I’m a little north of you guys, but I challenge that statement. IMO stone fruit are the hardest thing to grow on the east coast. But, I’m struggling with apples too. Just not as bad. Like you I sell the fruit and as the years went by, I started moving toward pears. They love the east coast and people don’t care if they look perfect. I’ve been slowly ripping out most of the stone fruit trees. Brown rot and pc has beaten me down and I give up. As a for sale crop stone fruit are just not for me.
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We have done very well growing 150 peach trees for about 15 years. Took a while to learn to sell them but we have built our market where we usually sell out before 10 AM. It’s the most profitable crop we grow but it takes the most labor.
Never lost a major portion of any peach crop due to insects or disease in 15 years
Lost the entire crop due to frost/freeze a few times and a portion of the crop to frost/freeze often.
Do you have an airblast sprayer and a pesticide license so you are able to use restricted use chemicals when required?
I was told by the Apple/Peach PHD that Peaches should be easier to grow than Apples in my area and his forecast proved to be right. We have found it a lot easier to manage brown rot on Peaches than to manage bitter rot on Apples. Also the Peaches get ripe in June/July but the Apples don’t get ripe until Septembet/October so the Apples have about 3 more months to develop problems.
Not sure why you are having so much trouble with Peaches but I would expect Apples would be easier to grow in your 6B than in my 7B zone.
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Thinking my operation is a little smaller than yours. If I was willing to shell out the money for better equipment I probably would have done better. I only had about 50 stone fruit trees though. Apples I find if I stick to certain proven varieties the problems are less. I’m growing everything including nut trees, so the loss of stone fruit trees was not a major loss. Me giving up on them was not so much they were impossible, but I was to lazy to put in that much work. I bring you back to pears. Super easy to grow.
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We need to try some pears. Can you suggest several that don’t ripen at the same time and are not too sensitive to Fireblight.
After growing Blackberries and Blueberries for a long time on a small commercial scale with very few problems, we were shocked by how many problems come with growing Apples and Peaches.
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I don’t have to do anything at all for the pears and meanwhile I’m fighting away with the stones. You should try cherry. I have had pretty good luck with less effort than the other stones. Rot is limited in that time of the season. For me anyways.
Pear varieties are tricky because of the cold storage many of them need. I had to re-graft plenty of mine because I didn’t want 50 refrigerators, but did not understand that when I planted them. In the end I focused on Harrow Delight, Ayers, Red Bartlett, and Harrow Sweet. All of which ripen right off the tree and range the full season. Asian pears are easy as well. The market is not quite as large, but I’ll sacrifice and work harder at the sales point for the easy production.
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welcome
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@BigMoonFarmGA I’m interested to follow your progress. You’re about 4-5 years ahead of me, but I plan to do something similar to you in the coming years. I’ve trialed planting some chestnuts on some hunting property in south Alabama to begin to make mistakes with a small number before jumping in with both feet in the coming years.
I don’t know that I will get to 60 acres of chestnuts, but I hope to have 20 acres some day. I will (hopefully) be identifying a piece of property in the next 3-4 years. I would guess my location will be ~4 hours west of yours, similar latitude and plant hardiness zone. Please post updates on your progress. I’d love to know how it goes for you.
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Thanks for reaching out @Jblack! I will definitely keep you updated. I should have clarified - we have 60 acres of pasture. Our initial design is for 20 acres of chestnut which does not include the headlands, biodiversity / pollinator areas, access, etc. That’s about 2,200 trees on 20 x 20 spacing which means we will have to thin at some point. We also carved out space in the existing pasture for a nursery area, processing barn / building, and a cabin. Keep me posted as well as you start to look for land. Like you, we chose chestnut before we bought land so we spent a lot of time looking for good soils and an appropriate site. If they do well, I can let you know what resources we used and how we did that analysis. There’s a surprising amount of information out there on what to look for in a site. Hope that helps with planning and scheming!
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Will do. I agree with you @BigMoonFarmGA that there is a lot to read out there about land and site selection.
What cultivars did you pick, and how did you get them? Did you stratify nuts, or just buy seedlings? One of my thoughts about growing chestnuts in the deep south is just that is can be so hot in late September and even into early October some years. The association between chestnuts and “holidays,” primarily Thanksgiving and Christmas means that it is probably advantageous to have cultivars that drop later in the season. Certainly in October, but even into early November if possible. Compared to the shorter growing season in the upper midwest, I think we can grow cultivars like AU Homestead and AU Super that drop later in the season. I think there is some risk of an early frost ruining any unharvested crop, but having crop remaining to market in early December as people start singing The Christmas Song might be advantageous. I had the same thought as you to plant on a 20x20 and thin the trees out at some point. Certainly one consideration for thinning will be to select for productive trees with big, sweeting tasting nuts, but I think I will also pay attention to time of drop as well to push harvest into cooler weather times. Part of my plan is to have a pick-your-own/you-pick element to it, and I think people around here will be more likely to come out once the weather starts to cool off a bit.
