guildfordcycads

Hey Permaculturists of Reddit,

We just bought the vacant lot next door, which used to be an orchard. We’re planning to turn the bottom half into a contour-based food forest/orchard. The land is on a gentle 6° slope with mostly expansive clay soil.

We’ve been farming and gardening for about a decade, so we’ve got a solid foundation, but we’d love input from seasoned designers to poke holes in our plan and help us think through a closed-loop system from the start.

Here’s the rough concept:

• Trees are placed along the contours, with berms and swales for water infiltration.
• Natural walking paths wind through the site, and everything is set back at least 10 ft from the property lines.
• The upper area (~20 trees) is stone fruit, cascading downslope into pomes, then avocado, mango, papaya, and banana where the slope flattens.
• Copper fungicide needing trees are grouped for easier foliar spraying.
• Current canopy estimates are 12′ west-facing, based on our mini-orchard experience (birds tend to eat the top fruit and leave the lower fruit).
• There’s also a hexagonal deck for yoga/meditation/relaxation, with a small pond just north of it.
• Existing Canary palms are being removed due to invasive beetle damage (it’s wiping them out across SoCal).

For water capture, we plan to use the pond, a tank off the ADU we’re waiting on permits for, and possibly another tank further downslope. Our rainfall is low (average ~12″ annually), so we’re considering focusing more on in-soil water capture.

We haven’t drawn in the filler plants yet (nitrogen fixers, soil stabilizers, insectaries, etc.) because the sketch would get too messy, but we’re planning a full polyculture approach.

Questions for the community:

1. Have you designed or managed a food forest on a similar slope and soil type? Any pitfalls to avoid?
2. Are we being too generous with our tree spacing, or could we tighten it up for more layers/canopy overlap? I feel like I didn’t really include a lot of native trees which we will do around the rest of the property and the deck, but maybe through the orchard too?
3. Best understory/groundcover options for holding clay-heavy soil in place during establishment? I was thinking comfrey, clover, thyme, etc.
4. Would you design this for seasonal grazing integration (e.g., ducks for pest control), or would you keep it fenced off?
5. How would you approach pond placement and size for both aesthetics and irrigation potential, given our low rainfall?
6. If you’ve integrated community/event spaces (like a yoga deck) into your orchard, how did you keep it functional without compromising production?
7. What irrigation layout has worked best for you in a mixed-canopy, contour-based orchard?
8. Any must-have perennial filler plants or trees that thrive in SoCal Zone 10a and work well with stone fruit, pomes, and tropicals?
9. How do you balance copper spray needs with keeping the rest of the orchard chemical-free?
10. Given our rainfall, would you still invest in above-ground water tanks, or focus all efforts on in-ground infiltration?
11. What else am I blatantly missing?

Thank you so much!

https://preview.redd.it/w98mngfsj0jf1.png?width=456&format=png&auto=webp&s=c55aea00880ea105ff3004db93b3f550c0d0fe43