I dreamed of having a small orchard ever since I was a teenager in northern Minnesota. I’ve planted fruit trees around our houses through the years. In 2013, we purchased the adjacent acre to our home. This land had been mowed for years – and was a perfect open area to plant an orchard. I designed the fruit, nut and berry orchard using concepts from regenerative agriculture.
The overall concept was to design an edible forest. The layout on the left is a portion of the first half-acre’s design. The rows are 24 feet apart and the core trees in each row are 24 feet apart. The rows alternate between nut and fruit trees. I have garden beds in between the rows.
Each row is 100 feet long. The half-acre plot has three fruit tree rows (apple, pear, peach/persimmon) alternating with two nut rows (chestnut and carpathian walnut). The five nut trees in the rows become the tallest trees in the forest. The five fruit trees in the rows are the mid-canopy trees, which I maintain by pruning to a height of 12-15 feet. Each row also has a diversity of bushes (currents, gooseberries, bush cherries and hazelnuts), brambles (raspberries and blackberries), and vines (grapes and cold hardy kiwi).