The Ghost Orchard

We have several acres of wooded land on our property. In some areas, mainly where the slope is steepest, the forest is old. There are some live trees that are probably hundreds of years old, plus the ground has many lumps and divots from similarly large tree root systems that fell in wind storms centuries ago and were never reworked by farm machinery.

Some areas are new growth forest and were possibly a former orchard. People cleared the trees, then mounded up the soil in long rows on the flat parts of the property then planted long gone apple trees (probably) on the mounds. Creating those mounds was probably a huge chore, even if they used machines for it, and it probably took several man months of effort.

Years later, that furrow/ridge system causes drainage issues because it blocks the natural flow of surface water for hundreds of feet. In some places it is a swamp during the winter and spring months and ironically is a tree graveyard because of the wet conditions.

I'm building a mountain bike trail on my property. Part of it goes through that ghost orchard area. It's been a labor and material intensive part of the trail because of the swampy soil, so I feel inclined to hate on the people who built those mounds. It's a bad idea to drive vehicles through fragile soil and damp areas because it makes the conditions even worse and it will turn into a mud bog. There are a couple of the furrows someone probably used as a tractor path many decades ago and it's still kind of a mess.

The ghost orchard is a good illustration of how an arbitrary imposed plan generally doesn't work out well. A more prudent approach would have been to build a pilot project, see how it worked out, then incrementally built it out. I'm guessing, though, that the ghost orchard was built out all at once and then maybe failed and was left to go wild. People do that because of math and money. They think, "I will get X trees per 100 feet of ridges, which will yield Y dollars of sales." Then they build out the whole area to try to maximize revenue. The numerous problems might not show up for a couple of years.