How To Care For Backyard Orchard Fruit Trees | 'BACKYARD ORCHARD CULTURE' @ Dave Wilson Nursery

[Music] so here we are now at the Dave Wilson nursery and Hickman California and what are we gonna do today good morning Charles thank you good morning nice to see you again and today we're going to review our backyard orchard style planting here at Dave Wilson nursery we have hundreds of acres of orchard trees out here on the nursery but we dedicated this one plot about 2,700 square feet to creating a backyard style orchard trees on close spacings multiple budded multiple grafted multiple planted hedgerow spell years we have all the different backyard techniques demonstrated in this order yeah I saw during our preview I saw that there's about a hundred trees and I'm looking forward to hopefully getting to see all of these trees planted such a small area so let's get started okay thank you Tom [Music] all right Charles Malky biologists implant expert with ivory organics where we grow cool plants and today we're here with none other than Tom Spellman the spokesperson for the Dave Wilson nursery who is the largest distributor of deciduous berry fruit trees and nut trees in the country and what an honor to be here with you today well thanks for coming today Charles I've been really looking forward to hosting you through our mini orchard here and showing you some of the things that we've been doing over the last six years in this in this blog now I can't wait to see it and for those of you just watching us for the first time I just want to share with you that Tom Spellman and I in just the last 30 days we've done a lesson on general fruit tree care and I'm gonna put all of these lessons down below in the comments we also visited the high chill apple orchard in the low chill growing zone of Irvine California and then we also did a tour of the Zagora farms where they're growing some hybrid fruit trees these are non-gmo fruit trees but these acre genetics are basically deriving the superior flavors between fruit trees and creating you know what there are the next best fruits for tomorrow and a lot of those amazing fruit trees we're also gonna see here today and the Dave Wilson nursery is the exclusive distributor of these zeiger fruit trees in the in North America in North America yeah that's wonderful well let's get started with the backyard orchard culture lessons and where should we start well let's start right here we're standing right in front of our hedgerow of pluots and plums okay so these are six varieties of pluot and plum that are planted in about 36 feet got it and they look pretty big right now and they are you can see that they were all this point last winter and but now they've grown out six eight feet so as we start our summer pruning this is mid-july we'll be starting here in the next couple of weeks we're gonna bring them all right back down to about the seven and a half or eight foot mark now some of these still have fruit on them in fact this variety here happens to be splash pluot which is one of our nice little varieties so once we get the fruit harvested then we'll come in and do some pretty aggressive summer things here this is a great little variety super-sweet the commercial growers looked at this and they said you know what we like the color we like the flavor we like the consistency it's too small for a commercial piece of fruit so they were gonna scrap the variety and Mike Tomlinson and I look at it I'd live Oh some of our other people had evaluated fruit over the years and we thought you know what this is too good to waste this is too good to let go and what's the name of this again this is called splash splash yeah and it's a pluot again it's a blue on so plum and red so it's got that yellow interior and it's got the kind of plumage purple but it's actually more towards the pinkish absolutely this one really represents the true forms in both apricot and so with this splash plot I've noticed that all the fruit are within reach so even though my reach is 8 feet so all the fruit are within 8 feet or less mm-hmm but the tree is about twice the height so 16 feet tall and I know most people would look at this and say how come there isn't fruit 16 feet up there great question and here's the reason because we've maintained this in a backyard orchard style now for since it was planted five six years ago every year we're bringing it back down to our chosen height so all of our fruiting wood all of our spur wood all of our flowering wood is all down in the lower structure of this tree so the growth that's come out since it broke dormancy back in the spring that's all new wood and if we left it on there for a season we would absolutely get some fruit off of it for the next season but we don't want it up there we want it down here where we can get it every year in the summer and every year in the winter this tree will be pruned and that high branch structure will be removed we'll never leave it there long enough for it to actually become fruiting wood but we're always encouraging the fruiting body down below make sense I appreciate that well let's continue the tour okay so where are we now well this is our a spell yer row and so we have this is us sweet treat cherry plum we have a priam flavor delight we have a couple of peach varieties we have burgundy plum so these are all planted on a post and wire system for wires hi and they've been structured to grow the main stem up a post and then the laterals out along the wire so what we're seeing right now this is all the growth that's come out since January when it was per winter pruning god this is a sweet treat cherry plum the blue area that we were talking about and actually most of the fruit has been harvested if you want to come in you can actually zoom out here on the fruit skill that now we still have some real nice fruit on the tree so we will begin our summer pruning effort here shortly thank you on on this variety but this is just this is one of my favorite new introductions it's it's a low chill variety it probably only requires 200 chill hours to produce fruit it's also very