 Hello everyone, my name is Jenna Hood and I am here representing Earthdance Organic Farm School. I'm going to talk today about our polyculture orchard that we have set up on our farm. I'm going to sort of talk a little background initially about about Earthdance as a whole and before I get into the origins of our orchard, how it got, how it came to be laid out the way that it's laid out and sort of where we're at now with the orchard. So I started with Earthdance in 2018 after completing their apprenticeship program. I came on board as the assistant farm manager and subsequently in 2020 took over the role as a farm manager. So pretty much the the origin piece of the of the orchard happened prior to to my experience with Earthdance. So but I'll get into a little bit more of that. So we are a nonprofit educational farm. We combine food production, agroecology education, and community development. We manage a mixed vegetable, mixed fruit, and livestock production on 14 acres in Ferguson, Missouri, which is a suburb north of St. Louis, Missouri. In addition to food production, we're also operating a variety of programs aimed at educating adults and youth about organic farming and gardening, regenerative agriculture, and sustainability. We offer beginning gardener classes as well as full-time paid summer apprenticeship that's targeted into folks interested in farming as a career. In this program or in the the apprenticeship they receive 40 hours of hands-on education and training each week for a 10-week duration during the summer. We also have a partnership with our local school district where we engage with their vocational program to provide their students with hands-on education as well as some classroom-based education. We host numerous field trips and also collaborate on research projects with nearby universities and research institutions. And we manage roughly 10 to 15 volunteers each week, April through October. Our farm site is designed with permaculture principles at its core. We have six acres in cultivation currently, about roughly 8,000 square feet of high-tunnel space, a 36-by-40-foot pack house, 30-by-96 greenhouse, a farmhouse office, and a 200-plus, yeah a little over 200 trees at this point, mixed perennial orchard planted on berms and swells with our annual row crops or annual vegetable crops, alicrop in between, along with pastured poultry, mushrooms, herbs, cut flowers, pasture, prairie, and a mixed wood lot. So the origin story of our orchard all starts several years ago, back in 2014, we, with the help of us, Sarah from a rancher grant, we outlined a plan to plant a 60-tree pear orchard. And just prior to actually putting the trees in the ground, we sort of, upon some reflection and more research, we decided that planting a single area of the farm to only pear trees was really not quite in alignment with the principles of organic farming and permaculture that we were, we were, you know, really going after. And so with the ideas of integrate rather than segregate and valuing diversity, we set out to design a different kind of orchard that would integrate the pear trees into a much larger plan for establishing a diversity of tree crops that were planted throughout the farm. We grew some inspiration from a couple of different places. The permaculture orchard, which is a documentary in Mark Shepherd's book, Restoration Agriculture, really spawned a lot of our ideas and really set into motion what it was that we were trying to accomplish. So before laying out the trees, the Earth Dance farm team at the time established a system of swales and berms, and a key line design was used to site the swales. And if you're not familiar, key line design is a technique for maximizing the beneficial use of your water resources on a piece of land. In our case, the land slopes pretty dramatically west to east. And so we cited our swales in such a way, our swales and berms in such a way that the water flowing, you know, flowing down the hill is going to be captured in those swales in an effort to, you know, not just be totally running off the farm. The trees were planted into the berms, which were mounted on the lower side of each corresponding swell. So if you see in that picture there, the individual, she's standing actually in the swell and we created these using a rotary plow on a on the tractor. And essentially taking the soil from the swell and throwing it in one direction, creating the berm, where the trees were to be planted. The fruit trees were alicrop throughout the growing fields and parallel rows about 80 feet apart. And alicropping is ultimately the planting of rows at wide spacings with an annual crop grown in the alleyways between the rows. So we are, you know, we, we understand that over time as our trees get bigger over the years that we're going to eventually be losing a little less production area for our annual vegetables. And that was something that we knew going into this. So that's just something that we plan for each year as we're doing our crop planning. We know when we're going to have to take a particular bed out of production due to shading from the surrounding trees. So you can see on this hand-drawn map here how the berms and thus the orchard are situated in between our main vegetable