So today I dug 35 holes as the weather looks to be breaking this week. These trees (black locust, honey locust, seedlings from a local thorny locust, and mimosas) will serve as a windscreen, privacy screen, nitrogen fixers, bee fodder, and future fence posts.
The rest of the seedlings will go in as nitrogen fixers in the orchard. Within a couple of years they'll be coppiced and supporting the fruit trees.
For those of you who've owned a house already, you understand the time/money pit they can be. Setting up a homestead adds another level to that, in addition to the electric bill etc, you have the additional costs of trees, bushes, animals, feeding troughs, feed, tools et cetra.
Some of these are simply sunk costs, like renting the excavator to dig the swales, while others like the fruit trees themselves will give me at least 100% ROI per year for 10 years (if I can keep them alive, 50/50 that.) I get that ROI number based on assuming $25 paid for tree, and getting at least 25 pounds of fruit valued at $1 per pound for at least 10 years of the trees life.
The first big project that I had to get out of the way was getting the swales dug in. I dug in three, the first one ended up being in really poor soil. The next two swales were in beautiful black clay/loam and that's where I ended up planting a majority of my trees/bushes/vines. In the row that was poor soil, I only planted three trees, two Advacados and a plum. We'll see how they do.
