March Week 3

Organic Gardening Calendar4 Weeks to frost free date in zone 6By: Kathi

If you don’t know by now to get those seeds started, there’s no hope for you. But this week I would like to talk about orchard planning.
Things you will need:Recommend Starks Brothers Catalog
Internet access for research
Soil amendments

Before you begin digging, it would be wise to stop and consider what you want from your orchard? Are you looking for a cash crop, or do you want seasonal fruit for your family, or do you want blooms and bird food?

First of all, investigate your local growing conditions. What fruits are typically grown locally? If very few or none, there may be good economic reasons for not growing fruit in your area. As far as this article is concerned, fruit can be apples, pears, cherries, or even woody shrubs like blueberries. We will leave strawberries to another day.

Cooler climates grow apples and pears very well. Obviously you must be in a no freeze zone to grow citrus fruits. Apples in the Deep South are probably going to die or be eaten up by pests. But most people can have some luck with certain varieties of fruits no matter where you live. The easiest way to determine what types of fruit will grow in you region is to visit the local big box nurseries or if you have them available actual nurseries where you can ask a real horticulturist, rather than a kid working after school about your orchard planning.

What you will see in these places are the varieties that will grown in your area, but they may not necessarily thrive. Big difference. Beware of mail order catalogs. They are a wonderful source of information about very specific things, but determining if they will grow in your yard is tricky. Always remember, they are trying to sell you their plants. If it says "Will tolerate…” that’s one way of saying it will live, but it won’t be happy. With fruit, your plants must be happy or they will never produce properly.

Once you get a list of the fruits you see at these stores, go home and Google for each type. Look for micro climate issues that relate to your garden plot. Does your soil have a lot of clay? Check which varieties will grown in clay. If this fruit is very early blooming, is your yard in a low spot that will freeze later than the general no frost date in your area? In my yard…that could be a month later than at the nearby airport.

The next big consideration is your winters. Look at the horticultural information for the fruit you want. How many chill days does it require to set blooms and fruit? If your winter is not cold enough and long enough, many trees, especially apples and Pears will not set properly.

Once you determine what types of fruits you want, and determined they will grow in your area, then you must decide how much do you need, and how much work are you willing to commit to. Now you know I’m all for lazy gardening. You can be somewhat lazy with fruit, but you really can’t ignore your trees or all you will get is blooms and bird food.
With most all fruit trees these days there are multiple varieties to choose from. Its great idea to get one of each, but not necessarily practical or productive. Some trees are self fertile, meaning they can pollinate themselves without the need of other trees. But a lot of tree varieties require pollinators. I have never seen a tag on a tree at the big box store that said it required a pollinator. That information is best gotten on line. Stark Brothers list which of their trees require pollinators and which do not.

For cross pollination to occur you need two trees that bloom at the same time. Don’t think that just because you have two cherries or two apples you are going to get fruit.

Now what size tree? Trees come in Standard, Semi Dwarf, Dwarf sizes. If you want a back yard garden that is the easiest to deal with, get the smallest trees that variety of fruit is available on. I recommend any time possible getting the dwarf sized trees. The fruit will be better if for no other reason that you can better access the tree for pruning, spraying, and picking. If you have limited space, choosing Dwarfs will allow you to have more varieties in the same area than large trees will allow.

Spacing. Now here is where I deviate from the conventional wisdom. I figure if you are reading this, you are most likely not wanting to go into the fruit farming business, but want fresh uncontaminated fruit to serve your family. So Spacing? If you buy a tree and the label says to space these trees at lets say 10 feet, I recommend spacing them at 20 feet. The spacing guidelines assume the full grown trees will slightly touch each other. I’m telling you, this happens rapidly, and it makes tending the trees a pain in the rear. Lazy gardeners should separate those trees, so there is room to drive a lawn cart or a wheel barrow down between them. You will need to get on all four sides of every tree with a sprayer, (I prefer the backpack kind) and pruning shears to remove dead, mal formed, or diseased branches. This takes room. If you have another tree scraping your back while performing these procedures it makes for an unpleasant experience. I know. I planted my 20+ tree orchard by the directions. By the 4th year, I was mad because I could no longer get to my trees they were so thick. Disease set in and I lost most of my trees. Oddly those that lived were on the outside, where I could better reach them. Once the others died out, I had a good spacing pattern that allowed room to work around each tree.

This is another reason for carefully planning an orchard. A mistake made today may not be realized for several years. That’s a lot of wasted money time and effort.

When you purchase your trees, look for thick central stalks with lots of buds. Look for signs of disease or pests and do not purchase those trees. If there are several diseased ones, and you find a nice on in the pile….you will be lucky if you don’t bring home all the pests and diseases you saw on the ones you left behind. I strongly reccomend that you wipe your newly purchased trees down with an orgainic fungicide/pesticide from dirt to tip prior to planting.  Check the root ball for signs of soil pests.  Remove any found by hand and treat the root ball and surrounding new fill with an appropriate control for the pests encountered.

Once you settle on trees, and wipe them down, get out your tape measure and space them out properly with extra room. You want as much direct sunlight as you can get, minimum 6 hours per day. Don’t plant trees that will get taller to the south of trees that are shorter. You must consider where your trees will cast their shade when fully grown.

Digging the planting hole. Ever hear the expression, “dig a $10 hole for a $1 tree”? This is a must. Dig it deep and dig it wide. I like to plant my trees in holes that are 20X or more wider than the trunk at the base and twice the depth of the root ball. While I have all that hole dirt out of the hole, I amend mine with peat moss, greensand, bone meal, compost, and specially formulated fruit tree fertilizer. Again, GardensAlive! has wonderful fertilizers for fruit trees that are all organic.
Stir all those ingredients together. Replace the soil into the hole to a depth that will cause the previous dirt line to be set above the new dirt line, by several inches. Continue filling in the hole and packing the dirt in, not with your heavy foot but with a rod. Poke it in and out repeatedly to remove air pockets. Fill until you have completely filled the hole. Now turn on the hose and let the hole fill with water. Stop the water. You want the hole to absorb this water and it should drain right through. Repeat the watering process until the water stops draining out immediately. By now you should have all the air pockets out of the soil, and a well watered new planting. Fill in more dirt if needed to bring the soil line up to where it originally was on the new tree. Tamp it down lightly. Mulch. Mulch all the way out to the tree drip line or a minimum of a 36 inch diameter circle, if it is a tiny tree.

Now all you have to do is determine for your fruit and your location when to spray the trees. Put this on your calendar. Missed sprays cannot be made up. They are timed to the weather and the seasonal progress of the tree. If you do not spray the trees or use judicious means of debugging you will not get a lot of fruit. Trust me on this, if you want fruit you must spray. And again GardensAlive! (I should get a commission!) has a full line of organic sprays, with great educational literature explaining how to and when to.

If you do all these things, you should get a small crop of fruit by the 3rd spring. Each additional year you maintain happy trees they will produce more and more fruit up to their top limit.

So go forth without fear and set out your fruit trees. In our clay, in zone six, we settled into cherries as our fruit of choice. We get all the cherries we can eat in pies, and leave the rest for our feathered friends.

Next week: greater detail on spraying routines, pests, and diseases, in the orchard.