Design challenge:
200yd driveway along the edge of the property.One side abuts neighbors. Other side is the fence for my horse / cow pasture. I am considering ways to get some trees in along the driveway/pasture fence.
goals in priority order: (1) firewood (coppice/pollard), (2) livestock fodder; bonus points for food for people, bee nectar source, or nitrogen fixer
Constraints:
- It's on the edge of horse/cow pasture, so nothing that can be poisonous to those animals (ie that rules out black locust, cherries, etc)
- This is along the driveway and I also periodically use tractors etc in the pasture, so I don't want anything with crazy huge thorns (ie that rules out honeylocust)
- Must be able to survive in dry zone 4 climate in relatively rocky well-drained soil
- Nothing that is going to make too big a mess on my or neighbors' cars (ie that rules out red mulberry) or that is going tp put up too many suckers/shoots in the driveway
- I don't want the design to be too wide as I don't want to lose much pasture -- so preferably a single row of trees
On the plus side, the wheel line in the pasture should provide good irrigation and a I have access to additional supplemental water as needed
What I'm thinking.....
There's not room outside the fence to plant trees without encroaching on the driveway. So I'm thinking of a combination of a couple management practices:
(1) Just inside the fence line, plant a row of trees on about 15-20 foot intervals that I can eventually get to pollarding size. Once they are large enough, I can take down the fence posts and use the pollarded trees to anchor the fence wires.
(2) In between each of the pollard trees, plant one or two trees that will be coppiced.
Alternately, I could eliminate the pollard trees and just use coppicing. I would need to put another fence on the inside (pasture side) to protect the coppice from the cows. This approach would probably be more productive from a biomass perspective (coppicing instead of pollards) but would require more fencing and would also create a potential management challenge as i'd have to manage the ground cover between the coppiced trees. --- maybe run chickens or ducks or geese in there to keep the veg down?
Current tree species under consideration:
--shagbark hickory - downside is that it's slow growing
--grey alder - fixes nitrogen and is one of the few alder species that seems like it does ok on drier sites
-- apple -- may not ever even get to fruit, so I'm thinking antonovka rootstock
-- european pear -- similar to apple
So the questions are:
-- what do you think of this plan? do you have alternative suggestions?
-- are there management issues or type 1 errors that you anticipate that I may not have thought of?
-- what do you think of the tree species suggestions? other tree species that would work well in my climate as pollards or coppice?
