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« on: March 22, 2024, 10:20:16 PM »
Most of the fruit trees we grow want sun so in those cases you would keep the Inga back. Keeping in mind that to successfully shape fruit trees it’s important that the sun hits the sides of those trees as well as the top.
So, we might be planting small fruit trees of less than a meter high with a spacing of perhaps 8-10m between them. If your main problem is aggressive grass it would be ideal to shade this area between the fruit trees and maybe even tackle the grass with geo textile. If the grass is manageable it would be nice to grow other stuff like bananas, pineapples, passion fruit, and many other intercrops to use the space between the small trees up until they are able to dominate it.
To get back to your question, the thing is that we are talking about Inga because it produces a dense shade. Cacao can grow, up to a point, in this shade. Some garcinias, but I really prefer a lighter shade for these shade tolerant fruit trees. I suspect that you would need a combination of shade trees that Inga could be a part of. We use Brownea, glircidium, and erithrina, which are also nitrogen fixers but the shade is less intense than Inga. Every option has its advantages and I think that the Inga is not something to completely cover any fruit tree but to be there in a managed context.
Peter