drop mulch material), goumi berries (food, nitrogen-fixing, wildlife, chop-and-drop mulch), and hazelnuts (food, pollinators, wood).
These understory trees could each be hemmed in by several smaller perennial shrubs like rosemary, lavender, and sage that are great for pollinators and pest control, as well as edible uses. Tea bushes and berry canes fit nicely here, too.
Mixed amongst the understory trees and smaller shrubs could be plenty of herbaceous plants edible wildflowers and large edible “weeds” like comfrey, dandelions, chickweed, sorrel, and plantain. They also act as groundcovers, taking up all the ground space available so that unwanted plants have no room to grow.
Garlic and daffodils are great tubers/bulbs to plant around trees. They add some beauty, attract pollinators, and repel underground pests that may go after tree roots.
Then, vines can be trained onto trellises or posts in the mix of the food forests, even fences along the side. They can be allowed to roam across the ground as ground covers. Eventually, they can be permitted, with careful monitoring, to climb up large, healthy trees.
The mulch underneath all of this can be inoculated with edible mushrooms like wine cap mushrooms or oyster mushrooms to help break down the carbon-heavy material into fertile soil while providing food.

Fill the space & Blend your Guilds

What we want to do with a tree guild is to fill the entire space with dense layers of plants we have chosen. The smaller the plants, the more needed. One apple tree might inspire three understory trees, a dozen small shrubs, even more herbaceous plants, and on and on. The idea is to cover the entire space with plants you want so that plants you don’t want have any function to fill or space to fit into.

Finally, the backyard orchard will replicate this formula many times over, throwing in different types and sizes of trees, shrubs, herbs, vines, groundcovers, and tubers so that all that remains between the plants is walking paths through the food forest. An average suburban backyard can easily have 100 plant species growing in it, in addition to whatever fruit trees are growing.

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