Mediterranean Guild Gardening: Figs, Grapes, Olives & Companions | Mastering the Garden

What do olives, grapes, figs, and lavender all have in common? They're part of the sun-loving, drought-tolerant crew that thrive in Mediterranean climates—and today we’re designing a whole guild around them.

In this episode, I explore what it means to plant perennials where they want to grow and why matching plants to their ancestral homes creates a thriving, low-input ecosystem. From nitrogen-fixers like tagasaste and Spanish broom to groundcovers like clover and nasturtium, we’ll break down each guild member's role and how they support each other.

You'll also hear how I mapped my own land, identified the only full-sun spot, and turned it into a haven for these heat-loving plants. Whether you’re growing on rocky slopes or urban backyards, this episode will help you make the most of what you’ve got—by working with nature, not against it.

🌿 Highlights:

• The anatomy of a Mediterranean plant guild
• Why guild design means less work, better fruit, and healthier plants
• How to map your own land to figure out where these plants want to live
• A geeky side note on soil pH, drainage checks, and frost-mapping
• Let's include; nitrogen fixes, ground covers, pest repellents, fruits, vines, leaves you want to eat, herbs and soil enhancers. 

📸 Let’s connect: @whitestrawberriespodcast
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Transcript

Level Up: Unpacking the Mediterranean Guild; growing figs, grapes, olives and their support team

[00:00:00] Welcome to White Strawberries. Today we're going to talk about Mediterranean plants, think Greece and Italy, olives, figs, pomegranate, and grape leaves. We'll talk about where we should put them in our orchard and the benefits of keeping them together with their other Mediterranean friends resulting in a guild.

I'm Sam, and this is a podcast where we explore the lost art of living in and with nature. 

One of the most important things you can do in your garden is plant your trees and perennials. where they naturally want to grow. If you do this, you'll minimize your workload, get more fruit, and have healthier pest resistant plants. A great way to figure out the best location for a plant is to look at where it originates.

So let's briefly talk about what a guild is. And I would say that Growing a guild is It's kind of a high level concept of designing an orchard, , especially if you're wanting to design an organic one, you're wanting to design one that, acts as much as nature intends as possible, , has like a kind of a hands off approach where you've got really high BRICs, so really high,, nutrient levels in your plants, you're creating a little ecosystem, , within the wider ecosystem of your land.

So each member of a guild serves a function that supports the system as a whole. So you would find , trees and plants that work in harmony together. And in this case, come from the Mediterranean. So have Mediterranean origins. Of course, but in that space, It's really hot. So hot, dry summers and mild, wet winters and pretty nutrient poor soils. So for example, one of the fruit trees you might want to grow is the olive. It's deep rooted, it's drought tolerant and thrives in poor, well draining soils.

Around this tree, you'll want some nitrogen fixes. So some plants that talk to nitrogen creating bacteria, within the soil.

And improve soil fertility, so they add nitrogen into the soil. You could use a tagasti, which is a tree lucerne, so [00:02:00] that's drought, hardy, it's a nitrogen fixer that provides mulch and attracts pollinators. They're quite fast growing and you can chop them back. They've got beautiful flowers on them, so of course it's going to attract pollinators.

You could use a Spanish broom here, so again it's hardy, it's a nitrogen fixer, it's got really deep roots and fragrant flowers. You could use white clover, it's a Mediterranean adapted ground cover that fixes nitrogen and retains moisture. So you want something covering the ground. And the more you listen to this podcast, the more you'll hear me harping on about this.

We're feeding the soil and we're covering the soil. Comfrey is a dynamic accumulator. So, that means that it's bringing up minerals from under the ground, and I like to use comfrey in the Mediterranean guild because it's so easy to grow where I am. Uh, it does come from a temperate climate, so it actually probably, in a perfect world, would go into the temperate guild, but I've never seen a plant just do such a great job.

It has a huge tap root, uh, pulls up potassium and phosphorus, it makes great mulch, chop it and drop it. I sometimes do it up to four times a year. It will disappear in the winter and come back in the spring. And so it might need some irrigation if, if you have a really, truly dry spot. But I hadn't found I've needed to irrigate,, in Auckland, Aotearoa, New Zealand.

 You could use chicory. It's another dynamic accumulator. It's deep rooted, drought tolerant. It's a plant that aerates compact soil. You could use yarrow, so that's hardy and attracts beneficial insects while accumulating nutrients. Uh, there are other pollinator. attractors like so they're going to support fruit production.

They're going to, encourage the bees to come and, take pollen from one flower to another. So things like thyme, oregano, lavender. I really enjoy using lavender and also rosemary in my hedging around my Mediterranean, space. You could also consider things that are pest repellent wormwood, rue or garlic.

, you might want other ground covers, [00:04:00] so strawberry clover, nasturtium, caper bush. They've, these are all either originated from Mediterranean or sort of naturalized in the Mediterranean. And then you're going to have soil enhancers, so they're going to boost microzool networks and decomposition, so oak leaf, mulch or wood chips, and 

my core is all fungi, so you could get that commercially. Olive trees thrive in symbiosis with fungi, helping them to absorb nutrients in dry soils. Something that I've seen done before is literally a bucket of soil taken from a thriving area. So if you know someone who has a really great Mediterranean, guild, take a bucket of soil from them and come and sort of spread it around the soil of yours.