high chill adaptable they're growing it up in Boise Idaho so it's done well in almost every location pollinates readily with other plum and pluot varieties but you can see this is on a standard root stock and it's pretty aggressive grower so what we want to do now once we get this free the rest of this fruit harvested is will come in and we'll just look for bigger so I can see this branch that's grown out four feet since this tree growth dormancy and I'm going to go all the way down to the lower point of that branch and take that off I can do the same bottle that all the way back down to where it comes off of the structure and take it out so this is all this year's growth that we're cutting out this year's growth so you can see that we still have a lot of small tightrope down within the structure and that's gonna be our fruiting wood for next season did you say that all of these smaller branches will stay for next year the longer more vigorous growth is being cut back so that we maintain what I like to also call is a free-standing espalier exactly so and then I also want to highlight what is this system called here again with the wires in the it's just a simple post and wire so hosted wires I want will do a viewer to hopefully see we've got the post over here and then there is these wires one and two is there a third yeah and there's a third wire that runs across and the primary branches are bound to it and you can see that they've got now a structure that's all about maybe a foot and a half less than two feet wide yeah and you're pretty much growing it I'm thinking like a grape lattice like it's accurate so that thin of it is once we get this plant pruned out it will be essentially 18 inches wide 10 feet long and about seven feet high fantastic that's great and and literally producing hundreds of these wonderful over in a very tight space on again dimension wise what are we dealing with how many how many um beef by how many feet well I think we heard it was like 90 90 feet by the whole project here now is 90 by 30 okay and we originally planted I think it was over a hundred trees Wow I'm the project so hundred trees in a 90 by 30 you know area 2,700 square feet and you got 100 fruit trees yeah so basically 27 square feet per tree and you're picking fruit starting like what month like to be guitar picking early varieties of peach and nectarine in the end of April or the 1st of May okay and we're harvesting all the way until dormant season so the apples the persimmons the pears are coming out you know all the way up until mid-december Wow so there's only about 4 to 5 months with no fruit yeah yeah and the rest of the year you're harvesting through your back all the time I come out here every day for five or six months and pick fruit that's no problem and what's the next one we're gonna view let's walk down so where are we at now so this is our flavor delight a priam okay and you know these trees were put in or these trees would have been in since the inception of the project so they've been in for six years you can see the main trunk you can see the lateral branching you can see the amount of vigor that we've had on it through this season it's an early season ripening variety so the fruit was ripe from the end of May through the month of June so we just listed it's July so now I went on I like the the oh I guess will highlight their lateral branches after your protocol be more obvious so now we can come in and do a little bit of summer pruning I don't have to get real aggressive I can just take again look for some of this vigor I don't need this branch growing right out into the area where I want access so we can pick some of those off we can just clean it up a little bit so that we have a nice white exposure with a nice air movement now I fit in here too absolutely and and really in a system like this where we have a fairly uniform structure to begin with it literally only takes minutes to come through here and do this type of summer pruning so I just want to highlight now again here's the primary trunk I'm hoping you can counter this primary trunk is over here all of the growth and there's even some new growth the smaller branches are reaching out less than 12 inches away from the primary trunk and then you've got these lateral branches you can see they were trained on these wires this here's the wire and the branches have been trained to go in both directions and the same was done over here with these lateral branches as well and this here is the lower level with primary branches so we've got Row 1 Row 2 and Row 3 with these smaller branches that are coming out and ultimately supporting the fruit from year to year so you know again in a very small amount of space 18 inches wide seven feet tall maybe eight or nine feet in width and we had the whole tree contained now all the fruit is reachable I'm getting everything from standing on the ground and and this just makes if you want to use this as a screen or a divider you know in your back yard if you want a little privacy something like this works out perfect doesn't take up a large footprint of space again we said so about 27 square feet per tree in this project some maybe a little more maybe a little less yeah there is a lot of empty areas too I see so it's not that they're not just necessarily all crammed well in order we've taken out a few trees and we're gonna we'll be putting in a few more that's one of the nice things about a backyard project is if you grow something and you decide hey you know I really didn't work out I really don't like that fruit then to do something different that's great so you know we're constantly changing our backyard orchard style schemes and I think we talked in one of the last videos about my philosophy of 80/20 so 80% of the varieties in here are tried-and-true varieties yep I'm always gonna dedicate 20% of this space to trying new things they're experimental part good so we've already taken out a few things so that we can put in some new varieties again this winter that's great I want to also emphasize on the fact that with these deciduous fruit trees