Our Permaculture Orchard slope

Our piece of land consists more or less in 3 sucessive hills. On the top of the middle one lays our house. And behind our house there is this slope, going from the chicken coop to the bottom of the hill, where our lake wall ends. When we moved in, on the whole slope there was just this one single cork oak tree. It is still here, and it is stunning.

This year, we progressively started to think that we could do more on this slope. A vineyard ? That could be a good idea, but what we decided instead was to create a small orchard!

Step 1 - Observe & Decide

Day after day, week after week, by going out and walking on our land, we observe. Nature patterns, sun exposure, vegetation changes, we keep noticing small and bigger things about this beautiful little piece of Earth. On this particular area, this north-east facing slope, we have 4 trees at the moment:

• a fig tree that has transplanted there when we dug our pond. Since then, the tree is fighting hard to survive. Season 2024 it only grew 2 branches and had a few leaves. Definitely struggling. We pruned all the dead wood, kept a nice crown structure, and we hope that it will come back in full strentgh in spring 2025.

• a young apricot tree and a young nectarine tree that we planted at the bottom of the slope during winter 2023-2024.

• a beautiful and tall cork oak tree

This slope is partially protected from the scorching summer sun. It is also more exposed to the cold north winds. Soil is pretty good and there is barely any erosion. It is located pretty close to our house, and down from our chicken coop. It is also in front of our caravan door.

So by creating a small orchard there, we thought :

1. trees will suffer less from the hot summer sun than almost anywhere else on our land

2. trees will be pretty close to the house, but not too close either, in a location we see everyday

3. so it will be easy to take care of the trees and harvest the fruits

4. we could set up an irrigation system rather easily as well, in comparison to other areas of the land

5. a lot of wild animals will benefit from these trees : bees, butterflies, birds, etc..

6. we will have some more biomass created every year that we can then use for mulch or fire starters in our fireplace

7. we will improve the overall vegetation cover of the land

8. we will harvest a lot of water and help recharge the aquifer if we dug swales for the trees

9. it would add a lot of beauty to our daily life

10. we would be able to discretely watch and photograph Eurasian Golden Orioles coming to feed on our future fig trees from the caravan!

I guess that are enough reasons to convince ourselves that creating a small orchard on this slope was a great idea! :)

Step 2 - Create permaculture swales

November 2024 : let the orchard slope project begin!

Phase 1

Phase 2

Phase 3

Mid-december, we are now done with the making of our permaculture swales. This is how it looks :

We are very happy of the result. Building the swales did not imply any machines, or even any input. We did them only with the most simple tools and some good will. Of course, we will progressively make some adjustments and improvements as it goes, checking how the swales do when it rains.

Step 3 - Choose the trees

When it comes to choose fruit trees, there are so many options of course. But we want to focus on :

• fruits that we love to eat!

• trees that are adapted to our climate, which is very hot in summer and some frost in winter

• trees that we know can grow well and produce a lot of fruit here in inland Alentejo, Portugal

• trees that will require little maintenance

With that in mind, we decided to plant the following fruit trees on our permaculture orchard slope :

• Fig tree

• Apricot Tree

• Pomegranate Tree

• Mulberry Tree

• Peach Tree

• Persimmon Tree

• Plum Tree

• Pear Tree

• Medlar Tree

Step 4 - Plant!

We decided to plant our main fruit trees every 6 meters. This means we can have 5 main fruit trees per swale. Then, in between we will plant some pomegranate trees, that we will progressively prune to have them look more like a bush than a tree, some berry bushes, aromatics like lavender, rosemary, thyme, or sage, and more plants and flowers like comfrey, cosmos, echinacea, roses..

Early, we went to a local market and we were able to find first 4 trees : a peach tree, a flat peach tree, a plum tree, and a pear tree. 2 days later, we planted them, along with a mulberry tree and a fig tree that we had bought a few weeks before!

Mid-january, we then went to a fantastic tree nursery : Viveiros Dinis in Monchique. It is the best nursery we have seen in Portugal so far. They have a lot of trees, prices are good, and their staff is really nice and helpful. We got more than enough trees for our orchard there, and planted as soon as we could.

Now the planting is done, and we are incredibly excited to see how it is going to look this spring! Our orchard slope looks like this, with from top to bottom :

Swale 1 :

Fig (unknown cultivar) / Plum (Mirabelle) / Apricot (Nelson) / Fig (Lampa preta) / Mulberry (Morus alba)

Swale 2 :

Peach (Pesses floridos, never heard of it before) / Fig (Pingo de mel) / Plum (Reine Claude) / Apple (Pink lady) / Peach (flat peach)

Swale 3 :

Apricot (Faralia) / Plum (Sao Bras) / Kaki Persimmon (Rojo brillante) / Fig (Burjassota branca) / Oak tree

Swale 4 :

Kaki Persimmon (Fau Fau) / Nectarine (unknown cultivar) / Apricot (unknown cultivar) / Pear (Conference) / Medlar (Tanaka)

Step 5 - Irrigate

Follow us on this nice little project as we make progress.

Step 6 - Adjust