After two or three years of soil improvement, Sepp Holzer is ready to start his (nearly) do-nothing orchards.  With over a hundred acres of farmland holding around 14,000 individual fruit trees, Holzer clearly can't feed, prune, and manicure every inch of his fruit plantation.  Instead, he goes to the opposite extreme, selecting for extremely hardy plants that can survive when planted into plain soil and never pruned.

In fact, Holzer doesn't even harvest most of his fruits.  He sells many of his heirloom pears to distillery owners who come and harvest the fruits themselves, and most of the rest of the bounty falls to the ground and feeds his livestock over the winter.

Holzer's first step when expanding his orchard is to send pigs through to loosen the soil and trample down the green manure plants.  Next, he spreads pomace that has fermented for about a month across the ground.  (Pomace is the skins and seeds left after making wine, oil, or --- in this case --- cider.)  The apple and pear seeds sprout and either grow or die, with the seedlings best suited to the particular spot they've been placed outcompeting the others.  These seedlings will become vigorous rootstocks, producing trees that grow taller and fruit later than those on commercial rootstock, but also tend to live longer.

A year or two after spreading the pomace, Holzer comes through to transplant out trees that are too close together --- these are grafted in his nursery and sold as one of his sources of income.  The best seedlings are left in place and have heirloom apple and pear scionwood grafted on.

Holzer doesn't prune at all, not even to remove the watersprouts that pop up from the rootstock (and which he believes protect the main trunk from nibbling wildlife.)  Rather than fertilizing the trees, he simply sends his livestock through the area at intervals, meanwhile allowing the green manure plants to continue to improve the soil around the trees' roots.

While I don't recommend Holzer's do-nothing fruit production for the backyard hobbyist with only a small growing area, his methods work very well for large expanses of pasture.  As you'll see in tomorrow's post, the fruit trees provide so much food for his livestock that he barely has to feed them at all.

This post is part of our Sepp Holzer's Permaculture lunchtime series.  Read all of the entries: Sepp Holzer's Permaculture Green manure rejuvenates poor soil Do-nothing fruit Pigging out in a food forest Holzer's easy mushroom cultivation

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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