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It’s a small sample size but I saved the 10 largest chestnuts from u-pick last fall. Stratified over the winter in refrigerator. I got 5/10 germination. About a foot tall. They are now the same size as the 1 year seedlings I bought last year.
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@Jblack totally agree with everything you said! We are using only seedlings grown from seed nuts this first planting. We got most of our seed from U of Mo and tried to focus on parents from Auburn like you mentioned and GA like Payne but there’s a mixture. We also harvested seed from some local trees that had marketable / tasty nuts just as an experiment. We figured that those genetics should be more adapted to the South. We did get a handful of seedlings from Steve Lucas in Oklahoma (An Oklahoma Chestnut). We didn’t pay much attention to drop time just because we figured we weren’t sure whether that would be genetically expressed in the seedlings without a known pollen parent. But I think there could be advantages to selecting for a tighter harvest window like you said and it’s a great point about harvest and weather. We also thought about the possibility of having a pick-your-own marketing strategy but haven’t decided yet. Another option would be to top work to get a better handle on drop timing. I’ve been told that delayed graft failure isn’t as much of an issue in the SE but it seems like there are some disadvantages to doing too many grafts. Seems like the experienced folks have observed that the grafts don’t actually produce the same quality as the ortet, but on the flip side those could be very important seed nuts for breeding. It’s fun to brainstorm about these things for sure!
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@BigMoonFarmGA Makes sense. I appreciate your responses. In your original post you mention that you are going to focus on chestnuts but also plan to plant fruit trees and then later you mention headland/biodiversity/pollinator areas. What else are you thinking of planting? Will anything else be for its commercial value?
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@Jblack it’s definitely a work in progress and maybe a bit complicated but I’ll have a go. I have loads of ideas but nothing solid yet. One thing that has been extremely helpful: we invested in working with Propagate Ag for consulting and use their Overyield software. It’s been incredibly helpful for planning the chestnut side of things as well as virtually evaluating the economics of different crops. Once you get to that stage, if you ever wanted to use it, I have a 10% referral discount I can share if you would be interested. Just let me know. So I’ve played around with different options (in theory) including mixed berries, muscadine, apples / cider apples, peaches (scary), pecans and elder. I also think pears are a strong possibility but they don’t have economics on that yet. The software lets you evaluate the economics of different crops over 30 years including capital expenditures, install, maintenance, harvest, etc. As a greenhorn, this has been super helpful in giving us confidence to move forward with the chestnuts and evaluate the financials of different options. So in the design we tried to focus on access (headlands and dedicated driving lanes) and infrastructure that were crop independent and left quite a bit of space free for future options.
I think I mentioned in a previous post that I think context is everything. I don’t live on the farm, but have a good deal of flexibility in my job to be able to spend time up there during the week. I hope (fingers crossed) to eventually transition full time to the farm but that is several years away. So, from a practical standpoint, what I did in this first phase was place the headlands of the chestnut orchards further in field away from the forest edge. This way I have space to trial and evaluate different things between the forest and the chestnuts if that makes sense. I just love trees / perennials, and I love growing things so I wanted to leave optionality and these serve as the biodiversity areas for now. It definitely takes away from space for the chestnuts but we could always expand the chestnuts out if we wanted to. We also carved out areas for natives, pollinators, etc. My wife is in charge of those so I can’t speak to all the things she has planned but these are primarily non-edible.
