"Fruit Trees on Steroids" planting method

General Fruit Growing
1

Has anyone else here used the “Fruit Trees on Steroids” planting method promoted by International Ag Labs? It is also sometimes called the White Method of tree planing. If so, what kind of tree and what were your results? I have done this on about 30 trees so far and I am planning on doing this planting method on a couple OHxF pear root stock this spring. The essence of the method is planting small trees in very large (3’ wide 3’ deep) well amended holes with an empty bucket in the bottom of the hole to encourage air penetration deeper into the soil.
Here is a link for info from International Ag Labs.

Also here is a video comparing peach trees, one with and one without the International Ag Labs protocol.
Peach Tree Comparison

2

Not sure whats wrong with your neighbors 5 yr old peach trees because mine has only been two years in the ground on semi-dwarfing rootstock and is already 10’ tall and 6’ wide.

The soil amendments make sense but the empty bucket not so much. After the oxygen is absorbed in that small cavity I don’t really see how it would be replenished through the non-permeable plastic.

3

Yeah I’m not in favor of soil amendments in the hole, often roots trying to leave the hole circle back to the good soil, later the roots girdle. A user here posted photos of how his roots circled and stayed in the good soil. If you want to feed it more, fine, amend by mulching compost to the drip line. Not sure what the bucket would do? I tend to mound trees as high as possible. and never bury deep. This method has worked well for me.
Putting them in super good soil makes for a lot of vegetative growth, which I’m actually trying to avoid. Also fruit quality is better from trees that have to work to find water and nutrients.
I guess if you made the whole big enough you could avoid girdling. I only watched the video and I would never want peach trees that big, ever. I do not want to climb ladders to harvest fruit. I know you had frost problems, but wow, so few fruit.

Also for me I don’t need a ton of peaches. Mine produce about 80 fruits per tree I thin over 120 off the tree, and leave about 80. and are kept at 7 feet tall. Mine are now 7 years old. I also grafted many cultivars unto them so each tree produces different fruits throughout the season. I used backyard orchard culture pruning techniques to keep them small. Just yesterday I took a photo of them. If you zoom in you can see the white tags marking each cultivar.

005
0054608×2592 3.95 MB

This year I will not get that many fruits as some of the scaffolds will be cut down so that new cultivars grafted on lower more horizontal branches can become the new main scaffold.

Here is fruit off my Arctic Glo nectarine before much grafting.

PF Lucky 13 also before grafting. I should have thinned even more as yield was too high.

Indian Free peach (this tree is only 5 feet tall) It is the tree I’m closest to in the photo (first photo) I took yesterday. On the left is some home grown Yukon Gold potatoes.

I certainly would not want more peaches. And would not want to climb a ladder to get them. I just walked around the trees and harvested.My spacing is 8 feet, so you can fit a lot of 7 foot trees in a small space.
I also grow SpiceZee nectaplum. it produces some very large and delicious nectarines.

My favorite nectarine is Arctic Glo as I love the red fleshed peaches and nectarines.

To me the lack of flowers on your trees was striking. They should cover the tree completely.
Well cover the 1 year wood. Not the whole tree. Way too much vegetative growth in my opinion. The soil is too rich in nutrients.
Scaffolds only last so long. So me putting new cultivars on removing most of the old scaffolds can be considered renewal pruning. Doing that on these big trees would be tough work, if even possible? Peaches only grow on 1 year old wood, and soon on the big tree all will be unreachable. I want to keep the one year old wood at under 7 feet.
I’m in Michigan, Southeast corner, 8 miles north of Detroit. Zone 5b/6a.

I grow pluots too. Yields are less as the trees are fully grafted, and only one scaffold for any one cultivar…
Dapple Dandy and Flavor King in the center

Dapple Dandy is one big pluot!! Fantastic tasting if you ask me.

Multi grafted trees are beautiful with all the different fruit

002
0024608×2592 3.72 MB

16 Likes
4

I totally agree with this tree having too much vegetative growth. I applied truck load of chicken manure broadcast over about 2,400 sq. ft late summer of 2016. This definitely upset the balance of things. That came out in the next soil test as well. I do not think the planting method had much to do with the problem of the vegetative growth as the bulk of the amendments were lime and soft rock phosphate. There was also compost, manure, and kelp added to the hole but not in any great quantity. Here are a few pics from 2015 before the manure application:

IMG_20150406_185427_382
IMG_20150406_185427_3822448×3264 1.39 MB
IMG_20150406_185330_215
IMG_20150406_185330_2153264×2448 1.13 MB

2 Likes
5

Yes, that tree looks good. Good luck with them all. I see some canker spots, my trees have them too. I would prune that tree hard, When my trees were young I had to prune three times a year, now just twice. The trees in my photo need spring pruning. They get a little big as I do not prune in the fall. Here our native soil is a very rich clay loam. All it needs is nitrogen on occasion. So I have no need to enhance soil. I have seen some soils that would benefit from the method. I always worry that the root girdling would also make it weak in strong winds, since the roots would not spread well.

