Planting.
We like to get our new trees planted in the ground in early April and this has been a good spring to do so. More roots grow in the spring than in the summer. Therefore, we give our new trees as much chance as possible to grow roots.
Before planting, we measure the rows to get straight lines for planting. A tree out of place can be easily injured if not killed by equipment. A year or 3 ahead of planting, we often cover crop and till the soil to both build soil organic matter and to reduce weeds.
We started this orchard by making our own trees. The English and French tannic varieties in which we specialize are rare in the US. Since such varieties could not be bought commercially in 2003 when we started, we learned to make them. It’s a process called grafting. After about 10 years, I started teaching employees to graft trees. That expanded our production from 200 trees a year (that I could do by myself) to 3000 in 2017 (done by my workers). It is these 2017 trees and the 1000 we did in 2018 that we planted this year. It was a LOT of trees!
We got a tree planter a couple years ago and a new tractor to pull it. We use this equipment for the bulk of the planting but we have to hand dig or auger holes to fill in missing trees here and there. When we started, hundreds of holes were hand-dug, primarily by me. And many trees in our nurseries must be hand dug out as well. It’s a LOT of digging. And this year was the most we ever dug.
The trees must be planted at a certain depth. Then they must be watered. If not by Mother Nature, then by irrigation lines we install after planting.
The trees must be supported. Since we use dwarfing rootstocks the root portion of the tree is smaller and shallower than larger size trees. We choose to grow dwarfing trees since the trees will be smaller in height, produce apples sooner and be easier to harvest. The shallower root of the dwarfing trees must be supported so that it does not break or topple over in the wind or with the weight of bearing fruit. Because of this, most of the orchard is on trellises– similar to a vineyard trellises but taller. The rest are supported by 10’ stakes.
This year’s planting of almost 4000 trees brings us up to about 15,000 trees in the orchard. We believe we have the largest collection of organically-grown English and French cider apples in America. When these trees start bearing apples in a couple years, they will allow us to expand our production of both cider and apple brandy.