Then I started with what is already growing there, what is low maintenance for living off farm / commuting, and what we like. I love persimmon and have them growing like weeds all over the property so this year I left all the persimmon shoots growing in decent locations (these were historically bush hogged or are root suckers) and I would like to start top working them next year to asians and Americans for eating out of hand and pulp. I was definitely inspired by this forum and some NAFEX folks on the persimmons. There were two historical homestead sites on the farm where there are a handful of mulberry, pears and pecans growing so we are added a “Miss Kim” mulberry and started the process of restoring the pears and pecans. I will probably graft the existing pears which are really old onto callery root stock just to preserve them. I’m told they are tasty but we lost everything this year to the late freeze so I have no idea what to expect. They show no sign of disease so are at least fire blight tolerant so I figure it’s worth it. We also have muscadine, blackberry (obviously) and wild plums so we carved out a little spot for a plum patch and would love to add some improved Chickasaw there. I have two fig cultivars that will go out next year and about 12 pawpaw at home in the shade that I will transplant once they are ready for full sun (these will probably get their own separate mini-orchard near the chestnuts). There’s some other random stuff that is just for fun like hardy passionfruit, nanking cherry, etc. So all of this is kind of in the bucket of forage / biodiversity that I supposed could be expanded for pick-your-own but are really just for me to play around with. If there are things that really thrive and make sense we will have space in other areas of the farm to plant them out in traditional orchard layouts in the next couple of years. If / when we are feeling confident about the chestnuts we will plant out the rest of the area designated for chestnuts - haven’t decided if we are going to stagger this over 2024 and 2025 or do it all next year - and then see where we want to go next. I would love to try southern varieties of apples as well as peaches but I need more time for that. Either way these smaller areas are in places where we will be frequently working over the next couple of years so it kind of made sense from an efficiency standpoint to do it this way.
The only other thing to mention is that we have grower friends who we have brainstorming with about co-operative land use. There are about three acres that are flat as a pancake that could be perfect for a market farmer looking for an organic lease for example. Another of our friends does pastured poultry which could be nice for pasturing between the chestnut rows during the establishment years. These type of arrangements could be something we pursue while we are getting everything going. We also left a five acre field ‘unassigned’ with a good chunk of woods that is kind of far away from everything. It could easily be fenced out so that if we could work with a grazier or shepherd in the future to do silvopasture we would have a place to put a small herd of livestock when they need to be out of the orchards for food / safety purposes. Nothing we would manage ourselves but partnerships would be great for getting more hands on the land.
Sorry about the long-winded answer! I guess I could have left it at ‘not yet’ but that wouldn’t be very helpful in terms of sharing ideas. Haha. Everything non-chestnut is in the ‘safe to fail’ category right now and if the chestnuts just don’t do well for some reason we will have at least dipped our toe in the water of backup options.
What are you thinking of planting besides chestnuts? Any other enterprises you have your eye on?
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@BigMoonFarmGA Let me start by saying we’re probably cut from the same cloth. I have had similar thoughts to yours and will probably try several different things. I too just enjoy planting trees and growing things, so this endeavor will be part retirement income, part fun hobby. Some of my wife’s family is from apple country in Washington state, and she has always had interest in apples, so I will likely try some of the apple varieties that do well in the south. I have considered blueberries and blackberries, and I will likely also plant persimmons. Trees are my favorite though, so I will probably plant some pecans and black walnuts as well.
I will say that I have always thought that I would DIY it when it comes to planning where to plant what, and I had never really considered engaging a consultant like Propagate Ag. The more I think about it though, the more it makes sense. I can see how a good plan in the beginning could more than pay for itself over the lifetime of this adventure. If you don’t mind my asking, can you give me a ballpark of what Propagate Ag’s services cost? And did you buy your land first, or did you engage with them to help you find the piece of property?
As for other enterprises, some of that will depend on what piece of property we buy. I would certainly be open to some kind of co-operative use. Whether that’s free range poultry or letting hogs come and clean up the chestnut harvest is TBD, but I’m open to all of those ideas. Like you, my plan is to do it incrementally and fail small to limit the financial impact, especially in the beginning.
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@Jblack It’s great to meet others with similar interests and passions! We already had land before we started working with Propagate. The software alone (overyield) is $70/month. This is new, it used to be a fixed price, but I think that was while they were still in beta. You could definitely do a lot of the analysis and design on your own using just the app. We ended up doing the advanced consultation which is $5000. Here’s a link that shows the pricing and features of the different plans - Farms — Overyield. I would say that it is geared toward and designed for current landowners. That said, they do have a feature within the overyield program that shows suitability for different crops. It isn’t perfect but may have been improved as they are regularly updating things. It could be worth it to reach out to them to ask if there would be a way to pay a fee to have them run suitability for different properties you are looking at or consult with them to help find land. Everyone there has been incredibly helpful and the customer service has been outstanding so far. It was pricey to do the advanced consultation but I would do it again without question.
The other thing I would mention is that they also do tree procurement which we are still keeping open as an option for our next planting since we opted to DIY it early on. Additionally, at the time that we started working with them they were doing installations in the NE but if there are more growers in the SE to make it worth while they mentioned that could be a possibility in the future. Feel free to send me a PM if you want to know more about it. I’m sure we could figure out a way for me to show you how it works, etc.
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