6

Hi Joel,

Looks like you are well on your way to having a nice backyard orchard (or three :grinning:). Congratulations!

I agree w/ Drew that I wouldn’t do all that amending of a deep hole in your video, nor put an empty bucket at the bottom. It’s also a good idea to plant trees pretty shallow (although some staking may be required in areas where there is heavy wind).

Digging a big hole can have some benefit of loosening the soil. This really helps the roots take off. For me, it’s just not worth the time to loosen the soil by hand that much.

Vigor is kind of a mixed bag. And it depends somewhat on which types of fruits we are talking about. For peaches, I generally like a lot of vigor early on. As you know, peach trees, along with other fruit trees, have a juvenile stage they go through before they start really producing fruit.

I like to get through the juvenile stage as quickly as possible and get some size on the trees to get them to start producing something significant. After that too much vigor can be a drawback because it takes too much time pruning that excessive vigor. As the trees get older and really start producing heavy crop loads, vigor can drop off too much and the tree will start producing too many short unproductive shoots. That’s also when they really need some feeding.

For peaches excessive vigor doesn’t have a negative impact on fruiting. I’ve found the cultivar is the biggest factor on whether or not the tree will have an adequate bloom. Some varieties are very productive, and some not very.

With other types of fruit trees, excessive vigor can negatively impact fruiting, so you’ll want to be careful there.

I wouldn’t advise your methods on pear trees unless you are sure the cultivars are bullet proof against fireblight. It’s such a problem here, I spray apogee quite often to calm vigor down on my apples. For that reason, I never fertilize apples or pears here, but I’m using fairly vigorous rootstocks for those fruits.

Lastly, you will get better growth (your neighbor too, especially since he doesn’t do the amendments like you) if you kill the sod around your trees to the drip line. Peach trees (especially young ones) don’t compete well with sod.

As Drew mentions, you might also try pruning your trees a little lower. There is nothing wrong with big trees as long as there is space for them (and it looks like you have plenty of space) but there really isn’t a lot of reason to let them grow tall, except for esthetics . My mature trees are bigger than yours, but everything is reachable from the ground. This makes harvesting, thinning, pruning much more convenient.

7

I think the “canker” on the trunk is actually spray tar on the spots where I pruned.

8

@Drew51 I especially like the pic of your Indian Free harvest. I had my first ripe one last fall. The best peach I ever had!

9

One other thing I might add on the pruning is that you might look at some videos on peach pruning in the reference section of the forum. There are some good ones there. This will make your trees more productive in the long run, by minimizing limb breakage.

10

Yes OK, I would advice not to use anything. Now spores will stick to that area.

Yes, I have noticed off my original scaffolds I got a lot of really nice lateral branching on secondary branching. I grafted unto to these hoping to use them to replace the original scaffold. I’m not sure if this is going to work, but want to try anyway to see what happens. If it doesn’t work I will let secondary and tertiary branches from other scaffolds fill the void.

I like Indian Free a lot too! I’m growing out crosses with Arctic Glo nectarine.

002
0024608×2592 3.73 MB

I’m hoping to get a red fleshed fruit that ripens between Arctic Glo (August 1st) and Indian Free (October 1st) Ripening times are for this area.When seedlings are bigger I will take cuttings and graft onto existing trees and discard the seedlings. I may plant one out, I have a space. If bad I will top work the scaffolds with 4 other fruits.

Indian Free

2 Likes
11

Drew, do you grow any apples or pears?

12

No, I may in the future. About the only thing I don’t grow. No room either. And I know little about them. Of course many here know ton’s and such. I was thinking of an espalier of a couple apple trees and may do that. A friend has a pear tree and I grab them from him every year. We trade fruit.

13

I know they taste good and that some can last into Spring in basic home storage, and am jumping in as a noob with three M111 (almost full size) trees. Variety selection was entirely based on reports I read here. GoldRush, Hoople’s Antique Gold, and Kidd’s Orange Red are what I went with. I’d like to have done what you are thinking of doing but my wife prefers the idea of getting 2 or 3 big trees over the idea of 6 to 9 small ones.

14

At first I didn’t plan on having so many trees. I did want them small as I’m not young and ladders make me dizzy. I was not sure how well it would work? It turned out to work super well, Not like I have little yields.

This is how the yard looked the first year in 2013

003
0034608×2592 4 MB

In 2017

2 Likes
15

I didn’t realize you only recently got into growing the trees. How long was it before you started harvesting your stone fruit?

