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Sorry this took so long, here's the basics on guilding your trees.

Building a tree guild is a method of planting support species along with your food producing tree/shrub. When building a guild, you want to focus on a few things. Attracting beneficial insects and pollinators, dynamic nutrient accumulators, producing green mulch, grass suppressants and nitrogen fixing.

For apple trees, you would look for things like dill, fennel and bee balm as your insectiaries.

Yarrow, chicory and comfrey as your dynamic accumulators.

Comfrey and jerusalem artichoke also fill in as mulch plants that you would chop and drop several times a season (comfrey up to 5x in 1 growing season).

Daffodils and garlic chives are good grass suppressant bulbs. I use hairy vetch, Dutch white clover, red clover and field peas as nitrogen fixing cover crop and grass supressants as well.

I'm guilding my fruit trees with N-fixing shrubs like goumi, seaberry and siberian pea shrub at a 4:1 shrub to tree ratio.

According to Dave Jacke, author of Edible Forest Gardens, you should also research support species that will bloom right before your apples start to blossom. This will get your pollinators onsite and ready to work at the right time.

There are a bunch of resources out there for apple tree guilds and you should be able to find what works for your climate with just a little bit of homework.

The other thing I would try to find out is what diseases typically plague apple trees in your area. Then find out what natural support species would aid in fighting off that disease. Definitely try to keep as organic as possible, there should always be a natural solution.

Good luck!

If you cut off their yellow flowers, they put their energy into growing the tubers instead of forming seed and should not get invasive. This is all anecdotal since I haven't grown them myself yet but plan to give them a shot next year. Comfrey is my go-to for mulch and dynamic accumulation.

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