When Trees Start Doing Jobs We Never Expected
n the last post, I looked beneath the soil at some of the less visible benefits our companion trees may be bringing to the food garden.
For this final post in the series, I will explore two benefits I gave very little thought to when we planted the trees.
One is practical. The other is more personal.
Both have become clearer as the garden has matured.
Natural Support for Climbing and Heavy Plants
As our Eucalyptus grandis have grown, their trunks have become substantial structures within the food garden. Recently, we started experimenting with using some of these trunks as natural supports for our productive plants.
Tomatoes have been the most successful so far.
Instead of building a separate trellis or driving stakes into the ground, we are growing tomatoes beside selected trees and training them up the trunks. So far, they seem quite happy there.
There is something appealing about making use of a structure that is already there. The tree is doing its normal job while another plant uses the trunk to reach upwards towards the light.
We have also been experimenting with zucchini around the base of some trees, but this has been less successful.
As I mentioned in the previous post, rainwater naturally runs down the trunks and concentrates around their bases. That seemed like a good reason to try zucchini there. What we may have underestimated is how much sunlight zucchini need, and how little now reaches the ground beneath the developing canopy.
The zucchini grow, but not as strongly as we would like.
I find this just as interesting as the tomatoes that are doing well. As the trees grow, the conditions around them are changing. A position that offers good moisture may eventually offer too little sunlight for a particular plant.
We are still learning what belongs where.
Early Success Builds Confidence
Perhaps the least tangible benefit of these fast-growing trees has been the confidence they gave us early on. When we planted the food garden, the trees were small and the landscape was still very open. We knew what we hoped to create, but there was little sense of the layered system we could see in our minds.
That changed surprisingly quickly.
About 18 months after planting, the Eucalyptus grandis were already creating height, shelter and a sense that the garden was beginning to establish itself. Our largest tree now measures 75 cm around the trunk and there are many more near that size in the rows around it. When guests see the trees, they find it hard to believe just how recently they were planted.
That early growth matters more than I expected. Syntropic gardening is a long-term process. Many of the changes we hope to achieve at Seven Hills Estate will take years, and some will probably take decades. There is a lot of observation, adjustment and patience involved.
So it helps when something responds quickly.
The trees gave us an early glimpse of what the food garden might eventually become. They also gave us confidence to keep experimenting around them. There was a real sense of achievement in seeing them grow so quickly. When so much of what we are doing here requires patience, it was satisfying to stand back and see such an obvious change in a relatively short time. That gave us a sense of pride in what we were creating and, perhaps more importantly, the motivation to keep going.
After 2.5 years, the benefits we have described throughout this series did not appear all at once. Some were obvious quite early. Others only became apparent as the trees grew and the system around them changed. And some, I suspect, we have not noticed yet.
When we planted these Eucalyptus, I thought I had a reasonable idea of what they would contribute to the garden.
Now I am much less certain.
I think that is probably a good thing.
Comments