The group consists of five normal 2nd-level characters, a combat-trained mule and two 1st-level half-orc Warriors (the latter three are obviously NPCs).
I know APL gets a bit silly when you add lower-leveled people to the group. So how do I proceed? Around what is a sensible encounter for them?
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Take all the lower level character's CRs, then use the chart that converts the CR of several creatures into a CR for an encounter. Group the lower things into "encouter" CRs about equal to the level of a single PC, then treat that group as one PC.
For example, if you had 3 level 4 PCs and 2 heavy horses (CR2), you would group the 2 horses together (individual CR 2, "encounter" CR 4) and treat them as one PC. This gives you a 4-person party of APL 4. If they also had 4 light horses, those could count as another CR4 encounter making it a 5-person party of APL4.
This obviously gets a bit more complicated with mixed CRs, but it's a start.
Also, this is just my best guess as to how you'd do it.
EDIT: In your case the mule is either CR1 or 2 (I'll assume 1) and the warriors are CR 1/3. The two warriors together is a CR1, as is the mule. Put together they are a bit over a single character (~CR2.5), so you could probably estimate about a 6-7 person party of 2nd level PCs. I would probably call this equivalent to APL3 because of the number of members.
Okay, thanks. The mule is actually CR 2, due to a somewhat dubious ruling I made that I'm sticking with now for consistency (the advice given is to make mules Advanced ponies, but I made them Giant ponies, since it seems like they should be large-sized). So that comes down to about a 7 person party of 2nd-level PCs. Thanks for the help.