Spring 2020 in the Demo Orchard

[Music] [Music] delicious hi Tom Spellman here with Dave Wilson nursery early May here in the Central Valley right now due to the current kovat virus situation I haven't been able to make it up here to the nursery in over two months so I'm really glad to be here today we're doing some fruit evaluations out in the orchard we're taking a look at our small test orchard right now and I have a few things that I'd like to point out I know everybody is sheltering and staying at home and everybody's spending a lot of time outdoors in their garden that's good you get some sunshine you get some air movement you get some exercise you get some fresh air so that's that that's a great place to stay that's a great place to spend some of your time well you can't do some of the things that we would normally like to do in our lives and I think we'll all benefit from the gardening that we're able to do vegetable planning herb planning fruit tree planning is as popular as it's ever been right now and we want to make sure that everybody has the right information to accomplish that and grow a good crop of material so some of the issues that we've experienced this year here and in our mini test orchard number one back in early March about two months ago we had a heck of a hailstorm we had you know hail the size of green peas and bigger and it came down steady and it came down hard for about a half an hour so we've experienced a lot of fruit damage due to that and I'm getting lots and lots of emails lots and lots of phone calls with people that are seeing this and mistaking it for insect damage or snail damage so let's take a look at some of the issues that we've seen this is our flavor Ella plumcot and this is a variety that got hit pretty hard so if we take a look at some of the foliage and some of the fruit we can see the result of the of the hail damage here's a great shot right here we've got a really nice set on the tree but we can see this pockmarking and it's all kind of coming in from the same angle it kind of came in from from above but maybe to the to the southeast you know Southwest face so when you start seeing things like this some people think it's it's birds pecking some people think that it's snail damage or slug damage but when you when you see foliage that corresponds to that let's see okay right here and right here you can see some of this foliage damage and this is not insect damage where it's been chewed this is where the foliage has been torn it's actually been physically torn from the hail that came down and hit it so this is this is the sign that you want to look for and the pockmarking will all be coming in from the same angle that hail comes down usually from one big concentrated storm and most of the damage is going to be at one angle so the damage came in like this that all came in on this same face so hail damage it doesn't mean that the fruits no good it just means that you're gonna have a little bit of physical scarring on it now if I was growing fruit to send to the market I'd be concerned because that's no longer a number one great fruit but as far as flavor it's not gonna have any effect on the flavor as long as it doesn't go any deeper than than the exterior then the skin and just causing it a little pockmarking the flavor should be just fine so take a look if you've got some damage and you're not sure what it is there's a good chance if you're in an area where you had a big hailstorm in the last two months that's what the damage is gonna be from so we've done some pretty substantial size control pruning this year some of the trees got a little big last summer this combination in particular which is one of my favorites peach and nectarines and and nectar plum and this this tree where these trees were about nine or ten feet tall last fall maybe even a little bigger than that and so we came in and aggressively took the tops down so you can see we opened up the center a little bit we thinned out some of the structure and we brought about four or five feet off the tops so we've done a lot of thinning this year with our size control reduction we're gonna get some really good size fruit this year these are for the most part early varieties tropic snow desert delight nectarine which is going to be ripen about three weeks for us here before the first of June for sure and everything's running a little bit late this year we had we had an a kind of an extended winter with those late rains and and we had a delay in dormancy break and flowering so most of the fruit here in the Central Valley is probably running two to three weeks later than than what we would normally expect so varieties that would normally be ripe in mid May probably not gonna be ripe until about June first so before you start picking a bunch of fruit you want to make sure that you pick some samples pick two or three of the biggest brightest fruit on the tree try them out are they physically ripe to a point where they're acceptable to you if so continue to use the biggest and the brightest fruit all the time but don't go in and just harvest the whole tree and then have to deal with a hundred peaches in a weeks period of time most of these varieties are gonna give you two or even three weeks worth of extended harvest so you want to use a little bit at a time make sure that you're harvesting the biggest and the best fruit first share some with your neighbors share some with your friends taking into consideration social distancing of course at this point but we don't want fruit to go to waste we want everybody to enjoy what we've been able to produce this this spring and I think we're gonna get some great fruit sets so this is one of our