particularly peaches plums apricots and apples that the fruit but the blossoms are all going to happen on last year's wood so we got to preserve wherever we prove those buds that are left this year will be the flowers for come next your spring so here you know here's here's fruiting wood for next year right here god we've got we've got lots of little tight buds on here and we're gonna get lots of flowers from this section but when I look at a branch like this it's too vigorous and in the wrong direction this is just bigger there's no there's no real fruiting wood on this right now so by removing this now I'm opening up the air movement and the light exposure to the smaller secondary growth that has our flowering wood on it and allowing that to establish a mature more through the rest of the growing season negging are more free of better quality absolutely fantastic so I see a lot of fruit at the next stop what's there this is a peach plum hybrid called tri light and so it looks like a looks like a peach a basic white peach but it does have a little bit of plum parentage in it originally was rated as a very high chill variety but we found it to be very low chill adaptable as well so one of the nice things about some of this backyard orchard experimenting is it's allowed us to take a lot of these varieties out of the realm that they've been dedicated to grow in and were and we're expanding those horizons a little bit we're able to say hey you know what we rated it at 800 hours originally then we downgraded it to 6 and then we downgraded it to 4 and you know what we can probably downgrade it to two let's go a commercial grower might not think along the same lines but they have a completely different expectation that a backyard grower does for sure so I can take a higher chill variety grow it in a lower chilled location and still get good quality fruit on most varieties that's wonderful while we're talking about the commercial versus the backyard orchard growers such as the home gardener such as myself the commercial growers we were with a few at these Egger farms yesterday and I know that they were you know checking for firmness and and how it pulls off the tree and and they're looking at like how fast it's gonna be the farm it store it transport it and all these and they're tasting these fruits some of the things I'm gonna taste amazing but I know we're picking them about what a week or two too early at least two weeks before what I would consider their peak ripeness and so why are the commercial growers doing that when I know in my backyard or Teramo is like feeling it for I want it to be right and I want you know maximum flavor sweetness you know and health you know that I'm gonna capture by eating at the same day compared to something being transported you know over the over the course of two weeks right um so what's the difference again with it what is the commercial grower looking for well your commercial grower cannot ship a tree right piece of fruit you you know what a tree right peach does yeah and if you set it on the kitchen counter for two or three days it turns to mush so a commercial grower is not going to be able to get their crop to market in two or three days so they need something that has a firm consistency that they can they can process it they can wash it they can grade it they can cold store it they can get it out to retail locations get it displayed on a shelf and then it still has to have that shelf life yeah so they absolutely have to pick a couple of weeks before peak ripeness another thing I noticed also yesterday and with these commercial growers is they're looking at color their mating color more of value than flavor yeah yes in size like that was another like factor like it could be smaller as we did with the original tree we just sampled where he said it's too small for the commercial grower right but the flavor was something maybe superior to a bigger piece of fruit exactly and you know what all III I'm okay with that yeah same here but you know from a commercial perspective when you go to the grocery store and buy fruit you're buying with your eyes you know you're looking at that fruit saying boy that's beautiful it's large the skin is perfect the color is is beautiful you're not tasting it in the store they're not allowed to no you're not these stand there Nita peach they're gonna get a little you know upset with you so if you're buying with your eyes correct so it has to look it's very best and that's one of the the key points you know they're looking for the size they're looking for the exterior color they're looking for a nice you know complete piece of fruit that doesn't have blemishes on it so those are all commercial attributes that are extremely important to their market that's great so what's our next stop well let's walk down the row that's it so now here we are at the end of the row of the freestanding espalier and what is this fruit tree that's covered in so many fruit well Charles this is one of my favorite varieties this is burgundy plum okay and burgundy plum is reliable everywhere I've seen it it just seems to produce like a madman we've already picked probably two-thirds of the fruit off this tree and it is still a whole Italy just loaded with all this this fruit and it suffered a little bit we didn't thin it so the fruit is smaller than normal but you remember my philosophy I'm okay if it's small and tastes good I'll just eat two or three for sure so this varieties it was included in the project here because we have so many other pluot and plum varieties planted around it this is one of our our best varieties for cross pollenization great blooms for a long period of time it hits the early the mid season and even some of the later blooming varieties so I always like to include burgundy plum in a backyard style planning and Plus that the fruits absolutely delicious that's good to know let's take a look at it here's the exterior and I'll take a bite check out that flesh so it's a beautiful and delicious tasting piece of fruit so notice yesterday while we're at sagres Farms that a lot of the commercial