Planting Guilds for PAwpaw, Cherry, and Asian Pear

Hi there, I'm looking for good ideas and help creating tree guilds/companion plantings for the trees listed above. If anyone has advice or experience it would be much appreciated. Below I'll try to give you an idea of what I'm already doing. Basically gradually trying to convert the sod around my fruit trees into an expanding circle of forest floor-like growth and cover.

PAWPAWS:
Everyone in my area that I know of (NE Missouri), has had difficult times getting these to survive their first few years because of their requirement for shade and a specific environment. We planted some last year in a forested bank of a stream and they survived with no attention.

This year I designed a guild specifically for them. The pawpaw saplings are planted right underneath large Autumn Olive bushes on the shaded side and close around them I've planted gooseberries and elderberries. Once they are old enough the autumn olive will get cut down, giving them mostly full sun for fruit production, and the large elderberry and gooseberry thickets around them will provide trunk shade and prevent grass.

ASIAN PEARS:
So far the only pear-specific guild plants I know of are Currants.

SOUR CHERRIES:
Don't Know a thing.

ALL TREES:
will have comfrey planted around them as well as various flowering bulbs for grass suppression.

Also I'm seeding a mix of buckwheat, yarrow, clover, parsley, chervil, alyssum, baby's breath, fennel, calendula, alfalfa, carrot, dill, radish, coriander, and daikon. This is just a seed mix that I will direct sow on one side of the trees to suppress sod and attract beneficial insects.

So....

Anyone out there with some specific plants/shrubs/ etc. that they know of going well with any of these trees?
Thanks!

all my paw paws died, the roots rotted, figured maybe they didn't get enough shade. I planted seeds this year in my woods, so far we'll see.

as for pears, I have a lot of pears here, mostly I have comfrey under them, but also daylillies and iris and perennial flowers to bring in pollinators and I generally toss in some annual vegetables under them as well.

my cherries are in two seperate ares of my garden, i have sweet, sour, bush, wild, ornamental, etc. The sour cherries are growing in asparagus beds and also have onions under them as well as comfrey, annual cosmos, jerusalem artichokes by one, rhubarb, bearded iris, etc.

my sweet cherries are growing on a slope on the north side of my house, they have a lot of things planted nearby such as eleaganous, spirea, barberry, strawberry, aegopodium, cream and sugar grass, siberian iris, daylillies, and other things.

my bush cherries are growing in several places in the mixed garden beds, near jerusalem artichokes, comfrey and annual vegetables. I just put a Carmine Jewel on my island in my pond near my waterfall, that has stones with perennials, roses, etc planted among them..and I have another one that I'll also plant on the island for the protection of the pond.

Brenda,
do the sour cherries do well with that guild? I have a baby sour cherry that I'm looking to guild, and there isn't much easy-to-find info on that. I also have a baby bush cherry, but I probably need to move it before guilding it.

This is the extent of what I've found:
Cherries should do well with the same sorts of guilds as apple, plum, and peach trees.
Sour cherries produce better and are not bothered by birds when guilded with horseradish. (Horseradish like wet soil and cherries do not, so the spot probably was wet and the horseradish absorbed the excess.)
Sour cherries are more tolerant of wet soils and poor soils than sweet cherries.
Sour cherries are quite disease resistant.
Sour cherries like more nitrogen and moisture than sweet cherries.
Cherries are sensitive to frost during bloomtime, sunburn when fruiting, like cool weather, and don't like wet feet.

hi Austin,

your guild for pawpaws is perfect. I have been raising them for years and advising people how to plant them
they are an understory tree and like to grow in forest soil, ie, decaying leaves and wood with lots of fungi
the shade part is only necessary when they are small and their roots undeveloped.
after the first year, if they are growing in the proper soil, full sun is ok, especially in the northern part of their range.

planting them under a nurse tree like autumn olive a good way to start them as the olive will provide shade, humus, nitrogen and encourage fungi to colonize the soil
the gooseberries and elderberries are good companions both having relatively shallow root systems compared to the pawpaw.
keeping a mulch layer up around the trees will help the fungi and provide enough food so the trees aren't fighting each other
i just pile up leaves around them in the fall

add in some spring flowers as these will have blossomed and gone to seed before the pawpaw even leafs out

Brenda,

don't give up on your seeds, they may not sprout til august or september

It's not really a well-researched or planned guild but I have a couple of paw paws under California coastal oaks, with elderberries, spice bush, ramps (Allium tricoccum), columbine, valerian, meadowsweet, scorzonera, and chives under them and Oregon grape nearby. Also adding to the shade are some Phyllostachys bamboo nearby to the south. I'd like to add a bayberry or 2 (Myrica pensylvanica), and NJ tea, (Ceonothus americanus) for nitrogen fixing. The area used to be heavily planted in Vinca major, and suppressing that is a concern. Any suggestions?

