How to set up a Community Orchard/fForest Garden

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Here is a straightforward step by step approach that can get you from lawn to forest in a jiffy:

1. First, share the idea with others in your community that are enthusiastic about it.

2. Come up with a proposal together to clarify your thoughts. Identify the areas that are suitable for planting. Consider borders along pathways and roads as well as open lawn areas. Make full use of any south facing walls, which are often ideal for more tender trees and bushes. Make a sketch of the area that you are thinking of planting and indicate the main features: South point, buildings, walls, existing planting and proposed planting. If you need guidance, any good Permaculture designer would be ideally qualified for the task.

3. Then decide on the scale of planting you want to do. A mini forest garden could be as small as two or three hazelnut trees inter-planted with current bushes. If you have more space add in pear trees, walnuts, cherries, plumbs, sweet chestnuts or even a native apple variety from the Irish Seed Savers Association. Decide upon the number of trees and bushes that you want to plant. How many mature fruit and nut trees and fruit bushes will comfortably fit in the area identified? What are your likely financial resources?

4. Discuss your project with the people involved in deciding about grounds maintenance and management. Make sure that they are happy with all of the proposals before you forge ahead. A couple of drafts of the sketch and proposal may be needed before everybody is comfortable with the plan. This stage is crucial to the process. Without the full participation and enthusiasm of everybody involved in maintenance and long term site planning, your garden may be mown out or built on within a few years.

5. Next step is to buy your trees and bushes. The fruit and nut trees can be selected and sourced from the Irish Seed Savers Association, Scarriff, Co. Clare or from Woodkerne Nurseries or Future Forests in West Cork or other suppliers of fruit and nut trees. Both of the organisations mentioned specialise in providing high quality fruit trees that are suited to Irish growing conditions without the need for chemical fertilisers or biocides. Bushes can often be grown from cuttings, or purchased from garden centres or specialist suppliers. Gooseberries, blackcurrants, redcurrants, boysenberries, white currants, raspberries and others make good inter-planting bushes between the fruit and nut trees. Climbers such as loganberries, hybrid blackberries and tay-berries can be trained up walls and fences, but require more maintenance than the other species, and as such are not always as suited to a forest garden or orchard where maintenance needs to be relatively low.

6. Publicise the planting and invite everyone to come along. Children particularly love tree planting and have a great sense of achievement afterwards.

7. In the summer following planting, care is needed to keep the trees and bushes weeded, and to water them if the weather is dry.

8. The final step isn’t a final step at all – it goes on year after year. This is the annual gathering for picking, picnicking, pickling, jamming, tarting, stewing and baking. A celebration of the sacred bounty of your own community garden.

Don’t worry about the length of time taken to fruiting and maturing. The trees will be acting as carbon sinks from the word go. Having chosen the trees you want, set about buying them and planting them. Both of these events can have an awareness raising element for the community.

Where to get your fruit and nut trees? Your local garden centre will have a selection of fruit trees and probably some nut trees. For greater variety of nut trees and fruit trees and for more unusual fruit bushes, try some of the excellent specialist suppliers of food trees in Ireland:

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