There are also places that will sell, different fungis. So if you're planting all these plants together, they're going to support the olive tree. Firstly, all the plants that we've talked about have either come from the Mediterranean area or they've naturalized there. So a lot of plants were taken along the Silk Road and distributed around that area.

But if they've lasted there in open pollination, you know, if they've, if they've lasted in this area for a long period of time, you know that if you have bony, dry, Soils with maybe not too much nutrients in them at this point, that are well draining that you can plant, then you'll meet a train in plants there.

 At the end of the day, you have to have some plants in and around your olive tree unless you want to mow it, which is your prerogative. But if you're mowing it, then the grass is going to be drawing up a lot of nutrients. It's going to be drawing up a lot of, the water.

And so you might have an olive tree that's less happy. So what we're trying to do here is grow plants that are going to be super happy, and we can sort of leave them alone. Save the comfrey, which we'll need to come and just chop down with a pair of hedge trimmers, , two to four times a year.

So if we are planting a guild, we're planting the olive tree and all these plants in an area that want to grow in the Mediterranean area. If we have an area in our orchard that supports Mediterranean, then they're going to be drought [00:06:00] resistant, they're going to be nutrient efficient, so olives thrive in poor soil, so the guild enhances fatality without excessive inputs.

Pests and disease resistant. So using traditional Mediterranean companion plants that deter common orchard pests and soil and water conservation. So deep rooted accumulators and nitrogen fixing ground covers improve the soil structure and reduce evaporation.

So how do we know what guilds we can plant in our orchard? In the initial stages of designing the orchard, or when trying to understand why certain areas aren't thriving, the first step is careful observation. Designing a Mediterranean orchard guild requires tailored observations that account for its hot, dry summers and mild, wet winters.

So for example, while a Mediterranean guild tolerates some wind, it's still wise to track wind patterns and provide temporary protection for younger, more vulnerable trees. In comparison, a citrus guild, which requires more deliberate wind protection due to its sensitivity, illustrates how differing Environmental needs dictate the design of each guild.

A citrus guild thrives in subtropical places. It likes damp soils, lots of mulch, and has shallow root systems. Almost the opposite of a Mediterranean guild. Begin by observing seasonal rain and drought patterns. Noting microclimates such as a warm sunlit slope versus cooler shaded areas and map prevailing winds to identify spots that might benefit from additional windbreaks or mulching.

For example, when we first moved on to this land, I talked to the previous owner about where the wind came from, and they were completely right. I mapped out where the wind went, what directions it went. For the first 12 months, I just took all of these notes.

We were lucky in that we were still living in our previous house, and we could come and observe this land, , and before we moved on here with our tiny house. I noticed that there was a very strong wind pattern coming from two opposite [00:08:00] directions, depending on whether or not it was summer or it was winter.

I noted where there was shade cast by trees, but also shade cast by like hills, and neighboring properties. I noted there was only one full sun spot on our property to put my garden.

And then outside of that full sun spaces I then used for my Mediterranean space. A lot of Mediterranean plants, they drop their leaves in the winter, so if there's lots of shade in the winter it doesn't really matter, but during the summer they need a lot of full sun.

 So what you'll end up having on the map of your property when you draw on paper are these places that wind goes.

Now some guilds really want wind. Some guilds really need cold, cold temperatures. So watch how the frost moves on your property if you have frost. If you get deep snow, then you'll know you can't actually grow Mediterranean plants at all. You'll need to look for more temperate ore. , other guilds.

But if you don't have snow, it doesn't matter if you've got a little bit of frost in the winter, you should be able to grow a Mediterranean guild. Also map the water flow, your drainage, the soil moisture retention, as well as the sun shade patterns. And this is going to help you position plants where they can thrive.

Your Mediterranean plants don't want to be sitting in water. So the grapevine, the olive tree, the fig tree, you don't want to be putting them somewhere where they're going to be damp all year round. However, that may be great for your citrus tree. I mean, you don't want to be drowning any of your plant's root systems, but some plants can tolerate a lot more moisture and need a lot more moisture.

All right. So do you want a Mediterranean Guild? Do you think that you have the space for it in your area if you do? Exciting? 'cause there's some really yummy fruits and [00:10:00] plants that you can grow here. Once you've done the initial mapping and you've decided you can grow a Mediterranean guild, then you need to gather some more information.

You wanna go back and check the pH of this area. Super easy to do. , you can get little tools or you can get like little powders and chemistry sets, from your local garden shop, and you can test the soil of the pH and you might wanna test the soil of the pH sort of. Depending on how large your Mediterranean Guild is gonna be and how much area you're gonna plant out, test it in a few different places.