production beds. West being at the, you know, the top part of that picture and the land sloping, sloping east and the berms are roughly set up on contour. They're not perfect, but they, they, they get the job done in terms of capturing the water when we do have rainfall. This is a drone dot that shows maybe a little bit better of stuff in action. You can see the main production areas. There's a portion of an area cover cropped in the lower left-hand side and the berms being, you know, the taller trees that are dividing those other, those main production areas. So I want to talk a little bit about a couple other specific things that went into the planting part of the orchard. So we did put down a heavy-duty landscape fabric on top of the berms and around the trees. This was done after the trees were planted. And we also selected several other tree species that were all adapted for organic production, ultimately to help us create a diverse polyculture of tree fruits. We then added to the understory lots of herbaceous shrubs, flowers, and herbs in the form of gill plantings. And these were a combination of mutually beneficial species that were selected to create a thriving mini ecosystem around the individual fruit trees. And all of these plants were selected to attract pollinators, suppress weeds, and to fix nitrogen. And we planted those, you know, just by punching holes in the landscape fabric. And through the years, we've mulched with wood chips around or on all of those berms as well on top of the landscape fabric. So in order to, because we're, you know, not putting all of the pears together, all of the apples together, we had to create a sequence that would allow or that would ultimately support the pollination needs of the individual fruit trees. And for us, also important was to mitigate the spread of pest and disease. And so by spacing the trees out, not planting all of one type of tree together, it was the hope was that it would mitigate the spread of pest and disease. So our sequence that we came up with was pear, two paw paws, another pear, tart cherry, pear, plum, two more paw paws, a Juneberry, and an apple. And that sequence repeats throughout all of the berms. There was a quite a lengthy process of selecting the specific varieties. A lot of research went into that. We chose Asian and European pear varieties for crop diversity and for market appeal. And all of the pear varieties were chosen for their superior, supposed superior resistance to fire blight and also for their marketability. We added a couple initially Shinco and Korean giant were the two Asian pairs that we had chosen. And we eventually added Shinziki and Chojuro to increase pollen diversity and for their unique flavor that those two types have. European pears, much like the Asian pears were also selected for their fire blight resistance and for their marketability. And I would say our acro pears are most, I might as well just say, they sort of round out our polyculture orchard. We have planted 60, roughly 60 paw paws on the farm. If you're not familiar with paw paws, they are known for being the largest fruit native to North America. They have just the most delicious flavor. They've seen very little attention from the farming community. You might be familiar with them growing in the wild, which cultivars that you find, or excuse me, varieties, those that you find growing in the wild, very low yields, but there are numerous cultivars that produce reliably and heavily. And as being that they're a native tree, they've shown minimal pest pressure and minimal disease. So we were really excited to plant those as a specialty crop for farmers market and for restaurants. And I will say the buzz about paw paws right now is just crazy. And if you're considering fruit trees, I highly recommend you consider paw paws. Additional species of juneberry, tart cherry, plum, and apple were chosen for their promise as potential organic fruit tree options as well. A lot of research was put into each variety, also always going back to a focus on disease resistance. Junberries, they were selected also, they're a native with several named cultivars and they produce pretty sweet berries. Tart cherry and the plum varieties were chosen for their early fruiting traits, the hope being that they would produce fruit prior to any heavy disease pressure. And lastly, the apples varieties that we chose, apples in the Midwest, grown organically, are highly susceptible to numerous pest and diseases. So we did try and choose the most resistant varieties as possible. So that's how the orchard was sort of set up a little about why we selected the cultivars that we did. I want to talk a little bit about sort of what's happened since the fruit trees were planted. So the majority of the trees went in in 15, well 14 and 15, a few more were added in 2016. And during that time, the farm managers who sort of solved this project, they were the brain children behind this project. They have since left the farm and their knowledge and expertise has been, unfortunately, I came in with less knowledge and expertise about fruit trees than they had. So my priority and my focus was on vegetable production. And so needless to say, the orchard as a whole was not able to ultimately