later plum varieties this is superior plum which is one of my favorites for the for the mid to late summer season we haven't thinned this one yet we've thinned most of the early varieties the varieties that are ripe in late May June July this is a late July August variety we really haven't come in and thinned it yet so the first thing you should do take a look at the tree take a look at where the amounts of fruit are when you have a large cluster of fruit that's out toward the end of a branch like this I always like to come behind it give it a shake give it a good shake you're gonna knock off all of that on pollinated fruit you're gonna knock off some of the fruit that was tight in the cluster then you can come back and take a look at it and just just start to thin some of this fruit again show some hail damage some of it more than others so I'm gonna fin a lot more aggressively out here toward the end of the branch where the weight would break this branch off and I'm gonna look for some of this fruit that might have a little damage on it because I know I need to thin aggressively anyway so I might even grab clusters and just take clusters off there's literally 50 fruit right here 60 fruit right here in this one little section of about 12 inches worth of branch well I want that to thin down to probably no more than eight or ten fruit so I don't have to be real selective I just want to get the weight off I just want to get the fruit thin and the longer you stand here the more time you're gonna spend doing it so I'm okay with more of an industrial kind of a thinning style that way you're gonna get that those fruit clusters down to a point where they're gonna be manageable and you're not gonna do branch damage on the tree later so here's a great example of what we call unpalatable out the size blue bigger than a green pea between a green pea and a dime you start to get some discoloration and it'll just drop off so all that none of that's gonna be good quality fruit anyway it's never gonna ripen up it's always gonna fall so just by doing that little shake just by getting that started you're gonna knock off all of that unpalatable thinning for you right there then you can kind of feel around that cluster a lot of fruit underneath so I don't mind picking off a whole handful at one time and I still have 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 fruit right here in a bot - 8 or 12 inches so that's that's plenty you don't need more than that so I pinned this little area down probably by 50 or 60 percent in 30 seconds and that's what you want to do get the fruit load off but leave the good quality fruit on I always like to come back and thin more than once I'll do an initial thinning and a week or ten days later I'm gonna come back and look at it again and I find that every time I do that I'm thinning almost as aggressively the second time as I did the first time around you you're never gonna be aggressive enough the first time to get off as much fruit as you really should for the overall health the tree and and the the health of the good quality fruit so this is the multi butted pride series peach that we aggressively pruned last year it was just getting too big and too rangy it actually had a broken branch on it from a fruit overload and we really really took it back and some of the comments that we got on that video were people were shocked oh I can't believe you did that with that tree you're not gonna get any more fruit on that tree you're killing that tree so I wanted to do just a quick overview on it we haven't thinned this one yet and I'm gonna start doing that right now but look at the amount of fruit that's on this tree we left plenty of fruiting wood on it but we took back the size considerably when and we even did it a little bit more this winter so we're size controlling the tree we've got all the fruit in an area where I can reach everything from the ground if I need to come out here and thin like this branch that has 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 peaches in about 18 inches where I want three so now I'm gonna start from from the end of the branch this is where you want to really reduce the overburden this is where the weight is gonna break that branch and I'm gonna thin everything I'm gonna take all these out here and probably eight or twelve inches I don't really want any of that fruit on the tree then I can come back up here where I have another ten or twelve fruit and I can thin by 50% so I'll take every other one I'll alter nail try and take from the left and take from the right then take from from the left again and go back to the right so now in an area where I had 17 or 18 fruit in a fairly small amount of space now I can come back in I've got one two three four five six seven fruit so that that's gonna enable that branch to ripen up those fruit would nice eyes nice quality and it's not gonna break that branch don't be afraid to thin in closing I just want to say that we're real happy this year to be able to supply a fair amount of fruit trees and nut trees to commercial farmers to farmers market growers and to wholesale and retail nurseries for sale back back to you guys for planning in New York it's a great business I love this business I'm gonna be doing this as long as I possibly can and I just want to say thank you thank you all for doing what you're doing be safe be healthy enjoy good quality tree-ripened fruit

Channel: Dave Wilson Nursery

Views: 16,244

Rating: 4.9396987 out of 5

Keywords: fruit trees, pruning fruit trees, backyard orchard, Dave Wilson Nursery, Tom Spellman, fruit tree care, growing fruit

Id: ZdiNrYECKVY

Length: 11min 29sec (689 seconds)

Published: Thu May 07 2020