I put in paw paws in 2016 and they are slow grower. Those are the only fruit trees we currently have. In addition to the three apples from Century Farm Orchards we have a Contender peach, a Nectafest nectarine, and a Harrow Sweet Pear (pollination will come from neighbors’ trees) on order from Adam’s. Hoping to get fruit soon.

With the stone fruit, I’m actually thinking about going with the open center and three or four main branches. And with these, to graft a Redhaven and one or two other varieties onto the existing trees for variety and for a longer season. With SWD, stonefruit seems like the best way to go for a supply of fruit between the early August cutoff for my “blueberry season” and when apple season rolls around. It’d be much easier if I could just plant a few different raspberry cultivars to fill in gaps…

16

The idea (as I understand it) with the bucket is to encourage air penetration deeper into the soil under the tree. The idea being to drill several small holes in the bucket and then place the lid on the bucket before burying it at the bottom of the hole. Changes in the barometric pressure above ground will cause a slight movement of air through the soil until the pressure underground matches the pressure above ground. More air in soil = more aerobic digestion of minerals in soil and more minerals available for the tree over time.

1 Like
17

As a kid we had fruit trees, and I have grown plants for 43 years, so even though my trees are only 7 yeara old. I had ton’s of experience growing tropical and sub-tropical trees. I have grown grapes for over 30 years. Most stone fruit takes 2-3 years to fruit. I like open center and all you say makes sense to me.

OK, if it has holes it may fill with water, and soil. If plastic it will become brittle and break.
If the roots can get to the air, so can the soil and water.
What I do with potted plants is use diatomaceous earth the size of perlite. DE holds 120% of it’s weight in water, pores are big enough roots can penetrate. When the water is gone it holds air. It keeps water moving like perlite. So lowers the perched water table in pots. I recycle in my raised beds, this stuff does not break down. It is used on baseball or sports fields to prevent water from pooling. Disney uses it in all of it’s gardens. So soil holds water longer, and yet it also aerates the soil. I would use this instead of a bucket as the effect is wider spread and will never break down.
I also use 100% DE as a rooting medium as you can’t over water it. Often cuttings or seeds rot from over watering. I use it with peat for seed as the DE I buy is coarse. A finer DE could be used without peat.
Auto stores sell 100 DE as an oil absorbent, and it is what I use. Optisorb from O’Reilly’s or Napa floor dry from Napa stores. Optisorb is the biggest grained or coarse type.
See above the peach seedlings that are in my custom made soil but has DE on top to discourage fungus gnats. Just to see what it looks like.

In my mixes for soil I use 3-1-1-1/3 mix 3 parts pine bark, 1 part pro mix, 1 part compost, and 1/3 part DE. This has worked for me. So 5 parts soil to 1/3 part DE. So my containers hold water longer and supply water and air to the roots via the DE.

I love using it to root figs becasue I can seal the system and it retains the perfect amount of water to root figs without them rotting from sitting in too much water. I can set and forget.
The DE is watered to saturation, excess water is drained off, the fig cutting top is wrapped in parafilm to stop it from drying out but more importantly to have a constant humidity around the bark. I just started trying this method and it’s working very well so far. I need to do more to say for sure.No drain holes needed in this system. You can also use DE in an open system and water occasionally with no risk of over watering. As long as you let it drain right. Great stuff!

001
0012592×4608 4.12 MB

In my situation my soil is plenty good enough to grow very big trees, so I have no plans to use the steroid method, they already grow way too fast for me. My trees are kept small and are extremely productive. It’s not broke, I’m not fixing it.

3 Likes
18

Good info. Does the DE in this form have the the potential to kill bugs like the powdered DE? I am trying to encourage earthworms as much as I can. I know the killing effect has to do with the sharp texture of the DE powder on soft tissues.

19

No, not really, once wet any DE is useless for bugs. Powdered DE kills bugs by decimating them. It’s like chards of glass penetrate the exoskeleton and they bleed out. Once wet no form DE will work. Do not breath the dust, best to wear a mask when working with it. You can wet it and safely work with it. My pots are full of earthworms. They don’t seem to mind at all. I have no idea how they get in them? I guess through th drain holes. I doubt even powdered DE would hurt them with that slim coating.
Earthworms are invasive creatures, none are native to the Americas. Columbus brought them over along with many other things Some areas of Wisconsin still have no worms. They hurt the forest floor tremendously.
https://dnr.wi.gov/topic/invasives/fact/jumpingworm/index.html

From the article
Although all earthworms can harm landscapes and forests, jumping worms may pose a bigger threat than European worms.

Worms are destructive to forest ecosystems by breaking down the leaf mulch too quickly.

1 Like
20

I like your little rooting set up there Drew. That’s really ingenious and with the correct medium I can see how well it would work. I have only rooted figs a couple of times but clearly moisture control is very important. I give mine some bottom heat which can be drying but you have to be careful and not over water.