Orchard as Re-Boot

I didn’t really know what I would be getting into when I asked to make an orchard. The reality of making it happen has been a trial for each of us individually and together as a pair, I won’t lie. It is fully the story of a couple venturing into a creative process full of unknown variables all of which create exponentiating volumes of sheer labor. It didn’t matter how much research I did beforehand, nor how much Joel brought of his own experiences, neither of us could fully see what is happening before it was happening. I couldn’t believe that he wasn’t just taking over, and he couldn’t understand what I was resisting. But the worst is over, and we are on the same page. It ended up being a permaculture approach after all: use the resources at hand, maximize fossil fuels in bulk, do a total re-boot if appropriate, set it and semi-forget it. There will obviously be plenty of maintenance, but my research will hopefully pay off in managing a no-till system that integrates trees and vegetables.

Dec 2019: The following photos span the recent 7 month period in which Joel found vast swaths of beautiful compost to the south near Dee Creek, the by-product of the old sawmill, pushed off to the side and into the forest. Black, crumbly, moisture retentive, and a few hundred feet away, he slowly brought to my orchard uncountable thousands of tons of it so that instead of me trying to hack around with the existing poor clay soil ( the topsoil of which had also been pushed to the side years ago), I could re-boot the entire area. The grade was changed significantly to anticipate water flow, the old doug fir stumps were tediously leveled and then buried, he is building me an access road far better than I was asking for, and the fence still isn’t done yet, but it will be bomb-proof against elk, deer, coyotes, the occasional angry rhinoceros, and maybe even raccoons. The orchard also got a lot bigger as he looked again and again at the future placement of a sauna, which will now be located inside the orchard and integrated with a part of the fence.

The photos show 5 year old trees planted but being surrounded by first topsoil coming in, and then the compost. We cleaned out rocks, old bits of logs, and the roots of himalayan blackberry, throwing those things onto tarps that we then rolled into the bucket and sent to the burn pile. Then the gradual shoveling, raking, and combing of a smooth surface into which I seeded in the center of the access road a meadow of wildflowers for butterflies and hummers. Outside of the access road will be vegetables in amongst the other trees, with a mown carpet of red clover and lupin. Some of the trees needed to be lifted and moved, some will likely die from the change of grade. My heart broke so many times I can’t tell you, but many deep breaths later, I can see how much nicer it will be to maintain moving forward, and how much more likely I will be to successfully grow food… thank you Joel… You are truly acting from the deepest of loves… for me and our mama earth… :)