growers that were there were there with her pole Pickers reaching for the kaulos fruit instead of just reaching you know to the fruit that were within reach why would they reaching for the tallest fruit well those trees are fairly large you know most of the trees in zagar's orchard are probably 15 feet tall maybe some even larger not so the commercial guys their philosophy is that they're gonna have better air movement and light exposure and more mature fruit higher up in the tree than down lower in the canopy where it's more shade at all so a better piece of a better quality those guys were there they're there picking fruit yesterday to take back to their decision makers and say hey this this is we can use this variety we can do this variety so they want to bring the best possible fruit back to their organization for evaluation to get you know the best possible results make sense so they're being consistent that way yeah anything about sweetness well theoretically the the fruit that's higher up if it gets more light exposure if it gets more air movement it should develop sugars a little more rapidly I heard a little bit of a buzz about its sweeter up there so I don't know if that's been proven or a weapon okay so behind me I see that we've got a peach tree it's got some orange fruit in there it's got some pink fruit in there and we've also got some green fruit what's going on well this Charles is an example of a multiple butted tree so this is this is our production variety that we're actually growing we call it the Xavier pride the multiple but of peach so it has five varieties grafted onto the food oh wow do may pride that was harvested in May Eva's pride that was harvested about three weeks ago mid pride is our next one it has the nice red color beautiful this is August bride that will be ripe about a month from now and their mothers also a June Python focus that was right so excessive ripening fruit from the middle of May until the middle of August going on highlight what you've accomplished here and when I'm getting into too much detail we take a look down here into the canopy of the tree but I want to highlight here is you're gonna see that one tree trunk you can see some names around it that Tom just mentioned I see June Pride and August pride and we talked about May pride and these are all again Zagar farm varieties right right they're all large sized fruit they're all free stone yellow-fleshed alberta style peaches that's ripen one after the other and so you can see again one tree trunk five flavors of peaches and we're enjoying peaches off of this tree for about four to five months out of every single year at least three months yeah that's that's wonderful so I see a sad story over here there's peaches and are all over the floor clearly too many fruit and there's a broken branch now behind you absolutely what happened this isn't this is another example of a multiple budget variety so this is a four in one white-fleshed peach and nectarine so we've got white flesh peaches and nectarines varieties grafted together okay against excessive ripening the one of the things that that we find in working in a backyard orchard got to pay quite a bit of attention to it we came through and did some thinning on these trees but obviously on this branch we didn't thin enough so this is an example of what happens if the branch isn't supported or the fruit isn't isn't thinned enough got it believe me I make as many mistakes as anybody else I'll never I'll never be the one to jump up and down and say hey I'm successful yeah we always have issues I haven't I haven't even been in this orchard now in about six weeks so it's not your fault you're so antsy I'm not taking blame but but I'm just I'm just letting you know that these are things that will happen so you know the reason you got to visit your backyard and you gotta spend time I could spend time with your trees you know the more time you can spend out here the more you're gonna be able to correct a problem like this we could have come in and thinned a little more aggressively we put up could have put a crop underneath that branch to hold it up sorry had we been here paying a little bit more attention to it we would have saved it but you know we're we're I'm trying to do this in the style of an average backyard growers I know this is not something that's professionally handled this is something that I don't have a crew of ten people that can come in here and do thinning and pruning and things like that they're busy growing trees they're not going to spend time working on my pet project so if I'm not here so how are we gonna crack this thing well this fruit for the most part is it's getting close to ripe there's still some small fruit on here so I think what we're gonna do is we're gonna thin some of the smaller fruit off and we're gonna put a prop underneath it and then we'll decide later on in the season the branch is cracked but it's really not broken so we'll decide later in the season whether we want to save it but if we do save it we'll be reducing it aggressively by 75% and from below but more than likely the way we do things in this project will probably just remove the branch okay you know it's shown us that it over produces anyway if I cut it off at the crack I would still have the bud initiation and I could probably still regrow some new canopy from there you mentioned the beginning successive ripening and just now it caught my eye that this fruit over here and I'm hoping you can capture this as well so you can see that this fruit over here is fuzzy as would be peaches but right behind it on the same exact tree are these smooth skinned nectarines mm-hmm and you said the word at the beginning successive ripening yes and I know that the critical word in accomplishing the backyard orchard culture that you've been teaching for a couple of decades now what is successive ripening well successive ripening the philosophy there is most people don't have a commercial expectation of the fruit that they're gonna harvest out of their backyard if I was a commercial peach grower here in the San Joaquin