Thanks for the responses. I asked for critiques and the time commitment necessary is a pretty good one and you are making me think it through a little more clearly.
I think a few things are on my side in regards to making this doable for my situation.
I am a teacher with around 14 weeks of vacation a year. 2 weeks in the spring (for planting), 8 weeks in the summer (all of June and July which most of my berry harvest will fall during), 2 weeks in October and 2 weeks at Christmas ( Prune mainly during this time). Financially in the long run I was going to need to start picking up some hours somewhere during these breaks, and I’d much rather do that in a way that I can at least be doing the majority of the work at home or at a farmers market that my kids can come with me to. So we are treating this a little more like a part time job than a hobby and I have a little more bandwidth for it than the average 9-5 career.
I am also pretty good at protecting my Sundays by not working and being with the family no matter what so that comforts me that even if a there is a few weeks were I am hard at it I’ll have that whole day to be with the family each week. If something is too much I will let it go. I did that this winter with a winter veg patch I was playing around with hoping to maybe get my farmers market sales going early. Wind ripped my row covers off just before a bad cold spell. It wasn’t an ideal time to fix it, it may have even been a Sunday I forget, but I peacefully let it go and knew that was a couple thousand dollars of sells I must not have needed this year. So for example If Honeyberries ripening in April and May before I get out of school is too much I will gladly just pick some for myself and let the rest go or if I get the time to pick enough to freeze them to just make value added goods with in the summer. A membership U-pick should also help with the labor needed for harvest eventually. Being a high school teacher I do have access to a large and cheap (somewhat unreliable too) labor market if I decide that’s needed at some point.
Landscape fabric. I planted the raspberries and matted row strawberries as open bed with fabric only on the outsides and not in row and never will I ever plant something again that can’t be planted with only a hole burned out for the plant. Weeding is something I cannot keep up with. I’m not opposed to using some OMRI herbicide as needed to spot spray or control suckers on the trees. I would rather use fabric and fertigate than rely on wood chips or compost to mulch and provide nutrients.
I do have quite a bit I will be doing in stages. I am not going to build a single trellis this year and might not build any more next year. I think my tree rootstocks can grow without grafting or training or trellising for at least one but maybe two years. If necessary due to wind I can run a real simple 1 or two wire t post trellis to keep them standing, but without fruit load I think they will be okay. The blackberries I may put up a simple trellis to help with the wind or this first year I may tip them all at 3-4 ft to keep that from being necessary. This year for the 20 new rows I plan to put in all I can see I need to do is my on Saturdays before and daily during my 2 week spring break do some soil prep (with a tractor), lay down landscape fabric and irrigation, burn some holes and plant, the seed planted pawpaws, persimmons, pears, asian pears, and peaches will be a breeze to plant compared to the rest of it. Then stay on top of irrigation and my 8 week summer break harvest berries and sell at the farmers market.
Lastly about peaches and apples, I am giving up on the no spray pipe dream, but I think I am going to give Scott’s low spray methods a try. Again I hope not to spray them for a few years until they are grafted and fruiting. I feel like 4 rows of tall spindle trees (2 peach 2 apple) won’t be too crazy to spray. Especially If I can upgrade to a PTO sprayer eventually. If its too much they will get ripped up or I’ll get a hog or two that I get to feed a little cheaper with a lot of cull apples and peaches.
To me this is backwards. After spending the time, energy, and dollars to get trees into the soil the last thing you need is defoliation from deer or disease, especially the first year. More mature trees can handle moderate disease and critter pressure.
Mmmm thanks for the hard truth. There’s a little more room for reactionary spraying of mature trees than there is for tiny rootstocks and seedlings. I guess preventative would be more of the best route. Do you think with keeping a close eye and being willing to take some plant losses I could go the more reactionary route? I see a little deer damage here or disease pressure there and then I start spraying or taking measure to prevent. I’m stocked up pretty good on fungicides and insecticides so ready to deploy those as needed or preventatively ( regalia, stargus, oxidate 5.0, Dipel, Pyganic, and tritek)
Haven’t had a whole lot of deer pressure. Hoping the dogs and heavy mixes of fish emulsion I plan to spray are enough to keep them away, but I haven’t been through a winter with my plants yet entirely.
I think you are under estimating the time commitment and the cost of starting/maintaining an orchard. At the size you are looking to put in I don’t know if it would be profitable. You don’t have any economies of scale at that size. If your main interest is increasing your income I don’t think starting an orchard is a good way to do it. Getting a second job would be a better choice. You get an hourly wage immediately and don’t have to invent any money.
