Totally Preventable Mistakes When Planting Fruit Trees

what is going on everyone welcome to another very exciting episode right here on the my gardener Channel so I am absolutely excited for today's episode because we're going to be planting up the rest of our orchard I already did start but I started yesterday it was pretty windy super cold and it we actually had a cold front move through that's why I'm still still wearing my winter wear a lot of you have asked me Luke when spring coming man I haven't seen you kick out your flip-flops and your your your Steve Irwin shorts yet as you saw in the last episode we were actually at Meijer picking out our fruit trees we're talking about do's and don'ts for purchasing fruit trees at big box stores and a lot of you guys wanted to see me plant them and kind of go through a similar do's and don'ts for for transplanting and kind of getting your orchard in the ground so we've done this orchard now this is our third year of our home orchard it's kind of been in a kind of a an ongoing project and I always like to say that you know before we get started with that the first thing I want to talk about is the first don't is don't treat it like a project projects are supposed to be kind of finished in one piece you know I mean you you start a house project you would hope to finish that house project it's kind of one unit right or you start building a deck you finished building a deck it's kind of one thing but a garden and an orchard as it is on the home should really be kind of always adapting and always being modified to fit your needs and that's what I would say I see a lot of times people say you know I want to put in an orchard right and always say don't put in an orchard start an orchard and have like a two or three year plan based on your family's needs with that being said though I want to go over there get our plants plant it up and and talk a little bit about spacing and why we have the setup that we have so the first thing I want to talk about is spacing spacing spacing this is a huge mistake I see a lot of gardeners making is putting things way too close together or spacing things way too far apart on this on this channel we talk all the time high-intensity spacing high-intensity spacing we talk all the time is a modification off of bio intensive farming it's based on the belief that you know the traditional farming practices have really done us a great disservice when it comes to the amount of stuff that you can grow in a given space and so when it comes to our you know our kind of our high-intensity gardening approach it does not apply to just vegetables we talk about it all the time with vegetables but we've been in that kind of an ongoing mission to apply that also to our home orchard because it does apply it still applies exactly the same so you might be wondering well how does how does it apply how do you do it well you take the basic spacing the spacing that they would recommend you to space it at and you divide it by half and that's all you do so when it comes to our fruit trees here they're spaced about six and a half to seven feet apart and that's because traditionally they would give you they would say spaced about 14 feet apart between trees what we want to do is we want to have the trees canopy just barely overlapping it's gonna do a lot of things it's going to do exactly the same type of stuff that happens in your vegetable garden the first thing is gonna happen is it's going to shade the soil just like in your vegetable garden you want that foliage to cover the soil when it shades the soil it's going to protect the soil from from solar radiation so it's going to protect the soil microbes which is the life of your soil it's going to help the soil to not bake and cake which helps the structure of your soil it also is going to help protect the soil from evaporation so your soil is gonna stay damp longer and that means your your trees are gonna be healthier and less stressed it also is because it's going to be less stressed it's also going to prevent against pests because pests will hone in unstressed and diseased trees or plants in general the last thing that will really benefit is with pollination you need a cross from a you know tree of the similar species or a tree of the same species I should say to increase fruit set what's really nice is that when you have trees where the foliage is just barely starting to cross you're going to have a B that's going to go from one flower to the next without ever realizing that it moved from tree to tree and therefore you're actually gonna have much better fruit set in fact University of Purdue or I guess Purdue University as it's a you know usually called Purdue University did a test up in Traverse City with their cherry trees and they found that the cherry trees that were segregated had 25% less production than ones where the foliage was touching that's a lot when it comes to overall production and that's why when you see fully mature orchards you know they might be in rows but the trees they allow the trees to touch each other because it really helps with production now the final thing you might be wondering yourself is well when they're when they're touching and they're crossing aren't they going to get you know really crowded for sunlight and and a lack of airflow which can lead to disease and the answer is yes it could but based on our tree selections it won't and that's what's really nice is that in the back row you'll see the back row is all fully mature trees those were actually purchased three years ago with the expectation we were going to get them to about ten feet tall and then stop them from growing those are not semi dwarf or dwarf trees they will grow as tall as you let them get so we've capped them at about ten to ten and a half feet so we can harvest from the ground level but these trees here in this row they are actually known as a semi dwarf and a semi dwarf is grafted onto a root stock that only allows it to get about five and a half feet tall so the trees in the back row are going to be about 10 to 11 feet tall at most these are gonna be about five and a half to maybe six feet tall at most and therefore there will be a gradient that's going to be a great thing for sunlight because as the Sun rises in the east it's going to cast first the light on the shore on the shorter trees but also the bigger trees instead of having these trees be big as well if these were large and these were ten feet tall you'd have a really large shadow cast on the the trees in the back and that could prevent fruit from ripening adequately it could make your fruit kind of tart or bitter because it doesn't generate the sugars that it would normally it also can lead to things like disease if if du stays on the leaves very long and doesn't dry in the Sun so this is really going to be great it's a wonderful technique to increasing the product you know the the production value of a space of land is by staggering them so that the sunlight is evenly distributed and then finally the same thing goes with your disease when it comes to lack of airflow because they're on a different plane the foliage is much lower on these semi dwarf trees than it is on our fully mature standard regular trees so the ones that are like 11 feet tall the foliage is much higher so the airflow is not being blocked by anything because it's not a completely different it's a it's a completely different height so those are really the biggest concerns a lot of people have with putting their trees close and as long as you maintain them as long as you prune them which we have videos on and I encourage you to watch those