How to Plant Fruit Trees for MAXIMUM Growth and Harvest

having a home orchard is awesome because obviously you get to have a bunch of fruit however making sure that you plant your fruit tree and plan your orchard accordingly are really key to actually getting that fruit and because it can take up anywhere from four to seven years depending on the fruit variety before you after planting the tree before you even get fruit it's really important that you know how to plant it correctly so that you don't set yourself back so i like to start with bare root plants bare root plants fruit trees plants are a lot cheaper than buying larger potted plants and i don't like to grow my fruit trees from seed because one you're going to be adding that many more years before you actually get fruit production and depending upon the variety of fruit tree when you plant them from seed you don't actually get the same variety so to make sure that i'm getting the exact variety that i want and at least cutting off a couple of years i like to start with some younger immature bear root fruit trees now one of the things when you are getting your fruit tree that's really key to making sure that you actually can get fruit off of it is knowing by the variety type if it is a self-pollinating fruit tree meaning i it's self-fertile i don't have to have another variety nearby in order to get fruit off of it or if it's a cross-pollinating type fruit tree then you are going to need two different varieties so not two of the exact same kind in order to get fruit so if you've got a smaller space then you want to make sure that you are picking fruit varieties one that actually grow in your climate but two are self-fertile so today i am actually adding in a nectarine it's one of the very few fruit varieties that i don't have here in our home orchard so i'm going to be showing you how to plant this now ideally with the bare roots i like to plant them in as long as the ground's not frozen and there's no snow which there's not right now i like to put mine in in winter or really early spring but before any of these buds have begun to leaf out before we hit the heat of summer so you're going to want to evaluate your property this is a semi dwarf so it's not going to get super huge and you can see i've got lots all my other fruit trees in this area and i like to keep the fruit trees kind of grouped together one it's easier for me when i'm taking care of them to have everything kind of in the same spot most of your fruit varieties need at least six plus hours of sun so this is an area that gets full sun which is you can see why i have situated all my fruit trees here to make sure i'm getting full sun so that's going to be important you also want to make sure it's an area that has decently good soil fruit trees do need to have good soil and you want to make sure that it's well draining so you don't want it in hard compacted soil or in a low spot where you would get a ton of water or you would have a lot of runoff so before you start digging your hole with your bare root trees as we're going to remove this packaging and we're going to have i've got a 5 gallon bucket here of water and we're going to soak our roots before planting so usually your bare root trees will come packed with sawdust like this because it's going to hold the moisture and it's really important when you get it from the nursery or the store wherever you happen to get it and if you're bringing it home before planting it you're not planting it immediately you want to check and make sure that this is still moist which you can tell this sawdust is still there's a lot of moisture in here because if the roots have totally dried out then you're going to have problems and there are roots so now it's the manual labor part the good thing about starting with a fruit tree that isn't super big yet is i don't have to dig quite as big as a hole [Music] so i just like to get the soil where it's going down there nice and loose so it's not compacted and you can see it's kind of a mixture a little bit of clay a little bit of sand but overall this is pretty dark and fertile soil so now we're going to test and see our our hole is deep enough so we want to make sure that there's plenty of room for these roots to go out so both in circumference and in depth and my depth is pretty good but i need to make that just a little bit wider okay so that's a lot better you want to make sure we want to have these roots here where these guys especially this long one can spread out you don't want them really wrapping around in a circle we want the roots to spread out nice and far so i kind of will spread them back around here actually could go out just a little bit further right here for that one okay that is just about right so we're gonna check now we've got some width here we're also going to check our depth so this is my root stock here and then you can see here where it's been grafted on and the reason they do that for a lot of root trees is they'll get a root stock that is something that isn't susceptible to disease it's a really sturdy type of rootstock but then they'll graft on the type of fruit that you actually want to be growing and so they'll put it onto the root stock so it's important to know that because when you're planting it you want to make sure that you're planting just a little bit below so you can kind of see this this is where this has been grafted on so i'm going to have my soil depth to be right in this area you can see it looks like that was the line because this came in sawdust and i'm not actually