receive the attention that it deserved. And so anyway, let's just talk about what's happening now and where we are with our management of the orchard. So ultimately, it's not a huge orchard compared to many orchards that folks might be more familiar with. But even as such, the size of our orchard requires more attention than there's three of us full time. And you've got to remember that we are, our time is also divided up between not just production, but also with teaching. And so we were really unable to ultimately prune every winter as required. We lost some trees to disease, firebite being the primary disease. And with the nature of our orchard setup, with the trees being planted on the berms, it also required that we manage those berms. We couldn't just, you know, mow up next to the fruit trees like you could if it was set up as, you know, sort of a more traditional orchard might be. Many of the trees over time had been overtaken by a Japanese hop spine. And the understory was overgrown with Bermuda grass and other weeds. At one point, elderberries were added to the berms, which were not in the original plan. And we found that they're now actually competing with the fruit trees. In an agroforestry scenario, we would be able to, you know, we could potentially run livestock through the linear orchard, but with our vegetable crops being adjacent to the orchard the way that they are, it just doesn't quite work for our setup. So through the years, we were managing the weeds and whatnot with volunteer help. But even with volunteers, we were hard-pressed to really stay on top of everything. So even with the neglect that the orchard received, the trees were set in fruit. We started getting fruit off of trees in 2017. When we had our first pair of harvest, we had a very small pawpaw harvest as well. And we've seen slightly larger harvest happening in the subsequent years. And I mentioned, so last or in the fall of 2020, I took over the role of farm manager. And I was introduced to a gentleman named Wink Davis. Wink, he had recently retired and I learned that he had owned an apple and peach orchard in Colorado. He and his wife sold their orchard, moved to St. Louis to be closer to their adult, one of their adult children. And he was looking to, you know, get back working with his hands and was really eager to get involved with the orchard at Earth Dance. So with Wink leading the charge, we put together a mostly volunteer, but some staff led orchard committee that we worked together to outline, to actually, you know, line out some goals pertaining to the orchard. And so we'd have a clear direction and could work toward bringing those goals to fruition. During these conversations with the orchard committee, it became clear that we were really, really wanting to pay special attention to the soil microbiology and ensuring that we were providing the trees with the nutrients that they needed to remain healthy and less susceptible to the pests and diseases that we experience here in the Midwest. That orchard committee came up with some goals. I'm not going to read, you know, read these necessarily, but important goal, grow abundant, delicious nutrient dense fruit and berries. And we wanted to grow those with a commitment to achieving those through biological and ecological means and without the use of chemicals. And the health and diversity of the biology and the microbiology, we wanted to manage pest and disease pressure by improving the health and diversity of the biology and microbiology. And we also wanted to take what we were learning through our own sort of experimentation and use that as a part of our education. It's really, we're a teaching form. And so everything that we do, I like to say everything we do is an experiment. And even, you know, you learn oftentimes learn more from your mistakes than, than, than from the things that go well. So we're, we're constantly learning and adapting. And the orchard is a prime example of that. So, so with Wink coming on board, and he's a volunteer, I want to mention that too. Even with his, even with us having more attention on the orchard, it's still primarily a volunteer-based thing at this point. We last year, were able to host a pruning workshop, pruning workshop in partnership with a level three arboretum here in St. Louis. And through this workshop, we garnered some attention for the orchard and were able to recruit some additional volunteers to assist with our pruning efforts. So for the first time, since probably 2017, we were able to prune every single tree on the farm. We did have to apply some restorative pruning techniques to a lot of the trees, which meant bringing down the leaders and a lot of the tall vertical growth to make the trees more manageable from the ground or using short ladders. We also opened up the centers to bring in more light and airflow, eliminated any redundant and damaged limbs. We were, we knew that fruit production this past season after that more extensive pruning was probably going to, that we were just going to have a smaller harvest and that ended up being true. But we're confident that that we'll see improvements in yields this year and in subsequent years. We also began the season following a holistic spray regimen that was outlined in