Thanks for the replies. The orchard is roughly 85' by 60'. And it's fenced. Too small for the tractor to manuever easily (I'd get hives watching my husband trying to turn around without running over my Red Sheepnose apple) but it's bigger than I'd want to mow by hand. It would take too many woodchips to cover. The trees are mostly apple, peaches, plums, and pears. All are on semidwarf rootstocks. I've solved the deer problem so I'm not adverse to putting in clover. Or even garden crops for the first few years. I didn't think of that, but I like it. It's pretty much weed free right now so it's a blank slate that I don't want to mess up. I would love to grow alfalfa for my milk cows but I don't think it grows well here. Maybe cowpeas or some kind of legume? Or maybe some kind of mix like clover and oats? Then I could scythe it and feed it to the cows. (that sounds really cool but to be honest I'm not real sure what scything involves.) Gosh, I thought everybody would have the perfect answer. Like "The National Association Of Obsessive Home Orchardists has mandated a ground cover consisting of 40% legume, 20% potash, and 30% comfrey. Seeded at a rate not to exceed 30lbs of biomass per square foot." or something like that. :)

I grew up in Sebastopol, CA, near Santa Rosa. It was covered with apple orchards, mostly Gravenstein. The main highway through town is named Gravenstein Hwy. Years ago, nearly every jar of apple sauce (Apple Time), bottle of apple juice, even the dried apple bits in Apple Jacks cereal came from Sebastopol. 20 years ago the Washington apple growers got together and bought the Vacu-Dry processing plants in Sebastopol and shut them down, effectively shutting down the apple orchards. Every spring they still have an Apple Blossom Parade for nostalgias sake, even though the apple orchards are untended and out of production for the most part.

Lamium is nice---you can just mow it if it spreads too far out of bounds. Lots of people like ajuga but we found it really does take over the lawn. I have also had good luck with violets---either the plain purple kind or the white, but there are also many other varities and colors. My favorite shade ground cover is sweet wooodruff---lovely foliage, little white starry flowers, and a wonderful smell when it is dried.

Dorothy, It does sound like Johnsongrass, which is the bane of my existence here.....second only to bermuda. I try to keep it mowed down short because that seems to more or less control it, but those large, finger-sized rhizomes (yours might be wrist-sized since you get so much more moisture, LOL) creep into the edges of the veggie garden and flower beds and drive me bonkers. To make it worse (just the name association) our land was once part of the Johnson family farm, we live next door to the Johnson son and his family, we bought our land from one of the Johnson daughters, and our road is known locally as Johnson Road. So, when I am digging out Johnson grass, I am always wryly amused and ask myself if the road was named for the Johnson Family or the Johnson Grass! (And I love every member of the human Johnson family I've ever met, including in-laws and nieces and nephews, but the grass is a different story!!!) I used to have a lovely bed of daylilies that I put in the first year we moved here, but the Johnson grass kept infiltrating that bed over and over during our hot, droughty summers and I finally gave up and abandoned it and the Johnson grass choked out almost all the daylilies. One day, I will have a daylily bed closer to the house, but only after I have removed ALL the grass and taken measures to keep it from ever invading again. That first year, I was naive in thinking that if I removed all the rhizomes and enriched the hard, clay soil, the Johnson Grass would be manageable. It might have worked closer to the house...but this bed was about 200' from the house, down by the driveway/roadway, and it doesn't get any supplemental irrigation, so the Johnson grass, being more drought-tolerant, "won". I have planted a lot of trees around the house because we built in the only open area (not wanting to bulldoze huge trees in the woods) so we had no shade. I didn't do as good of a job as I should have at keeping the grass away from the roots of the young trees back then, but I'm doing better now and I think it does make a tremendous difference in how quickly they grow and also it makes a difference in how well they tolerate drought. I planted mint in clay soil in several areas and it lived for several years but it eventually died out during drought in 2003, a year in which we only had 18" of rainfall here (our worst year here by far, and that was the year the grasshoppers ate everything in sight, including fruit on the trees, the cotton rag rug on the porch, and our fiberglass window screens). I would never plant mint in the "good soil" in my flower beds or veggie garden for fear it would outcompete everything else, but I am going to plant it near the chicken coop and guinea coop where the combination of the hens "digging and scratching" and the increasing amount of shade have left a lot of bare soil in an area that used to have bermuda grass. (Yeah! Some of the trees are finally getting large enough to shade out bermuda.) When our fruit trees were younger I planted nasturtiums and garlic underneath them (nasturtiums to attract beneficial insects and garlic to repel borers), but the chickens liked the nasturtiums a little too much and the garlic merely disappeared. Dawn