POPCORE (POP Community Orchard Resilience Education) organizes many elements of orchard stewardship, ecosystem design, and harvest uses that POP has learned over the years, synthesized in a 4-part series that covers Pruning and Eco-Orchard Care, Pest and Disease Management, Harvest and Use, and Design and Implementation. 

This year, the POP team took a big stride and created a guide on each of our four POPCORE trainings:

1. POP Pruning Guide
2. POP Pest and Disease Guide for Stone Fruit
3. Harvest Guide
4. Orchard Design Guide

It has been a good practice for our team to come together and think through how to share the basics of orchard care in a way that is approachable, engaging, clear, and useful. We gathered and improved resources we created in the past, filled in the gaps by writing some new ones, added custom illustrations by Orchard Coordinator Simone Shemshedini, and formatted them into easy to read booklets. We have been thrilled to share these new resources throughout the season and heartened by the enthusiastic response.

Additionally, this year we launched a new Lunch and Learn series with in person workshops exclusively for our orchard partners and Lead Orchard Volunteers (LOVs). We envisioned this series to be a place for the POP community from across the city to come together to share food, learn, and practice orchard care skills. Overall, 21 orchard partners and 19 LOVs representing 29 different orchard sites participated in the series.

The POP team has worked hard to be able to teach these workshops together in a way that is engaging, hands-on, and leaves plenty of space for participants to get to know and learn from one another, with nearly all attendees responding to our survey with the highest possible ratings.

We plan to continue to improve and update the guides and workshops each year to incorporate feedback and new learnings. 

There are a number of POPCORE videos on our YouTube channel.

The 4th and most recent chapter in the series is Orchard Design. The guide and workshops walks through:

1. Site Analysis: How to decide if a site is appropriate for an orchard.
2. How to Conduct a Soil Test
3. Base Mapping: Creating a base map (scaled drawing) of the site to show existing structures, pathways, and vegetation.
4. Food Forest Design: Design practices that mimics the diversity of natural forest to create a more holistic ecosystem. 
5. Do’s and Don’ts: Summary of helpful hints to keep in mind with creating orchard design.
6. Orchard Plant List: Our most commonly used orchard plants with notation on their size, maintenance level, pollination requirements, light requirements, and harvest window.   
7. Recommended Plant Sources: Local and mail order plant nurseries for fruit trees and herbaceous perennials.
8. How to Plant a Tree: Using text from our friends at TreePhilly with new illustrations by Simone. 
9. Resources: Recommended books and sources for further learning on food forests and orchard care. 

As we thought about how to teach Orchard Design to a group of people who are already have established orchards, we decided to focus in on how to expand orchards to include more elements of a food forest. Food forests or Edible Forest Gardens aims to create a functioning, diverse ecology in the orchard that mimics a natural forest. By working with nature instead of against it, these orchards are more healthy and productive and may experience fewer pest and disease challenges. The food forest terminology originates in permaculture, a movement of sustainable design, but many indigenous cultures across the world have traditionally grown food in a similar manner.

The first lens we looked at our orchards through was the 7 layers of a food forest – Canopy trees, Low Trees, Shrubs, Herbaceous Perennials, Root Zone, Groudcovers, and Vines. By planting a multi-layered orchard, positive relationships are created between plants. All ecological niches are occupied, so there are fewer opportunities for weeds to grow. With yields from so many layers, overall production is increased. Other layers can be harvested before fruit and nut trees mature. Partners and LOVs categorized the plants in their current orchards into the 7 different layers to notice which layers had little to no representation – and noticed an overall pattern of little to no representation within the root zone and groundcover zones.

You can check out the plant list within our Orchard Design Guide, which is categorized into the 7 layers of a food forest to analyze your own orchard or design.

The second way we looked at the diversity of our orchards was through 6 different categories of Ecosystem Support plants that build the soil or support pest control.

Nutrient Accumulators: Accumulate nutrients from deep in the soil (usually through long tap roots) and bring those nutrients to their leaves and fruit, naturally cycling nutrition content as the plants breaks down.

Nitrogen Fixer: Plants with a symbiotic relationship with a root-inhabitating bacteria that gather nitrogen from the atmosphere and feed it to surrounding plants, making it an excellent companion plant. 

Umbel Flowers: Attractive habitat and food source for predatory insects. 

Long Bloomer: Plants with a long bloom time support beneficial insects with a steady food source and habitat. 

Fall Bloomer: Plants that bloom into late Fall provide beneficial insects with a food source as options thin.

Strong Aromatics: Plants whose strong scent may repel or deter pests from locating desired plants, while also attracting beneficial insects who will prey on pests.

After sorting current orchard plants lists into these different categories, folks could see where the gaps existed and use the Orchard Plant List to start filling them in.

We ended the workshop together by having folks decide between participating in planting an understory within the POP Learning Orchard and learning to create base maps, a birds-eye-view scaled map of the site showing existing structures, pathways, water source, vegetation, etc.

This POP Blog was written by Education Director Corrie Spellman-Lopez.

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