Getting the Perennial Fruit Started

There’s a quote I’ve heard that goes, “The best time to plant a fruit tree was 10 years ago; the next best time is now”.  Well, I managed to hold off for one whole year to give myself time to prepare the ground, and now I’ve done some planting.

Aside from an abundant strawberry patch and a few coastal melons, my CSA share is all vegetables (and flowers).  But in a few year’s time, there’ll be raspberries, blueberries, apples, pears, and plums as well.  The planting is now done, the irrigation is mostly set up, and the mulching is underway!  Here’s some of the details:

Site Prep - I wrote a blog post about this a few months ago describing the steps I went through to get the ground ready.  One of my goals was to get the perennial grass to die back so I could replace the ground level flora with clover and a mix of forbes.  In this I was mostly, but not entirely successful.  The ground between the berries rows and fruit trees is now full of dutch clover, yarrow, chicory, and more, but there is still pasture grass coming back.  No longer, however, will I have the problem of thick grass sod competing with the tree roots and overwhelming the mulches.

The soil I started with was already pretty acidic (5.4).  I added lime where the fruit trees were going, but not in the berry section.  In these beds, I was able to incorporate some peat moss, and soon there’ll be a thick mulch on top.  The entire area received a generous dose of rock phosphate, and some azomite as well.

Varieties - My perennial patch consists of 440 bed-feet of raspberries, 850 bed-feet of blueberries, 50 apples, 14 pears, 8 plums, 12 peaches, and a few miscellaneous trees just for me.  Here in Arcata, our cool summers really limit the variety of tree fruits that will ripen here.  Many apples and pears do well, but only a couple types of plums (Beauty, Prune), one Peach (Frost), one Fig (King) and no nectarines, apricots, cherries, persimmons, walnuts, etc.  You can grow Meyer Lemons in sheltered yards, but citrus doesn’t really thrive here either.

In deciding what kinds of apples to plant, I talked to a bunch of folks in the area, and I also asked myself what qualities were most important.  Rust and powdery mildew resistance are a plus here,  flavor is a high priority, and I mainly wanted apples that matured in Late September through October with decent storability.  The varieties I ended up planting are King, IdaRed, HoneyCrisp, CrimsonCrisp, Mutsu, William’s Pride (early), and a couple others to try.

With the blueberries, I decided that, for the size of my patch, it was better to have a lot maturing at once than to have an extended harvest season.  At least two varieties are needed for good pollination, and I chose Chandler and Bluecrop.  For raspberries, I chose Himbo Top and Anne, both everbearing types that have their larger fruit set pretty late in the season (after the strawberries and blueberries).

Spacing - Most of the apples are on M7, with some M111.  The plums and peaches are on Citation.  The spacing I chose was 12’ between trees in a row (staggered) with 14’ between rows.  This between row spacing is a bit small for tractor mowing, but the orchard’s not too big, and can mow with a brush mower.  Depending on how things are looking, I’m playing with the idea of letting the ground cover stay a bit tall and wild.  The in-row spacing is pretty conservative for these rootstocks.  Some people plant them much closer, but because of our potential for mildew problems, I wanted to maintain good airflow.

The raspberries are at 3’ and the blueberries are at 5’.  The rows are 8’ apart.  It looks wide open now, but it’ll fill out in no time.

Irrigation - For the fruit trees I’m using Supernet mini-sprinklers, and the berry beds each have two lines of 1/2” emitter tubing.  They’re set up to be watered separately, and there’s a nice big spin-clean filter on the header.

Mulching - The berries are getting a top-dressing of cottonseed meal, then a double-layer mulch of green waste compost (lots of conifer) and small fir chips.  Redwood chips and shredded bark are the cheapest mulches around here, but I’m avoiding them because of the growth-inhibiting tannins (though I guess the jury’s still out on which plants this is actually harmful to).  I’d like to mulch the fruit trees with hardwood chips, but there aren’t too many of those around here.  Instead I’m using rice straw, with a scattering of feather meal beneath.  I thought about using some of the composted cow manure I have, but it’s too weedy.

Anyway… Here’s some pics.

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