a book by Michael Phillips called The Holistic Orchard. And without going into all the technical details, the spray regimen begins at Budswell and continues as determined by the stage of bloom. One thing we realized, again, kind of because of the way the trees are set up and also the fact that there's so many or several different species of tree, the trees progress on very different schedules. And so that meant not every tree necessarily received sprays at the precise right time that would have been indicated by the stage of bloom. One thing that, an additional thing that we experienced this past year, the papas were in full bloom with the promise of just a wonderful harvest when we had two nights of hard freeze. And as a result, we had far fewer papas this year, which, you know, can't do anything about the weather. That's just kind of one of those things that you got to kind of cross your fingers and hope for the best. So we also suspect that cold also impacted other trees as well. So in addition to the pruning and that late freeze definitely took a hit on our fruit production this year. We also had an extended cool wet spring, and that was perfect for the propagation of fire blight. We spent more time than we ever have cutting out disease branches and even removing some trees, some pear trees where the bacterium from the fire blight was determined to be systemic and the trees could not be saved. We also saw evidence of coddling moths on the apples as well as some other pest damage that we were not able to positively identify. So and despite selecting varieties that are thought to be more disease resistant, you know, there's no guarantee that those varieties, they're not perfect, right? Once something takes hold, really all you can do is try to improve the overall biology. If you're looking the way we're taking, you know, the way we are approaching a holistic management of the orchard, we're recognizing that it's just going to take time and patience to really correct the imbalance that currently exists with the overall biology in the soil, in the soil with the trees. So a couple other things from this past year. Managing the berms was quite a task. We ended up, I'm looking at time, I'm running out so I'm going to speed through this. We ended up pulling up all that landscape fabric as a result of the just knowing more now about how ultimately the landscape fabric was preventing the microbial, the sprays, the beneficial microbes that we were applying to the trees was not able to penetrate at the soil level due to the landscape fabric. So we ended up removing a ton of landscape fabric this year, which was extremely time consuming. We're also having to take the extra step of dechlorinating our water because we use municipal water at this point and all of the beneficial microbes that we're putting into the orchard would be killed by chlorine in the tap water. So we did dechlorinate the water and we do that by aerating it and adding humic acid. We also recognize that the orchard could really benefit from consistent management. The majority of the pruning spraying fabric removal was all done by volunteers this year. It felt like we were playing catch up, not staying ahead of the demands of the orchard. And we're just still not at a place where the fruit production on its own justifies hiring someone to outright manage the orchard. So one day we hope that the orchard can be a self-sustaining enterprise. But until then, we're hoping that interest in what we're doing around biological and regenerative farming will attract interest via grants, donations, revenues from educational activities, and that those things will offset the fact that the fruit trees themselves will continue to take time to be profitable on their own. Yeah, so there's resources that I mentioned already specific names of those books and documentary and the tree sources where we sourced I think 95 or more percent of the trees that we planted in the orchard. I have not been looking at comments. I can look at that real quick and see if there's questions in the chat. Yeah, there is one question in the chat about what kind of sprayer you use or recommend. I don't, off the top of my head, we, if you saw in that one picture, it's a, I don't know, off the top of my head, Wink purchased it. I paid for it, but Wink purchased, you know, found it and purchased it. But I can try and find that out. I'm not sure how I would get that information to the person who posed the question, Nancy. Yeah, Nancy's waving at me. Yeah. Does anyone else have a quick question? We've just got like a minute or so. Here, hold on, let me bring you the mic so she can hear you. If you had to do it over again, would you space out your trees differently for starters? I don't think, we wouldn't, I don't, I don't have concern necessarily with how the trees are spaced out or the sequence that the trees are spaced out. I think if we could do it over, what I would, would want to do over is, all right, we've got someone, someone that is dedicated to the orchard, that it is part of their sort of responsibilities. Maybe it's not their only responsibility, but it, someone who can take ownership of it. And we just were lacking that once the, the farm manager who established the orchard moved on.