Valley I'd be looking for 300 to 400 pounds of fruit per tree so what is the average homeowner gonna do with 300 or even a hundred pounds of peaches yeah that's an intimidating amount of fruit for a family of four or even six or eight to use in a couple of weeks period of time yep so if I plant three or four varieties or grab three or four varieties in the space of one now I have a variety that ripens early and early mid-late mid and a late so I can harvest out of that space for an extended period of time smaller more usable crops for my family so just to reiterate what you just said the goal is you know with this one tree in the space of one tree instead of enjoying fruit over a couple of weeks or a month I can now enjoy fruit over maybe two to three months exactly so here we are now with the dapple dandy clue on another Zagar success story and one of the bestsellers for Dave Wilson nursery right absolutely Charles this variety dappled dandy was one of the very first releases of interspecific pluot from Zeiger probably came out within the first ten or so that they released well well over 20 years ago this varieties been marketed both commercially and also sold as a backyard tree oh wow commercially I've seen it in the produce markets and farm stands and they've called it dinosaur egg or Dragon's egg Wow so it has a modeling modeling to the exterior and also a modeling to the interior which kind of gives it that speckled look kind of like a like an egg let me share that with you that's the speckles that we're talking about with the reddish pink and green coloration and let's take a look at the inside here check that out that's an amazing piece of fruit you know I would say these really aren't ripe yet these probably need a couple more weeks on the tree before they really are at full flavor and character but the nice thing about most of the pluots is unlike the old-fashioned plum varieties these will hold on the tree for three or four or sometimes even five weeks oh that's amazing and they just get better and better as time goes on that's great so the traditionals would probably last how long on tree a traditional plum yeah Oh two weeks usually max so they've doubled it yeah and I want to know great piece of fruit that's excellent well let's take a look at another lesson in the corner of your property so behind us here is what appears to be a huge tree there's no fruit on it here we are the mid-july so I'm assuming you already harvested the fruit all of them were within reach but what is this gigantic tree well this Charles is a representation of a three-in-one multiple planted combination so there are three distinctively different varieties but they're all in the apricot family so we have a traditional apricot okay we have an a preowned and we have a piccata that has apricot parentage in it as well so we call them a premium and then in regular apricot so all within the same genus of fruit trees you plant in the same yes basically grow zone and let me share with the viewer here that we've got three separate tree trunks coming out of a hole that's measuring about 24 inch square and I know with the backyard orchard culture the goal is to plant anywhere from 2 to I guess the maximum is for trees within about a two-foot square area yeah we want to try and get you know compatible and varieties together that will cross pollinate with each other and give a successive ripening fruit so out of this combination we had the a priam that came in early season probably around the middle of May to the end of May okay apricot that came in early June to mid June and the a priam that was mid June into 1st of July Wow so today I've got three to four months of fruit three to four months worth of fruit on this one for base of one multiple planet combination which takes the footprint of one mature orchard trip so the key with successive ripening is to get you know pretty much the same amount of fruit but over an extended period of time oh I can't use 600 apricots in two weeks there's no way I mean unless you're unless you're making a hundred quarts of jam or or apricot pies like you you know can't believe and I like the fresh fruit so I just want to go out pick fresh fruit off the tree share some with my family share some with my neighbors and make good use of it so to have the successive ripening concept in play works wonderful you know one week I can harvest this variety ten days later I can go into this Friday next I can go into this variety so you're getting a little bit of a fruit over an extended period that's awesome it makes it enjoyable for that backyard orchard culture grower to visit their backyard frequently over write many moons not just those two weeks right and continuously enjoying the fruits of your labor yep again spend some time with your trees you know that way you know what's ripe and you know what to pick and you're taking advantage of the best possible tree ripened produce you know every week in the year that's fantastic well let's get on to our next lesson okay so here we are now alongside a cherry tree and something I wanted to point out is a lot of the trees that you buy from your local grower will be wrapped sometimes with these Dave Wilson nursery tree wraps as we can see here with this particular chair you can see that it's got this protective paper they I know a lot of growers when they take them home the first thing to do is take it off in the planter tree what can you tell us about the tree Rock well the tree wrap these trees have been in the ground out for two years the tree wrap was put on just as initial sunburn protection so while the trees are young you're protecting the lower 18 inches of the trunk as the tree sprouts out and develops a head it's theoretically putting shade on the rest of the trunk that you see so we're shady here but then we're still sunny down here so that's the initial sunburn protection that we need at this point these wraps only last you know eighteen months to two years we would remove that wrap and then get some whitewash on these trees so that we can protect them ultimately these are these are some