An orchard from scratch / Unlikely progress
An ongoing real-time series about helping a friend create a food forest intermixed with some unpopular takes on permaculture
If you missed the first post in the series, it’s best to go back and read it, because without context, you will have a harder time understanding the how and whys. Also, you can find the whole series at its dedicated tag page.
The last episode took place in November 2023. It was a really shitty way to end the season, discouraging. We tried to make peace with the fact a whole year will be skipped and planting of the trees will have to be postponed till autumn 2024, but it was not easy.
The massive piles of clay clumps just sat there, under the snow, and then under the rain, and then under the snow again.
In early January, the contractor called that they finally have the machines available to fill the road bed with rocks - first large size pieces, then a bit smaller and a finer fraction of gravel at the top.
That meant that a big excavator will be available at the plot to do the work and we wanted to use the bigger machine, if there was leftover time, to potentially try and break up the soil that was delivered last November. And if that works, possibly hire them for another day to try and at least preliminary push soil around towards a more level… level.
Of course it snowed just before work had to commence but that did not twart our plans, this time!
At the start of day 2 it was evident the road will be done quicker than expected so both of the machines could spend some time playing in the dirt. The snow was melting in the same time and everything was very, very wet and muddy.
By the end of day 2, we had secured another day of their time to finish what they started, because it looked like it would be possible to be finished. Hope was starting to slowly creep back in. A late planting of trees…? Do we dare think about that and attempt it?
Tree planting season (and in fact all perennials as well) here is autumn, usually from late October and leaf fall onwards till late November, as long as the time permits - no frozen soil, no deep snow and no forecast for very cold weather.
Planting in late winter, nearer to spring, is frowned upon here for several reasons:
Trees would have spent months in a “heeled in” state in the nursery, so certainly there would be some root damage, especially considering the -15 temps we got during that period.
The sooner you plant a tree after it’s been dug out, the better. It has more time to settle in and actually the roots can continue growing in winter, if the soil is not frozen solid.
Spring can be unpredictable in the last decade here. So one week it looks like deep winter with cold nights and snow, the next week it’s 20C and everything is started to wake up and bud out. It’s easy to miss your planting window and even lose trees to rapid changes in weather.
On day 3 the job was done. A bit unbelievable, to be honest, at first. I had to go to the office and when I came back, the massive piles were no more and the plot looked… level-er?
However.
If you followed the previous installments, you probably picked up the pattern that this project seems to have adopted…
A quick look and walkabout and a check up with the laser level showed a few serious problems with the plot as it was.
First and foremost, it was a pig wallow. Wet from the melting snow and the over saturated state, the machines turned the plot into a mud bath. My rubber boots squished and squashed as I tried to walk around without losing them to the clay.
Any sane person would tell you that wet clay should never be trampled, let alone by two heavy machines, as it tends to compact and decompation can take a few years of soil life activity and ample moisture.
Also, it was easy to measure what was obvious to the naked eye as well - the large clumped piles did not spread very evenly and we had large dips there and there, especially near the end of the plot, plus mounds in places.
So in effect we put the vertisol piles to use, but the terrain was unusable in that state. It was really not level, the drop degree was not consistent and the surface was inhospitable to walking, let along planting trees.
I was leery to suggest to postpone planting to autumn again; the owner also was heavily opposed to that idea, so I had to quickly come up with some solution, as he was coming by the end of January to inspect the work that was done so far and he wanted to order trees for planting.
Suddenly I had to move quickly, everything had to happen right away in that new context and the easiest solution I could think of was to just level it with sandy alluvial soil.
Shocking, I know. So I’ll give you some time to digest that and we’ll continue in the next episode. There is a happy ending in sight, I promise. Or at least I hope 🤞