On Guard The dilemmas of grazing in Orchards

Having your own orchard is wonderful, the beautiful blossom, tending to your trees and then fresh home grown fruit, What could be better? But as someone who advises on orchards many owners or prospective planters of orchards are surprised when one of my first questions I ask is “What are you going to do with the grass?”

Surely orchards are all about trees? Well actually what you do with the sward beneath your trees is key in terms of work, money and future management. For left to its own devices your orchard will soon begin to scrub up. To keep it as an orchard of free standing fruit trees with grass and wildflowers beneath you have to manage the sward in some way.

TO GRAZE OR TO MOW

There are essentially two choices or courses of action. You can cut or mow the orchard floor in some way, be that a regular mowing or an annual hay type cut. Or you graze it with livestock. If you mow your orchard you don’t need to endure the work and expense of individually guarding your trees, but you will need a mower, fuel and time (labour) to cut it. As well as preferably no deer in the area for even if you don’t have livestock of your own, the local deer population may be very partial to your fruit trees. For some small[holders grazing can be a more attractive and certainly a more traditional form of managing the orchard floor. But you will then need to protect your trees from the unwanted attention of your stock. Sheep are the commonest and the traditional orchard grazing tool and perhaps the easiest of the four legged mowers to accommodate, (in theory at least) being shorter in the leg and with less strength than horses or cattle both of whom present a huge challenge to keep off fruit trees.

TYPES OF GUARDS

2020 was the year I finally decided to graze my own orchard so I spent some considerable time researching options and experimenting accordingly. Essentially you need to prevent your livestock being able to reach any parts of the growing tree, for they will strip bark from the trunk, eat leaves and fruit, and pull down and tear off small branches.