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I have a brand new 1/2 acre of completely bare land and want to stick a few trees out there before I really get to building and designing. I’m hoping to get some recommendations for some out of the box trees I may not have heard of or am overlooking. Things that you are growing that are not just surviving but thriving with increased temperatures.

Climate: High altitude desert at 5800 ft elevation. Newly upgraded to USDA zone 7a so we do get a fair bit of freezing temps in the winter. Also very dry – just 13 inches of rain per year, although I do have irrigation water (for now). The thing I’m most worried about is the increasingly hot summers – I see it stressing the trees in other people’s yards. Common trees I see planted around my tiny town that are still alive are: cottonwoods, globe willow, honeylocust, black locust, stone fruit, apple, mullberry, northern catalpa, ponderosa pine, pinion pine, Utah juniper. I’ll be planting some of these but want to try a few odd-balls or trees uncommon or non-native to America’s southwest desert. Hopefully I can find something new to the area that really likes it here and can offer me a larger variety of trees for the future.

Ignore how crooked the right one is just yet. I have to move some stuff to put it in the final spot. I plan on filling them using the hugelkultur process. Would you place weed barrier on the ground? This is an established garden area that has last year’s cardboard, with straw and leaves as mulch.

On our goat dairy, we have a sizeable pasture. Running through said pasture is a shallow creek that sometimes has itty-bitty minnows during the summer. Anyway, I’m afraid that it might be contaminated with pesticides/herbicides. You see, on either side of the creek’s pasture are monoculture cornfields (we’re located in the American Midwest, Zone 5, by the way) that are routinely sprayed with chemicals. Sometimes, I’ll see whitish-brown foam forming on the top of the water and collecting at the banks of the creek. I’m afraid that this is some sort of chemical build-up. The creek’s source is not on our land. Because of this, I’m looking for solutions to purify the water so that I can grow wild rice downstream in a marshy patch of ungrazed pasture. Any tips?

Brown rot is a fungus that attacks the flowers, fruit and eventually branches of stone fruit trees.

It’s becoming a real problem in my part of the world (south-eastern Europe/Balkans), it’s destroying whole orchards, and I have personally had very poor harvests in my food forest (under construction) in recent years, to the point where I wonder whether it’s worth growing plums, apricots, peaches etc. any more.

Regular growers use fungicides etc. to combat it, but that’s just not an option in a permaculture context, and even though the copper-based sprays they use are generally considered “organic”, I am not interested in going around spraying trees, I am trying to create a SYSTEM that will carry on doing its thing with minimal input from me, at least that’s what it’s supposed to all be about.

Other solutions are clearing away last year’s fruit (I don’t have any animals to help with that unfortunately), leaves etc., removing diseased branches, but again, these are not really practices that are sustainable in a permaculture context.

So does anyone have any experience with combatting brown rot in a purely sustainable way – I guess I am thinking of specific interplants, polycultures or other design decisions or maybe species choices that could help keep monilia at bay?

Gully Stuffing

Gully stuffing is one of our favorite tools in the Beneficial Biomass Portfolio because of its ability to achieve many restoration goals at once while putting large quantities of slash to good use. This singular low-tech, cost-effective technique has the potential to filter sediment, reduce erosion, enhance habitat, and improve the carbon- and water-sequestering soil sponge of upland landscapes. OAEC Co-founder Brock Dolman is a longtime practitioner, teacher and champion of gully stuffing techniques

Hi, i started my journey to convert my yard to a food forest last year. I planted some fruit trees , and for every two fruit trees i planted an elderberry in the middle. I saw info that elderberries were nitrogen fixers, but recently i found a thread here in reddit that they are not. So now i am looking for a different plant to add to to mix, im going to keep the elderberries for now as they all survived haha. This year so far i added clover to the area. I would like to add a perenial shrub to assist with nitrogen fixing. What are the best options for Maryland? Zone 7. Bonus points if it has any of the following perks. (Not necessary to have all 3) 1. Edible 2. Naitive 3. Has pretty flowers