buying wasn't buying it at the nursery we actually got to see it in the ground where the level was it looks like that the soil line was kind of like right in here so we're going to fill this with soil right up to this spot now you're going to notice that i'm not actually putting anything in the ground i'm not adding fertilizer i'm not adding anything to this soil and that's really important because when you're dealing with trees if i were to put a lot of compost and add a lot of different manure composted manure or different stuff like that and put a lot of fertilizer and amendments into this hole the roots would not want to spread out to the other soil because they would realize that this area was the most fertile and as they began to reach out and grow they would feel and sense as they were feeding the soil difference so in order to ensure that that root the root system does spread out and grow we don't actually add any amendments to the hole that we're planting it in we will be adding some stuff in just a few steps and i'll explain that but we're not actually going to be putting it in here and i always feel like it's better to have a larger wider hole where you're planning on putting your fruit tree especially if it's in an area like this that's part of our yard and has the grass because this grass robs nitrogen and nutrients from the plant and i don't want to have a bunch of grass especially right around where the root system is so don't be afraid to go wider with your hole and take out take out especially anything that would be competing around it [Music] do [Music] i've got a lot of little earthworms and some really good dirt on these soil clumps from the grass and obviously i don't want the grass in their roots in there but i'm kind of trying to shake loose some of this dirt back in [Music] okay so now we want to make sure that we have this watered really well we've been soaking those roots and then now we're going to pour some of this over this is also going to show me where i have any air pockets and need to add more soil and we've had days and days of rain so my soil is not completely saturated but it definitely is not dry now we didn't add anything to the hole other than the regular dirt but this is where we're going to take our compost so this has been composting down it does have manure in it but it's been aged for over six months which is key so we're going to take some of this and we're going to add this to the top layer okay so we're going to check and we can kind of see where the water has all finished draining here which is good and you can also see where it's sunken down a little bit and that's what i said there was some air pockets down in there and so when you water it like that it'll let you show and i'll kind of these are some errors we're going to be putting more so um the composted soil on top of here anyways but it just kind of lets you know where those are at if you do need to add any more soil which we do because you can see this is much too shallow to leave this we need more dirt in here but we need to leave room for some of this really rich nice compost so it's fine to be putting this on top because as it rains it's just going to filter the nutrients down in but it's not going to confuse the roots and keep them in the hole because it's only being fed from the top and you can see how dark this is so the darker the soil is a good indicator without doing soil tests that it has more nutrients and health in it and while i do want this around so that it's right at the level it was at the nursery you don't want to a pile a bunch of soil up around your trunk so you don't ever want to have it like encased you want to make sure you don't want to girdle it now i'm planting this tree in winter and we get a ton of rain and moisture here in the pacific northwest so i'm not really worried about this not getting enough moisture right now but we still want to provide some mulch so let's not let this sawdust that it was packed in go to waste i'm just going to simply put this right on top and this will continue to break down over time but because i've got this sawdust right on top it's not actually oops i forgot my wire tie needs to go in my pocket i'm not mixing this into the soil so it's not going to affect the nitrogen levels at all by just sitting on the top and eventually it will just break down but in the meantime having this layer of sawdust on the top does help for moisture but it also helps for many of the weeds trying to encroach or take the seeds growing on this top layer because i want to keep this weed free now when we're first planting this tree like this we're pretty much done if you're not getting about an inch of rain a week then you are going to want to water this for the entire first year so all the way through the summer and even into the fall even though we're plant i'm planting that's the time of this recording it's in february i will water this all the way through until next fall so that's a mistake a lot of people make when they're planting a new fruit tree is they think that they just need to water at the time of planting or maybe the month or a few weeks afterwards but no you want to make sure if you're not getting an inch of rain a week that you are providing it so that's i usually give it about two gallons of water for a tree this size if we haven't had any rain in a week or checking your your soil levels now this is super important for the longevity health of your tree and getting lots of fruit and establishing a really good root system because your fruit trees can