Um, so I did that, um, and I had a slightly alkaline soil, so perfect. I didn't really have to add anything to it. And I tested it using a, like a really affordable sort of fork type pH test. I added some lime to the surrounding soil because. It didn't hurt. My nana lives near a lime quarry, so she just grabbed me some chunks of lime.

And when I actually planted my grapevine in the hole, I put some chunks of lime in there. To do two things. One reason was to help with water flow, just to make sure that the grapes roots weren't sitting in any water, and also to help with the, alkaline soil. The Mediterranean Guild prefers a slightly alkaline soil.

You also wanna check moisture levels in this area, so you may need to add drainage. One way you can do this is by digging a hole, maybe in the middle of winter and just seeing if water sits in that hole. 'cause if you've got water sitting in a hole, you'll need to be careful with the Mediterranean Guild here.

You'll need to be careful with most guilds, actually. Like if you've got water sitting in a hole for a long period of time, maybe your sub tropicals will be fine, but most other guilds will need some sort of drainage. Also check where the frost sits. So if you get a frost, like I mentioned before, Mediterranean plants typically grow in regions with really mild winters.

So frost is a rare occurrence. However, when frost does occur, many of these plants rely on a combination of physiological and ecological strategies to minimize damage. They often [00:12:00] undergo a period of acclimatization during colder months, which increases the cold hardiness of their tissues. Some species reduce their metabolic activity and enter a state of Cy like.

A grapevine . 

Many stone fruits or droop trace their roots back to the Mediterranean region and beyond, while almonds originated in the Mediterranean and peaches, apricots, and cherries and lums came from further east, so they came from China, Persia, before spreading along the Silk Road. So these fruits adapted well to Mediterranean climates with hot, dry summers and mild winters.

It's important to note that if you're buying a fruit tree that has originated from this region, it needs to be a true heritage plant. For example, if you can purchase your trees that are identified as being heritage or heirloom, which means the plant has grown from being open pollinated, I don't believe that these are legal terms, just like saying an E'S free range.

I don't think anyone monitors that. So just because it can be more of a marketing tool than a legal term, just. You know, ask, ask the people selling these trees. Likewise, if you're keen on buying heritage plants, I would suggest, uh, an organization that specializes in it.

Similarly, if you're wanting to plant Mediterranean fruit trees, but you don't have Mediterranean spot, you might get a grafted tree. Do the opposite of what I just said you could get, . A stone fruit grafted onto a 

temperate , 

root system. 

so what have I got in my Mediterranean Guild? I have three FIEs. They all came from different places around New Zealand. My nana collected cunnings from them and passed them along to me. It's really sweet because when she walks in my garden, she'll share where these trees have come from and they're important to her.

They're from relatives or significant people. She's known. Fig trees can get really big. So I'm talking 10 meters high and every year I keep them to about head height. They lose all their leaves in winter. Um, I get way too many figs than I can eat, and I'm not a huge fan of preserved figs, so I tend to give a lot of them away.

. I have a pomegranate [00:14:00] sapling and a mulberry sapling. They're super happy, but I haven't seen fruit yet. I'm excited. I have a grapevine or the northern side of my shed. This space is the full sun as I'm in the southern hemisphere. After I cut them back, the branches just lie down to cramp mulch.

Each year I get more grapes than I can eat, and I love using the young leaves to make. Alma. I also enjoy the vines for making wreaths. A side note here is that grapevines, leaves, fruits, et cetera, contain resol. This is an amazing medicinal supplement that is expensive to buy and taking the bull by storm right now.

Honestly, grow a grape vine if it's the last thing you do. They're so good. I have lots of those ground covers that I mentioned before. I have Wormwood, which is a PEs repellent, three different clovers to fix nitrogen, white, red, and crimson. I have pollinating plants such as rosemary and lavender. at the bottom of all of this, I have a thick layer of wood chip, which I get from a local arborist, but my goal is to use this less over time, and I'm hoping this guild requires less and less input from me as it ages.

Lastly, I have a crazy amount of comfort. It grows so easily from root cuttings, and it's such an easy way to feed the soil. These plants or seeds or cuttings were given to me for free from my local community.

I think I bought the grapevine because I wanted a green grape, and I brought that from the KW Institute, so I brought an loom variety, but other than that, they were all given to me for free. Actually, I'll draw a picture of what I've got on socials, if that can be any use to you, you can check that out.

One more question that I wanna answer that I had was, can I plant my white? strawberries there. So can you plant alpine strawberries in a Mediterranean guild? So frag sca, which is the alpine wild strawberries, they're not true Mediterranean plants. They prefer cooler, moist conditions, but they can survive in Mediterranean gardens with shade and irrigation, such as under my grapevine and fig trees, which is currently where I do actually have some.

But I've noticed that they do struggle in the summer if I [00:16:00] don't irrigate them. So every so often I'll throw the hose there. If you're willing to provide extra care, they can work, but they're naturally more suited to a temperate zone. So I think there's probably a good place to wrap up. Do you have a Mediterranean Guild? 

Is there anything that you're gonna add to that guild now that you've listened to this podcast, is there anything that you're gonna put under your fig tree or under your grapevine, ? If so, I would love your feedback.

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