Advice For Planting and Maintaining New Pecan Trees

even though yields haven't been up to standard the past couple of years that hasn't dampened the enthusiasm of those looking to get into the pecan business man with planting season in full swing David Jones recently spoke with one pecan expert who has some advice on how to properly start and maintain your orchard before you can get this you first have to start out with this and right now planting season is underway for pecan growers around the state who are looking to cash in on an industry that has remained relatively steady it's a reason the demand for these trees remain at an all-time high well the price for pecans has stayed pretty good for the last few years and with the other commodity prices being down there's continued to be an interest in planting pecans and we you know we continue to have a pretty good number of trees going in the ground once you decide to get into the business picking the right variety is the first and most important decision you'll have to make and the biggest factor to consider when making a choice is time commitment as some varieties take more effort than others variety selection is a big part of planning an orchard because once you make that commitment and get those in the ground you're kind of stuck with it so there's several things a grower needs to consider when choosing a variety probably number one is how much time are they going to be willing to spend managing this variety while it might sound like common sense just how far into the growing tree is planted will determine how successful we will be in the future probably the most important is to not plant those trees too deep kind of a common rule of thumb that I tell people to do as they're planting trees is to look for that uppermost lateral root coming off the taproot and keep that right at ground level or no more than an inch below the ground once the tree is in the ground properly maintaining the orchard is paramount as the first year is the most important one for the tree well the first year the main thing that you need to do is keep weeds away from those trees and keep good soil moisture you don't want to let them dry out you know ideally a grower would have irrigation on those trees and mainly the key components that first year are just keeping the weeds off of them and providing good soil moisture and don't expect your orchard to look like this any time soon as growers must show plenty of patience when starting off in the business you're usually looking at anywhere from you know 5 to 8 years getting those trees into production and it depends a lot on the care that those trees get after their planning its advice to remember as trying to rush the process will affect your yield in the long run you know one of the key key things I think also is to not over fertilize that first year a lot of growers you know as soon as they plant those trees they want to get them into production as soon as possible they just need to keep in mind that no matter how much fertilizer they put on them they're not going to have nuts that second year so the first year they just mainly need to work on building up the phosphorus potassium and zinc and not worry so much about the nitrogen reporting from Tifton I'm Damon Jones for the Georgia Farm monitor

Channel: Farm Monitor

Views: 34,121

Rating: 4.9288888 out of 5

Keywords: Pecan, pecans, nuts, trees, tree, orchard, grove, farm, production, planting, raising, growing, weeds, treatment, care, start, starting, beginning, UGA, University of Georgia, Tift County, GFB, Georgia Farm Bureau, Georgia, Farm Bureau, Farm Monitor

Id: i90tosaCa34

Length: 3min 21sec (201 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 25 2016