North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[Ginda Fisher <ginda@concentric.net>]

Since Del has already planted the trees, rearranging them or planting in
stages seems impractical.  Go ahead and plant something in between -
just make sure it's something you can get rid of when the time comes. 
So no blackberries, unless you want your apples to always compete with
them, even after the apples shade the blackberries to the point where
they stop fruiting.  I'd also agree that it's awkward to interplant
annuals with perennials (I'll keep doing it, because my space is at too
much of a premium, but it's a pain.)

Currants are probably okay.  They bear quickly, too.  Plums might work -
and since they often die fairly young, you won't feel too bad about
pulling them out.  Or you could just put in a bunch of daffodils and
enjoy the show.  (But no daylillies - too hard to get rid of.)

Then again, all that talk of clean fruit on old trees that compete with
everything in the world. . .maybe if you overplant, the sparse little
apples you get every other year will be clean?

Ginda Fisher

claude sweet wrote:
> 
> Jim wrote:
> 
> > I recall reading, years ago, that some studies of this type of planting
> > wasn't cost-effective over the long term for a number of reasons.  One of
> > the things that I recall was that the owner/orchardist/gardner usually 
> > left
> > the "interim" crop in too long (not wanting to "weed out" a cash producing
> > crop), and that it therefore gave the "main" crop unnecessary competition,
> > so that in the long run, an orchard without the between-the-rows
> > shorter-lived crop started producing sooner, and had better overall
> > production.
> > I think this may have been mentioned in "The Owner Built Homestead", by 
> > Ken
> > Kern.  Will try to remember to look tonight.
> >
> > Jim Erdman (Menomonie, WI)
> 
> I know of a newbie kiwifruit grower who interplant with row crops. The
> inability to use mechanical equipment to perform cultural care for both
> the permanent and annual crops produced much higher costs.
> 
> When combined with this individuals lack of experience in farming,
> especially in marketing, the result was an economic disaster.
> 
> In another case an individual planted asparagus as temporary cash crop.
> When it became necessary to remove the interplanting, the task proved to
> be much more difficult and expensive than has been projected.
> 
> A more practical concept might be to plant the permanent tree crops in
> stages with the unplanted tree blocks used for cash annual crops until
> developed as an orchard.
> 
> Claude Sweet
> San Diego, CA
>

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