I don’t think you have a good feel for how spraying is going to work either with an organic or synthetic spray program. I would take a look at this post and the rest of the thread as well.
Also look at this thread which deals with starting an orchard on a low budget.
I actually want to change what I did earlier. I’ve had 2 peaches 2 pears and 3 apple trees planted in this field for 3 years with 0 deer disturbance. And my strawberries, raspberries and Blueberries haven’t had any trouble yet. I do think the constantly patrolling dogs from both neighbors help mightily in this and I plan to have a livestock guardian dog of my own in the orchard for most of the year. I am going to bank on the spraying fish emulsion and the dog working for now and if I see trouble spraying an actual deer repellant and beginning to make plans for fence.
Voles/mice are going to be my trouble I think as several of those 7 trees do have damage at the base which I thought was weed eater mower damage from my wife, but can definitely tell was mouse/vole damage now that I’ve looked through some threads. I think traps might be my game plan as hardware cloth for that many trees is not in the budget for now.
Thanks for putting me on the trial to research this more.
Thanks for the reply Mroot and especially for the linked threads. I just got finished reading every word of both and learned a lot.
A couple thoughts
I realize money would be easier and quicker at a part time job, but again this is more of a family endeavor and being around while I am working is vastly different than being away from the home. Working a single day of my 14 weeks vacation away from my home at a job that would actually employee me seasonally for probably less than $20 an hour sounds dreadful, but working most days of my 14 weeks vacation producing and selling fruit sounds like work, but not too bad. Especially if my kids a running around playing in the dirt or I can see my wife hanging clothes on the line. You know what I mean?
A few extra thousand a year is all I am looking for. I have done some math with the low end average yields and I think I can at least recoup my costs and if I have a couple decent years in a row make some decent money selling direct to consumer at local farmers markets (I’m aiming for roughly the price of organic fruits from the local grocery stores) and even more if I head 45 minutes away to the big city of Louisville to sell. I don’t think it is unreasonable to expect $1000 gross per 150ft row of any of the fruits I’m planning minus maybe some of the less popular ones which I have added with the knowledge that I’ll need to do some customer education, but also knowing the care needed will be much less than a high spray finnicky crop like peaches.
I think economies of scale doesn’t apply as much until you’re having to factor in labor costs and wholesale prices. I could be wrong, but my math thus far has made me confident, and my invested funds thus far and with these additional 20 rows I am okay with loosing 100% of.
These threads were great, I really enjoyed your simplified spraying schedule and plan to do something exactly like what you posted, but when things are actually bearing. I found posts by Scott and blueberry in that thread where they both minimized the need for spraying until bearing age which is what I was hoping for. If a big defoliating issue pops up though that will need to be addressed and I’ll implement a normal spraying routine earlier than I thought.
Voles do seem to be my number 1 enemy so that will be next rabbit hole to hop down and reasearch and cost to add to my spread sheet.
What is the total area you plan to plant out (acres)? I currently have 7 acres fenced on a 12 acre lot. I have old school plantings with central leader apple and pear (a few peach and cherry too, but they’re trials as this point). My trees range from standards with 17’ spacing and 21’ aisles, to dwarfs with 10’ spacing and 17’ aisles and my row lengths are 600’ to 680’. I think the last time I took inventory I was at 678 trees, in 14 rows. I have considered some high density planting in my remaining row to be planted. We have more large equipment (tractors) than an average homeowner, along with equipment for them. These were purchased over a significant number of years and in relation to other interests we enjoy. Even with this machinery, we found it necessary to hire a commercial excavator to clear stumps from the sight of the orchard. As the orchard develops more equipment has and will be purchased. We’re retired; I deal with the orchard mostly on my own. I have all day, every day to deal with what needs to be done at the orchard. Were I working a full-time job, I don’t believe I could do it, at least not alone.
Young trees and fish emulsion sounds like a lot of new growth to me, and young trees with new growth sounds like a recipe for fire blight, especially in an unsprayed monoculture. Fire blight resistant varieties are resistant, not immune.
Voles - you’ll need to keep the vegetative growth from filling in around the base of the trees. The only vole issues I’ve had are on trees with weeds around the base. I have my trees mulched with woodchips (a wood chipper one of the pieces of tractor equipment) and it helps, but I still have to suppress weeds with a commercial string trimmer and herbicide. That’s one of the most time consuming chores for me all summer and fall.
