Options for Backyard Orchard Ground Cover

What, if anything, should you plant under your fruit trees?

Many a night I’ve lain awake wondering what is the best thing to place or plant underneath fruit trees. Should it be living plants of some sort? What about mulch to retain moisture and prevent competition from plants?

I’ve spent hours weighing up the pros and cons of each choice.

The conclusion? I don’t think there is a perfect choice that suits every situation. There are too many factors at play: annual rainfall, irrigation set-up, edible forest garden plans, access for chickens, access for picking and harvesting equipment, pest risks. It’s a complex equation and likely to leave you bamboozled.

Here are a few of the options that I think are worth considering for your backyard orchard.

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Want to know more about this incredibly interesting topic? Come along to my September 21 workshop on Ecological Succession to learn all about:

• Using weeds as indicators of soil health

• Edible forest gardening

• Differences in preparing soil for vegetable patches and orchards

• Weed control methods

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Grass or lawn

Grass is bad for fruit trees. Or so we’re often told. The shallow root systems of both grass and citrus apparently compete with each other. Having grass under your citrus trees (or any fruit trees) will have a huge negative impact.

I’m not so sure.

I’ve seen many productive fruit trees surrounded by grass. In fact, any competition by the grass is likely to be offset by the fact that it is retaining moisture in the soil and supporting a healthy soil food web.

Having grass under your fruit trees is very low maintenance (just mow it every now and then). Keeping the grass low can reduce humidity around the trunk and keep the tree healthy. It’s also a lot easier to pick up fallen fruit after a soft landing on a lush lawn.

Lawns under fruit trees (even citrus) are perfectly okay, in my experience.

Edible forest gardens

The opposite of lawns under fruit trees is edible forest gardening. The concept is simple. No one weeds, waters, fertilises or maintains a forest, yet it thrives.

We can take the principles of how a forest thrives and structure our gardens to mimic a forest ecosystem. There are lots of ways to interpret the concept of an edible forest garden. I describe my interpretation as “a cottage garden with fruit trees plonked in it”.

Many of the perennial garden beds in my productive garden fit a definition of “edible forest garden”. The fruit trees thrive amid all sorts of understory plants.

You can read a huge list of potential perennial understory plants you might use in your orchard here.

Vegetables