RE: ORCHARD: PLANNING, PREPPING & PLANTING
Don't laugh at me, but I saved this post so I could read it more in-depth later on when I had the time (I just posted three songs today I wrote). I love trees, especially fruiting ones so much, so naturally I wanted to learn about your thoughts on how to plant a food forest.
Are you in a summer or winter season right now? I'm always concerned when I see bare root trees planted at the wrong time of year. We had a rose that my folks planted poorly in the summer, leaving the roots above soil. After a week or two, they finally dug it up and re-planted it, and it looked thoroughly dead. Two months later, it finally has a small shoot growing on it. Nature finds a way!
Will you be adding any protection to the trunks of those trees? It looks like a lot of work was spent digging holes and selecting the right trees to plant. I bet they were expensive too, but definitely worth every penny for the future harvests they will bring. Wild deer and rabbits might gnaw on the woody parts if they aren't screened or fenced out.
I tried to include everything but left a few things out. I've editing this post to add some of that information and try to fix some spelling/grammar mistakes. Even with editing I still always miss a few. HaHa.
We are in the very hot, humid summer and are also experiencing a drought here on my homestead. Very frustrated by it but it is what it is. These trees came dormant which meant they should have been able to be planted right away with very little shock potential. The weather didn't really make that easy to do, but I did the best I could. It's also quite physically hard on me to do this type of labor which is why it took a few weeks to get these planting. So, I am happy they got in the ground at the right time. It's way to hot to be transplanting anything right now.
So far I have not had to add anything to the trees to keep animals away from the trees. We are in such a wild area that there are a plethora of food options. It seems like they are picking other things to nibble on. We have had a mole tunneling around the roots of the trees. I was concerned it was a baby groundhog because we had one, but that ended up not being the case. The groundhog is a whole 'nother story. It's most likely a mole because the trees don't seem to be struggling leading me to think the roots are not being munched on.
The biggest problems, which I don't go into on this post, are fungal diseases (long story but we have problems here and some of the trees are prone to this I've since learned). And...…..The dreaded Japanese beetle. I thought one of the cherries was a goner. I've been spraying neem oil which is supposed to reduce both of those issues. It seems to be helping but It's difficult keeping up with it because it's so hot. Too hot for me to be outside, truthfully. I'm struggling just to keep things watered. So, while everything is growing, everything is also stressed out. If I can keep everything alive until the end of fall when they go dormant, that will put me at ease.