I've red that sour cherry is doing best near black currant. I planted this combination recently but so far I have no personal experiance, neither I understand why this combination should be successful.

My pawpaws are under a canopy of mature black locusts (who don't have much of a canopy) and under the pawpaws I've planted wild mint, mayapples, wild ginger and will add aralia racemosa and ramps soon. There are also currants and barberries close to them. Both mayapples and wild ginger have fetid flowers that attract the same sort of pollinators that pawpaws use, and they bloom around the same time, so that it part of my pollinating strategy.

Thanks for your pollination strategy Issac, I have all those plants on the property to transplant. I'm just building a pawpaw guild in a hugel bed and to date I've just a dwarf quince with them.

Milan Broz wrote:I've red that sour cherry is doing best near black currant. I planted this combination recently but so far I have no personal experiance, neither I understand why this combination should be successful.

Thanks for that tidbit. Let me know how it turns out. Right now I am waiting for my sour cherry to get big enough to plant other things with it, so in the meantime I'm searching for anything that would work with it!

Isaac,

That pollination strategy sounds great; I wonder if you know what the pollinators are (Flies?) and/or some plants they pollinate at other times of year, so I can keep them happier longer. Not quite sure where to find that particular information on the plants I'm growing (or might want to) other than such extensive research I just run across it. Lots of sites give the same basic stuff; some give a little more in one direction or another but I haven't seen those bits listed anywhere.

I use Dave's Garden, USDA, PFAF, MO Botanical Garden, and a few others, in addition to whatever a specific search turns up. I live in California so very few of these plants are native or naturalized here and information on them is not easily found in libraries or book stores.

It's just an idea I had, I don't know if it will work... in fact I was already going to plant wild ginger and mayapple and only after looking them up online (which I do with everything I plant) did I realize that they had fetid flowers and might be able to attract pollinators to the pawpaws. Flies and beetles pollinate fetid flowers, they're attracted to the smell... and you only need to attract them during the time that the pawpaw is flowering. Some people hang rotting meat/roadkill from the branches of the pawpaw tree for the same reason. I don't know what the natives are around you but I do know that there is a western wild ginger (Asarum caudatum) and a western skunk cabbage (Lysichiton americanus) which both have fetid flowers and are native to the west coast.

EDIT: And I just came across this pretty little plant: Fetid Adder's Tongue (Scoliopus bigelovii).

Well, with a name like fetid adder's tongue how could anyone resist?

I asked about the pollination because even though we only want them around during paw paw bloom they need to eat something the rest of the year to be here for that season; since none of these plants are native and may not fit into the local ecosystem including such pollination relationships I may have to provide a year-round diet (I'm in zone 8b, with very mild though rainy winters) for the flies or beetles to make it. Just like I'm trying to do with my honeybees--extending the season as far as possible in both directions for them and me.

I did just order a big batch of wild ginger (A. canadense) for the wasabi guild, which is not far away from the paw paws. I can plant some of those right by the paw paws. Strangely, while looking for wild ginger and fantasizing about wild ginger brew I saw may apples in the online catalogs and wanted some, but for no good reason other than Boy Scout camping memories and reading Light in the Forest when I was 10. Looked for excuses (aka uses) but in the end couldn't justify buying any. Oops.

Big love-ee-aye indeed.

Jeff Cope wrote:
I asked about the pollination because even though we only want them around during paw paw bloom they need to eat something the rest of the year to be here for that season; since none of these plants are native and may not fit into the local ecosystem including such pollination relationships I may have to provide a year-round diet (I'm in zone 8b, with very mild though rainy winters) for the flies or beetles to make it. Just like I'm trying to do with my honeybees--extending the season as far as possible in both directions for them and me.

I think that with fetid flowers it's a little different because the plants are basically tricking the beetles and flies into pollinating them. The insects don't eat their nectar, they think it's rotting meat that they can lay eggs in. Also, if you have house flies in your area, which I'm guessing you do, you'll be fine. The problem is getting those beetles and flies to the pawpaws at the right time.

Yeah I've had intuitions that I didn't act on like that before... I try to get what I can if I can these days.