stock trees in the orchard here that we take blood wood off of and we like a little bit of a higher trunk on the cherry so we would typically come in at this point and get a good whitewash on these okay what can you tell us in regards to whitewash and protection and whether you're planting in spring summer or fall or winter you know how fast a sunburn happened to printer's well honestly Charles on some of the more tender tropical material you can you can have irreversible sunburn damage in as little as a day so if I was planning a citrus or an avocado or a cherimoya or some of the different tropical fruits and even deciduous fruits my philosophy is that day it goes into the ground is the day gets its first whitewash oh it's wonderful well let's demonstrate whitewashing with the trade tree just next to us sir little right down to the next one so over here is a cherry tree that's doesn't have the protective wrap on it's a little younger the canopy hasn't quite yet been developed and there's quite a bit of light coming into you you know the lower story of the tree and it's always going to be being here in the northern hemisphere on the south-southwest facing side of the tree that's going to be the sub that's gonna receive the most Sun and instead of whitewashing which is a gardening you know concept of you know protecting a plants from the Summer Sun and in the winter Sun scald being you know that damaging Sun when the trees otherwise I'm protected by its canopy instead of using latex paint and paint was designed you know to pretty much garner houses and 100 years later your house is still painted but the trees gonna continue growing and that pans going to shed and especially for the organic gardener the organic orchard they're now prohibited from using chemical latex paint in the orchards and so what we're gonna use today is the ivory organic it's three-on-one plant close to texting against damage in summer sunburn and insects and rodents it's three on one plant formula has the added benefits of these oils which include caster cinnamon clove garlic peppermint rosemary and spearmint and these oils which also you know with the added diatomaceous earth is going to serve as out of protection against damaging insects and rodents as well for any exposed prune surfaces or grafting wounds as well so what we're gonna do today is simply going to throw the solution up which is also I want to highlight its Omri listed as well for organic use and we're going to simply take our paintbrushes and let's get the painting well I think it's just great that we you know we now have a product available that's an omni registered organic so that you know these organic growers can absolutely protects their trees against the sun damage issues and still be able to maintain their trees with I'm gonna have Isabella step in here and she's gonna help you finish okay [Music] consider we're not painting a house so it really doesn't have to look perfect we just want to get a good coating on here especially on that Southwest side this is the side where the sun damage typically happens so we want to make sure we have a good coat on this side the faces that afternoon once we get up into this structure we don't really need the paint up in the canopy wall and paint right up to it though so we make sure that we protect that tree well so here we are now in the city of West Lee California and I could tell just driving down the street that these are all Dave Wilson nursery fruit trees that were just recently planted you can see that the sleeve has been kept on all of these thousands and thousands of fruit trees throughout the entire orchard of the protective sleeve protecting the trunk from damaging summers sunburn if you don't have this protective sleeve it's important to whitewash using the brush on technique a nice big coat to protect that tree trunk again from damaging Summer Sun burn in the summer also winter Sun scald in the winter and then what's also amazing we've been teaching this for years is the value of whitewashing the entire plant structure with a foliar spray take a look again at the leaves take a look at the steps where he can't come in with the whitewash technique with the brush you can actually come in with the foliar spray and protect the entire leaves and stems and again all of the what's gonna be the future primary branch for the tree is also you know been protected with the foliar spray and as that brush is gonna be a little bit too complicated and that just goes on and on and on and on and on for these thousands and thousands of people's to nursery fruit trees that are here on this planting that we found in wesley california how amazing is this so another question i get asked often is on irrigation and as cruces in your backyard orchard culture practice how do you water your trees well the key with irrigation is be thorough you want to make sure that if you're if you're gonna put on a cycle of irrigation that if you're gonna make it count so you know long water five minutes ten minutes isn't gonna do you any good at all yeah the system that we've chosen here using these what we call orchard spinners these put on a gallon and a half to about two or maybe even up to three gallons an hour oh wow so when we run this system we basically run it for 24 hours so we want to make sure that we're penetrating the first eight to twelve inches of soil and we want to make sure that we're doing it with no runoff so the mulch and the configuration of the land is important and we want to get a good thorough saturating irrigation on when we put it on and I don't want to do it every day I don't want to do it three times a week I want to do it once every week or once every ten days once every two weeks depending on the time of year but put down a fair amount of water so that the tree can make use of it for you know several days early so going into the summer probably irrigation once a week I would say in general and for established trees that's probably a good pattern as long as you know what you're putting on okay so you want to make sure you understand how much water is going on in