Tubing, mulching, watering by hand out of the skid steer bucket.

Tubing, mulching, watering by hand out of the skid steer bucket. Every tree in this alley is a forty year bet. Northern pecan, thornless honey locust, and heartnut in the canopy row. Hybrid hazelnut filling the shrub layer between every large tree. The tubes keep the deer and rabbits off while the trunks harden. Wood chip mulch locks moisture into the root zone and starts feeding the fungal network that will carry this system for decades. Water goes in five gallons at a time straight from the trough in the skid steer bucket until the irrigation goes in.

What makes this a permaculture system instead of a nut orchard is what happens in the thirty foot alleys between the tree rows. Next is direct sowing pumpkin, winter squash, and bush beans down the full length of each alley. The beans pull atmospheric nitrogen into the soil while the young trees need almost none of it. The squash vines sprawl across bare ground, shade out weeds, and pull a cash crop off the same acreage that is growing nuts on a ten year horizon. Three sisters logic adapted from a cornfield to a tree alley.

Honey locust is the sleeper in this mix. J Russell Smith called it the corn replacement of permanent agriculture almost a hundred years ago. Two hundred to four hundred pounds of sweet pods per mature tree, dropping in late fall when pasture forage is gone, ready for sheep and poultry to come through and convert it back to soil. Pecan and heartnut carry the long game on nuts. Hazelnut starts producing in three to five years while the canopy is still filling in. Every layer pays its own way on its own timeline.

Trees are the backbone. Annuals are the cash flow. Livestock come later. This is what obtaining a yield looks like when the yield is measured in decades.

Zone 6b. York County Pennsylvania. First full production season at Run-a-Muck Farms.

#permaculture #silvopasture #alleycropping #runamuckfarms #regenerativeagriculture