Orchards vs. Vegetable Gardens: Why Not Combine Them?

We often erect a mental wall between planting an orchard and planting a vegetable garden. Either you have neat rows of trees, or you have neat rows of vegetables.

Here’s an orchard:

And here is a vegetable garden:

The former is a long-term investment that takes years to pay off. The latter is a quick return with more fertilizing, weeding, and daily effort.

Of course, if you’re a bit more free-spirited, you might go for a food forest instead, with various trees and perennial vegetables together.

Over 12 years ago, we planted this food forest in South Florida

However, let’s go back to the common vegetable garden/orchard divide. Getting fruit in an orchard may take 3-6 years, but then you get yields that can last for generations. Vegetable gardens provide quick and abundant harvests, yet you have to plant again every year.

Yet you don’t have to choose between having an orchard or growing a garden. And if you grow both, you don’t have to plant them separately.

You can combine them, particularly in the early years of an orchard.

Thus far, we’ve had good luck incorporating orchards and vegetable gardens together, getting the quick yield of annuals with the long-term yields of trees.

In our Grocery Row Gardens last year, we managed to grow 163lbs of cucumbers, over 150lbs of sweet potatoes, 760lbs of watermelons, 18lbs of Jerusalem artichokes, 10lbs of okra and about 40lbs of potatoes in between our fruit trees.

Grocery Row Gardens are multi-layered polycultures with trees, shrubs and veggies

The vining crops acted like ground covers through growing season, with cucumbers dominating in spring, then being surpassed by watermelons, and then finally the watermelons being supplanted by sweet potatoes into the fall.

Our trees gave us nothing in yields as this was our first year; however, we still got over 1,000lbs of food from the system!

If you have an orchard, why not plant fast-growing crops between your trees? This works especially well in young orchards where the trees haven’t blocked much of the light yet. By the time your trees get big and start producing bushels of fruit and nuts, you will have already harvested tons of food from the space. Think pumpkins, sweet potatoes, watermelons and other ramblers, which you can start on hills and let run. Or get more intense and plant potatoes, corn, or other crops in beds between the trees.

Just something to think about. Our little backyard orchard/vegetable Grocery Row Garden system is outlined in this handy little booklet.

Even if you don’t plant a Grocery Row Garden, you can really up your game by adding some annuals to your orchard or food forest, particularly in the early years of establishment.