videos you shouldn't have too many problems with growing trees this close again we have our trees spaced about seven feet apart and that is a wonderful spacing to ensuring that you can get the most bang for your buck out of your land so with that being said let's get in here let's plant these trees up because I want to talk just about a couple things with planting all right so before we start digging the hole the first mistake I see a lot of people making is not making their hole big enough you know they'll take the pot here and they'll dig it as close as they possibly can to the pot you need to dig about two times the diameter of the pot that's going to give you a really nice large hole so that the roots can move throughout that hole and aren't gonna hit a wall as soon as they break free from their root ball alright now that we got the plug removed we're just going to dig all this soil here loosen it up and dig our hole alrighty so we're ready to plant the tree now the next mistake I see a lot of coal making when it comes to planting is when they take their tree come on out here they take their tree and they bury it too deep this is a very common problem and one that is really easily prevented all you have to do is make sure that the original soil level is not below your the the soil level that you're transplanting into because what's going to happen over time is water is going to move towards the base because water moves to the lowest point naturally and at that lowest point is the base of your tree it's going to cause trunk rot and that's the one of the fastest ways for you to lose your tree and have to start all over again the next thing it's going to happen is or time soil is also going to move in and it's going to start to actually backfill against the base of the tree here and because these are remember these are grafted trees they're grafted to a root stock what can happen is this actual the tree that you're growing can set roots instead of the root stock growing the tree this part of the tree can actually grow roots and you start to get growth habits that are not what you'd expect rather than a semi dwarf you might end up with a fully you know a fully grown tree that's 40 feet tall because it's overtaken the root stock which is selected for certain traits it could be hardiness it could be disease resistance it could be shape and size which is generally what it is but it could also be things like yield so you never want to you never want to risk backfilling soil onto you know onto the actual trunk any higher so and then the final thing when it comes to filling in the soil when it comes to backfilling is I see a lot of people doing this and it's one of probably one of the biggest mistakes I see people making is besides putting it too low your back filling with compost and fertilizer do not backfill with compost and fertilizer any experienced arborist will tell you and when I was going to the Master Gardeners course this was the thing they stressed the most is that if you backfill with compost and fertilizer the roots will actually be far worse off than just using the native soil and that's because the native soil is what you want the roots to eventually move into but if they're not encouraged to move into that native soil because you amended the whole with really good rich compost the roots are not encouraged to go into lesser quality soil so what you want to do is just backfill with the original soil that was there and it's gonna be far better off and what you want to do instead is instead amend the surface of the soil with things like woodchips compost you can even do that with fertilizer but amending the soil as a whole will actually change the physical soil quality that will make it better for the roots to then be encouraged to move out but don't amend the whole do not do that that will certainly end up with a really anemic plant over time because what will happen is as soon as the roots have extinguished all the nutrients and taken up all of the really good soil they won't be encouraged to move throughout the rest of the soil and you'll end up with a stressed plant especially in summertime and that's why a lot of gardeners end up with a tree that doesn't seem to grow very fast or puts on a lot of growth right in the beginning and then completely stops and then it then ends up dying later on in the summer or doesn't make it through the winter because it doesn't get established well enough so all right we're gonna get this back film and then I'll talk about the final thing which is staking alright just wrapped everything up now it's time to get serious we have to talk about staking so on a daily basis I get asked about staking trees should you stake how should you stake and how long should the stakes be in the soil for it the answer is I never recommend staking staking is one of the worst things you can do for your fruit tree it actually makes an overall weaker tree because staking what it does is it prevents the tree from swaying when a tree sways like this it actually strengthens the stem and strengthens the branches which are the things that hold the fruit if you have a heavy fruit yield sometimes the branches are so weak it'll break just under the weight of the fruit let alone getting a heavy rain which adds weight you know water weight to the leaves that can sometimes break branches or you know god forbid you actually have a strong wind come through that plus heavy fruit yields is almost inevitable you're going to end up with bro and branches and lost fruit yield so when the tree is young let it sway in the wind the only thing staking does is support the tree to prevent it from shifting in the soil there's a very simple solution to that when you're backfilling take your foot and just gently tamp down the soil what that's going to do is going to remove any air from the soil which would settle naturally and that's what can cause shifting in the soil and that's what can cause the tree to kind of slant over time and kind of tilt and lean but if you tamp it down as you backfill it's going to actually fill in around that root ball prevent the root ball from shifting in the soil and you're going to have a totally straight and very structurally sound tree so I really hope that you like this video I hope you enjoyed it I know it's longer than our average videos but there was so much information in this video that I had to get out to you guys because I see so many mistakes being made and I just don't wanna see them being made because it really is something that you know it once you have planted a fruit tree it is there for the foreseeable future for decades and centuries that tree will be there if it's not removed or you know assuming it doesn't die so you want to make sure that you do it right the first time so that you can reap the rewards for years to come so I hope you guys enjoyed I hope you learn something new if you did make sure to give this video a huge thumbs up really help spread this video around other people that could use the information and I also make sure to comment down below and let me know other things you'd like to see when it comes to home or churning and and videos pertaining to that I'd like to know to gauge kind of future content so as always I hope you guys enjoy it I hope you learned something new I'll catch you all on tomorrow's episode see ya bye

Channel: MIgardener

Views: 219,141

Rating: 4.9048982 out of 5

Keywords: tips, migardener, trees, Premiere_Elements_2018, fruit trees, fruit, home orchard, mistake, gardening, mistakes, orchard

Id: R23smdpvPmk

Length: 14min 56sec (896 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 24 2019