a full irrigation cycle anything less than 50 gallons isn't really going to do much good on an established tree and you're probably looking at more like 75 to 100 gallons first off got it and remember these being your words when it comes to irrigation that you want to make sure that you water and then allow the soil to dry but never bone-dry so the goal is to kind of get that happy medium when it comes to watering exactly exactly so I always recommend that you check your soil with a moisture meter check it in several spots under each tree and use your average okay so a moisture meter is really just a simple 9 inch or 12 inch probe and a gauge and the gauge simply reads wet moist and drawings okay so if it reads wet you're good if it reads moist you're good once it goes down to somewhere between moist and dry you want to do a full cycle and let it go back down to that point before you irrigate moisture meter for a $10 investment that'll make you a master of your irrigation it's good to know and then I will just want to share the sprinkler when you take a look at it what's the name of this sprinkler called again oh they're just orchard spinners oh and there's all different you know configurations of these that throw different patterns this one happens to throw 8 by 8 ok so we've got these orchard spinner sprinklers and you've got a strategically placed between two fruit trees and I've noticed even in the orchards that we visited that they've kind of got the same powder in that between the trees they'll have one spinner and strategically spaced between each of the trees within the entire orchard so they'll pretty much have one drip line irrigation system like hose that will run across and then with a spinner place on each side of the tree with a bowl of as one of my friends arborist Lisa Smith likes to educate on mimicking rain and watering that entire root zone and that's what's being accomplished here with the spinner expands your water in the topsoil and the middle soil and by leaving it off for 24 hours you're soaking that entire root zone with zero to no runoff as you said you've got it time today the soil drinks it all and none of that water's going away exactly and I love that term mimic the rain yeah mother nature's been doing it for a lot longer than we have pretty effectively yeah so anytime we can look at a pattern that happens in nature and mimic that pattern like the mulching like so here we are at a farm just outside of Hickman and behind me are some almond trees and a couple of observation I want to share with you with a lot of these deciduous fruit trees is that they've got them all planted up on a mound you'll notice that they're all kind of raised off of the ground level and then notice that that runner sprinkler drip irrigation and wine look on it looks like a black rope that's running between the trees has a spinner head sprinkler between each of the trees that it's just spraying and as Tom explained about a gallon maybe two gallons per hour and then just running it for hours at a time soaking that entire root ball and then not watering it until the area pretty much dries out but you never want the soil to be bone-dry but that's a better practice and watering for let's say 10 or 15 minutes and now you're just only watering you know the top quarter of an eighth of an inch if you were to only water with this type of sprinkler system for all intents so they run these for hours soaking and you can kind of see it kind of looks like a pond or a lake around the tree but again because they're elevated the primary routes that are coming off the tree are still elevated and they're not getting waterlogged and resulting in phenomenons which are also damaging the trees known as root rot so by keeping the roots elevated they're getting their moisture but they're also still getting the aeration necessary and important for a healthy productive tree check out all those almonds so a quick bonus to those subscribers that had some questions for Tom and I was hoping you can help answer those directly to them for me let's do it so the first one comes from camera and a crummy of the busy gardener YouTube channel mm-hmm and his question is with backyard orchard culture why is it important to plant similar species together what are the downsides of planting different types of fruit in a two three four and one planting well you want all the varieties in a combination to be as compatible as possible because you can expect varieties that are planted 18 24 36 inches apart will eventually pleat together under ground and that the root systems will grow together so if you have varieties that aren't compatible you're not going to get that but if they're all grafted onto the same or similar root stocks they can absolutely live compatibly together make sense so that's the the reason for making sure that you're within the same genus and also like like while maintenance you know if I planted a lemon and a papaya and a cherry together they all three require different types of maintenance and I'm going to have to try and do something different to each plant that's planted close by another one that's that's encroaching on its growing space makes sense the watering the fertilizing the pruning of the whole care the whole system's gonna be different exactly makes sense the next question comes from David Rowland and it's kind of related to this last question where he asked can multiple varieties be grafted onto one root stock versus doing the two to four trees and one hole you know within that 24 and square oh yeah yeah no doubt um you know I think both options are good in fact we looked at both types of planning look at multiple grafted trees and we looked at multiple planted combinations so which one is better well I you know I don't know that either one is better it's it's whatever fits your your space and fits your needs we do a lot of multiple graphic combinations and I think we've done a really exceptional job of coming up with successive ripening cross pollinating compatible varieties that can be grown all on the same root stock yeah but in turn if you're looking