Spraying - you’re creating a large monoculture, beyond the scale of an average home grower. Any disease or pest that uses that plant as a host will thrive due to the density of the available host. I used around $1,000 in pesticide at the orchard in 2024 and I’m not producing fruit to sell yet. Spraying the orchard takes at least a day and that’s with the purchase of a used sprayer I reconditioned. It took me all summer to get it working well, including an engine swap in the end. With a proper 3 pt sprayer I should be in and out of the orchard in 2-3 hours. The correct equipment makes a difference, but we haven’t made that investment yet.
Fencing - I have over $4,000 invested in fencing I installed myself (more tractor equipment). I went with an electric fence, and it still is inadequate at times. It could use improvement, more $.
So, we bought the property in the fall of 2017, began clearing trees in 2018, and I started planting trees out in 2021. We had more site prep than normal as we had to clear trees from the site. I kept cost down by grafting trees and planting them in a nursery bed until they could be planted out in orchard rows. That led to new grafting each spring.
Most of the progress of our orchard can be seen in the Making Maggie’s Orchard thread here, and the links in that thread to the YouTube channel. It may be a situation where you have to dive into the experience to see if it’s something you want to do. You’ll find out fast enough it will require more time, $ and labor than you expected.
I’ll chime back in and offer my encouragement. I’m floating in a boat nearby with a 6 and 4 year old, a job, a wife, a house, etc. It’s taken quite a bit of time to just get 3 rows up, but I find time here and there. I can putter around after the kids go to bed with my headlight, out there alone in the dark like some sort of crazy person. Most tasks in can be dropped and picked back up another day, the exception being deer fencing. Wife isn’t interested. She likes the blossoms, fruit, and cider but has her own hobby of phone scrolling.
The trellis I ended up with is 4’ tree spacing, 14’ between rows. 140’ overall length giving me 35 trees/row. 28’ between posts, giving 6 posts per row (or a post every 7 trees). I’ve dug an embarrassing number of incorrect post holes figuring out the correct post spacing, attempting to fill my available space. My brain was having trouble processing that there’s a post at the beginning and end of each row. I have a spreadsheet now that helped visualize it.
Thanks for the response Andy. Overall it will be 1.43 acres planted, 415’x150’ total. It is again 28 rows 150’ long with between most having a 20ft row spacing and some berries with a 10 ft row spacing.
I’ll have a .14 acres in one row of persimmon and one row of pawpaws (20ft row spacing, 10 ft persimmon in row and 8 ft pawpaw in row spacing)
0.55 acres, 8 rows of high density Fruit Trees (2 each of apples, peaches, asian pears, and pears) ( 20ft row spacing, 4ft in row, 150’ long)
and about .75 acres in various berries.
It is a lot, but not a crazy amount I don’t believe. If I was doing a 12ft spacing on all my trees except the persimmon and pawpaws like I originally though I would only have 139 trees, but with the high density that puts me at 339.
I am in the market for a 3 pt pto sprayer and a zero turn mower as we speak, with those things added to my list I think it will be manageable.
Thanks for the warning on the Fire Blight Is that something I can manage once spotted or at first sight do you think I am toast?
All the trees are going to be planted in a 4ft wide strip of landscape fabric and to help out with the trees I will probably throw some woods chips around the planting holes of most of them. That is encouraging to hear that this might be enough to deter the voles.
Looks good to me and I love the idea of a headlamp to help find time for some of those tasks. It sounds like with 3 rows and 35 trees per row that you have 105 trees right?
I think dormant oil and copper sprays help prevent fire blight to some degree. Copper usually isn’t sprayed on fruit bearing trees or trees in bloom because of damage caused to the blooms and fruit. But sprays in the fall and early spring when the trees are still dormant are beneficial to prevention. Just keep in mind, copper is a preventative measure for fire blight, it does nothing to help stop an active infection. Once you see actual infection, act on it timely, prune it out, dispose of or burn the infected materials, and you should be fine. I’ve found streptomycin effective but hesitate to spray unless necessary as I don’t want to contribute to resistance, but if you have outbreaks that you’ve pruned away, it may be beneficial to spray streptomycin. You may see more aggressive fire blight than me as you’re in a warmer climate. I’m in the orchard nearly every day, so early detection is easy for me (well, not so much right now, we have 3’ of snow).
