I bought 72 bare-root trees and 47 starts at the annual county plant sales. I'm killing myself getting everything in the ground.
As I was struggling to find shady spots in my bare, open acre, for those plants that wanted shade, it occurred to me yesterday, shit, I should've bought only sun-lovers. Then in a few years when they were big enough to provide shade, buy the shade-lovers to fill in spots.
Wish I'd thought of that earlier. I couldn't say no to wild ginger, bunchberry, etc, though.
Update 7/1/2023:
Nope. Now that I have had another 2 years to tinker and learn, I would say that first, before buying any plants, that you at least have established cuttings of pioneer plants all over the place to provide shade to whatever new plants you buy and put in the ground. If you pick pioneer plants that also fix nitrogen in the soil, and/or form relationships with mycorrhizal fungi, then that's even better. Pioneer plants are free (they're all over the place), and root easily from cuttings (except for alder, which frankly, would be the ideal nurse plant since it meets all of the extra criteria).
Actually, if I were to list ALL of the tasks that I would do in the future, to go from bare land to food forest, I think this is the order I'd go in:
1. Observe how water moves through the ground on your property for 1 whole year. Mark wet spots on a satellite image of your property. Mark arrows moving away from the driest spots to the wettest spots, downhill. Then, mark on the map where you might eventually put swales, ponds, bridges, rainwater collectors, hugel beds, etc, in order to distribute water better and make it percolate into the ground better. Soil is the best water reservoir.
2. Make a loose plan. Loose! Mark where things like septic systems and underground utilities are. Mark where you want your annual crops, living hedges, orchards and alleyways for any grazing animals, food forests, etc. You might have to redraw boundary lines later, and that's fine. You might have to switch areas later if you end up accidentally creating a swampy area, and that's fine--just plant water-loving plants that you can graft other things onto (like crabapple and dogwood). Or dig down for a pond and bring in pigs temporarily to gley it in the French way. Or make a stepped pond where, as the water aborbs into the ground, it exposes moist, flat sections of shore that you can plant annuals into. My point is, don't emotionally invest in your perfect plan, because nature will throw you curveballs. Also, as you work the land, new ideas will come to you. I turned my woodchips processing area into 3 level parking spots, and I'm going to plant shade trees around it to shade the cars. The woodchips will process faster since they'll keep getting agitated by the cars. There's no way I could've predicted that idea when I made my first loose plan. Also, everywhere I'm putting in terraces, I'm alternated each planted terrace with a walking path terrace so that I can easily access the planted terrace and knee height. I couldn't have come up with that before I accidentally created it and went, "hey!"
3. Now that you know where you might want to move water to, and where important stuff is, mark where you want drivable paths, or tractor-wide paths. Include storage locations for things like wood chips, and make sure it's easy for a truck to dump there.
4. Before you do anything else, put your driveable paths in!! I would've saved 90% of the time and effort and damage to my body if I could've driven loads of stuff to various locations around our sloped acre. :( You might need to splurge on packed gravel road. In a pinch, you can build paths over time with successive loads of woodchips from ChipDrop. I cannot stress how important this step is. You can redirect water, you can change where you store stuff. You cannot make up for the lost time caused by having to move tonnes of material manually with a wheel barrow over uneven ground, up and down hill.
5. Dig your swales, from the highest elevation to the lowest, and watch what happens after some of your heaviest rains. (You might have to tweak a bit after the first, startling rainfall.)
6. Lay down foot paths everywhere. I can't tell you how annoying it is that I have several plantings that are difficult to reach on foot because there are too many things around them that I don't want to step on. Put down weed barrier and cover in wood chips or straw. Whatever you have to do.
7. Now that you have reliable (or at least improved) water management, and paths, you can start putting cuttings in the ground (preferably in spring or fall) of nurse plants. These are things that grow like weeds, which will provide shade and hopefully nitrogen fixation to the longer-term plants that you care about. Or, they'll provide mulch that you can chop and drop. In Syntropic Agriculture, they use cassava stakes, planted at an angle such that the leaves will give shade to something, and the roots won't compete with the roots of that something. They call the cassava the "placenta". They plant it around fruit and nut saplings. You can often find lists of "nurse plants", "mulch plants", and "nitrogen-fixers" in Permaculture books or websites. Don't pick plants you won't be willing to severely prune.
8. Speaking of fruit and nut trees, you can plant small ones within the protective rings of whatever placenta plants you choose. This is also a good time to plant actual nuts and fruit seeds. If you're planting near buildings, I highly recommend using seeds/nuts, because trees that grow from seeds create the deepest tap roots and are far less likely to blow over in a storm.
9. Cover all bare areas with cardboard, mulch, wood chips, straw, weed barrier, sileage tarp, or whatever you can get your hands on. Preferably organic matter mulch. If it's bare soil, broadcast lots of living mulch seeds like clover, buckwheat, etc. If it's compacted soil, sow diakon radish or turnips. Cover seeds with plastic that's white on the top side, and leave it for a week or until the seeds have time to germinate and take hold. That way, birds won't get at your seed.
10. Bonus task: if it's logistically and financially feasible, it would be good to start regular waterings of aerobic compost tea, and/or TeraGanix EM-1, and/or mycorrhizal fungi, and/or spread fungal-inoculated wood chips everywhere, soaked and protected by an extra layer of organic matter. The faster you increase the population of beneficial microbes, the healthier your plants will be, and the more they will resist disease and pest insects. They'll also heal faster from insect damage. Plus, the more microbes, the faster your unsightly mulch will be broken down. Do these waterings in spring and fall, at least 10 days apart, and as many as you can afford. Make sure the microbes have a layer of protection on the soil surface.
11. At this point, you have nurse/mulch plants, and they're protecting the trees that will take the longest to come into maturity. Now you can safely rest for a season or two, and watch the results to see if you have to tweak anything in your design or tweak your plant choices. If something dies where you put it, then that wasn't the best spot for that plant. Try a different plant. Let weeds come up and research them. Are they useful to you? I had 15 medicinal plants growing for free, and 20 food plants. Cleavers made me feel amazing when I put them in green smoothies. Dandelion made my back feel better because I guess my pain was liver-related. I ate pickled dandelion roots--yum!! Prickly lettuce became my favorite painkiller for muscle aches. Whatever bitter herb I could eat raw I put into smoothies with enough sweetening (fruit or whatever) to overpower their taste. Others I'd put in salads. If I had to heat a plant to denature things like oxalic acid, I'd saute it or extract it into a medicine. I swear, I could eat enough greens for free just from the pioneer species that were growing here naturally.
12. Start filling in your bare spots with shrubs, herbs, etc. Propagate things like crazy, especially the seeds of what you already have, because they'll be more genetically adapted to your environment. If you can afford it, buy plants from a nursery and put them in the ground in only spring or fall so that they don't go through transplant shock in the heat of summer or the cold of winter.
Some of these tasks can only be accomplished over time. I'm 3 years in and I'm still bringing in organic matter. That's because for 30 years, the previous owner of the house exported valuable organic matter off the property (ie, they mowed, collected the grass clippings, and let the city take the clippings away). I still have spots that when dry, the soil becomes hard as rock because it's all clay with no organic matter and thus no biological life. Eventually, I'll have enough mulch plants that I won't have to bring in any outside organic matter--I'll be able to chop-and-drop my way around the property. After a while, natural leaf-drop in the fall will provide enough organic matter. Can't wait for that.