for something different and you don't do your own grafting then multiple planning is the answer okay you can buy you know say I I planted the Zagar pride peach combination and I've got my may pride for may and I've got my Eva's pride for early June and my my mid pride for late June early July and my August pride well what if I take vacation every year in June I don't I don't need that variety mid pride on there so I could plant my May pride and on Eva's pride and skip the mid-price put it in August pride and put in a Cahuilla something that's a little bit later so now right now I have four trees growing in the space of one and I don't have fruit in that season when I'm not there makes a lot of sense so again consumers can go to Dave Wilson nursery and find those local nurseries that sell Dave Wilson multi grafted fruit trees to have again that one roots Tata supports the multiple varieties of fruit or again you're saying that either/or there's advantages to both being they can also plant two to three even up to four varieties of fruit say they can't find the multi grafted variety or maybe they're lacking the grafting skills to accomplish it the multiple planting often just gives them that as an option where grafting might sometimes just not be the most applicable sure and as you saw today we have both in this in this mini orchard yeah I have both in my collection and a lot of people have crossovers between the two but the nice thing about those multiple grafters are multiple butted varieties you can do a four in one Apple you can do a four in one plum you can do a four in one peach you can do fruit salad tree that has peach plum nectarine and apricot all grafted onto the same tree so we grow hundreds of thousands of multiple grafted trees every year we'll probably the largest grower in the country of multiple graphics selections that's and I think we've done like I said a great job of coming up with compatible combinations that are successive ripening and all work together but wonderful either way works fine either way absolutely works fine that's great the next question comes from Adrian land and this person asks do you know if Tom imports the ladies the ladybugs and mantis or are they wild and native and this question stemmed from one we're at the high chill apple orchard in Irvine California we're talking about the importance of sometimes keeping the aphids on your trees because those are the food and the prey to the predators being the praying mantis and ladybugs and that's where that question came from so do you purchase and import these ladybugs on praying mantis and Qi orchards or where do they come from well I've never had to import any myself but with the with the multitude of experimental projects going on at the research station there we have a reproductive population of ladybugs lace wings and preen mass that are there pretty much all the time just a natural phenomenon that's happening in the orchard the last question comes from Ellen B and she asked in which we're talking about fertilization and and how to fertilize in a prior video and she's asking in which eight to nine months of the year should be fertilized container trees and is it different for citrus than for persimmons she lives in the San Diego area I think it's it's pretty much across the board you know you're feeding during the growing season so in Southern California I start feeding my container material and a January 1st of February and I try and do it monthly until about the end of September or the 1st of October ok and and you know we're talking very small amounts I'm talking tablespoons not pounds like you would use on a tree in the ground got it so a little bit every month for eight or nine months will keep up the nutrient levels in that container because the the elements are going to leach out of that container much more rapidly than the wood Wow so it so what we're I'm a feed two or three times on a tree in the ground six seven eight nine times for a container tree is not unusual good point so you're fertilizing two to three times more frequently right but a lower dose using much less for the container plants exactly that was awesome well thank you so very much for all of these educational lessons and if you've enjoyed this educational moment brought to you by over agin us be sure to give us a thumbs up and most importantly don't forget to subscribe and hit the push bell notification I'm also going to be sharing the links to get connected to the Dave Wilson nursery website and YouTube channels the Dave Wilson nursery is the number one American distributor of deciduous fruit trees and nut trees again in the country and you can go to their web site they have a lot of education for the commercial grower as well as for the backyard orchard culture growers such as myself and you can find all those local nurseries that supply depots the nursery fruit trees and I believe between this year and next year you said you're going to be pushing out close to 14 million fruit trees going around the world and helping to clean our air and cool our planet and offering the most nutritious and delicious fruits for all of us to enjoy isn't this a great business it is the best business and absolutely love the pretty part of us thank you again so much for having us and I'm looking for until next time thank you for the opportunity Joe thanks Tom as always keep growing with irie organics and wishing you all happy gardening [Music] you

Channel: IV Organic

Views: 58,330

Rating: 4.8983741 out of 5

Keywords: how to plant a fruit tree, fruit tree care and maintenance, fruit tree tips, dave wilson nursery, fruit tube dave wilson, tom spellman dave wilson nursery, zaiger genetics, zaiger fruit, flavor king pluot tree, pluot fruit tree, hybrid fruit trees, nectaplum, whitewash fruit trees, painting fruit tree trunks white, floyd zaiger, deciduous fruit trees, fruit tree planting tips, summer pruning fruit trees, thinning fruit trees, iv organic, backyard orchard culture fruit trees

Id: oVXjI93dmF0

Length: 50min 57sec (3057 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 26 2019