produce fruit for for decades i mean my parents have fruit trees that are over 50 years old and are still producing fruit but the key is making sure you get everything done right in the beginning so one of the things is as soon as your fruit tree begins to blossom that first spring go ahead and let it blossom that's fine enjoy the blossoms one of my favorite things about fruit trees is the beautiful flowers that we get in the spring however when your tree is it's the first year that you have planted it you need to remove those blossoms after they have bloomed do not let them form fruit and i know that is super hard that first year you're like oh but i want to but it's really key because it's going to put too much stress on the roots the tree is going to put all of its energy into growing and producing that fruit when it needs to be putting it into root growth and establishing a really good root system so all of the blossoms after they have bloomed need to be removed that first year now right at planting time one thing that can happen this is really common it can happen in the nurseries it can happen when you're shipping it or when you're bringing it home and it can also happen when you are planting and that is you will get some broken branches especially some of these really younger or smaller ones down here so this branch obviously it's cracked over on this side so it's hanging on by just a thread so this is something that we want to make sure that we have a clean cut and that we get pruned off it's not going to repair itself and it's just going to leave the tree open for disease and or insects so we're going to come up when it's like this and it's a clean break right at the trunk you're just going to come up right where it is take your pruning shears and you're actually just going to go right next to the trunk you don't want to get into the girdle right here you've got or the where the branch right is this and it's hard to see on these smaller ones but you can see right here where it sticks out like it's swollen just a little bit from the trunk and then you have the branch you want to cut right up to that but not in it and just flush right straight up and down so we've got that removed that was the only one that actually got damaged as i'm looking through here so that's the only one that actually needs to be pruned off all the rest of these guys look pretty good now one of the other things especially with young fruit trees that many people encounter is problems from deer deer will come in and they will especially these younger branches here and a younger fruit tree they will come in and they will totally break off branches or eat branches and they kind of can annihilate them and sometimes they can be so destructive it actually kills the tree so as you can see from quite a few of my other young fruit trees these fruit trees were planted last year you can use like new tool netting this is not tool netting this is just some plastic netting um kind of like kind of fencing but it's a little flimsy for fencing and i didn't even have a stake on this one i just tied it together with jute twine but that keeps the deer from coming in this is a cherry tree from coming in and nibbling on all the little edges so as this tree is beginning to it's got some some buds and stuff but it's not near bud break so it won't be leafing or flowering out for a few more months i'll come in cut it off and then enlarge that so that you're always making sure that your netting is enlarging with the tree but i've got it on all of my young trees once the trees are larger then the deer seem to leave them alone or they've got more branches so that you do happen to break one off it's not quite as drastic so i don't have these larger ones netted and they've been doing just fine but usually the first two to three years of planting a bare root tree i will keep it netted or a barrier method to keep the deer away now i have tried all different kinds of methods in the past to keep the deer away we've tried scent we've tried spinning shiny things you name it we've tried it honestly the barrier method works the absolute best for just keeping them away now if you're wondering how many fruit trees do you need to plant for a family or how much you're going to get or if you're like well i'm not sure what are self-pollinating varieties what are ones that i need cross-pollinating varieties i have got a chart and a blog post that has all of that listed for you so you can click the link below here in the video or we'll try to put it up in the cards so that you can go and get further information on that so that you can make sure now that you know how to plant your fruit tree properly that you can one learn how to prune it we've got a how to prune trees video for you as well but also that you are picking the right varieties for you and your growing climate so that you can have fruit for decades to come

Channel: Melissa K. Norris - Modern Homesteading

Views: 169,026

Rating: 4.9029975 out of 5

Keywords: fruit trees, fruit tree, planting fruit trees, food forest, backyard orchard, apple tree, organic gardening, organic farming, how to, fruit trees in backyard, fruit trees in containers, fruit trees in pots, fruit trees garden, fruit trees that grow in cold climates, fruit trees from seed, fruit tree garden, planting fruit trees in backyard, planting fruit trees in winter, planting fruit trees in containers, planting fruit trees in pots, small backyard orchard

Id: sNjJZyd1q4U

Length: 18min 56sec (1136 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 10 2021