Looking for opinions from people with dense planting experience. I have changed my mind on plantings for my condensed “pumpkin patch” orchard about 562 times in the last year. (Its going where my pumpkin patch is) It’s a small area that has good soil as I had to excavate out concrete rubble (leftover from construction nightmare) last fall and backfilled and mounded with top soil/compost mix. Straight native clay starts ~3’ down. Slight grade, decent drainage. Originally, I ordered trees based on flavor profile, then I learned about diseases, and ended up planting virtually nothing I had ordered. All trees are being pruned to be kept small. The plan I had settled on was 3 trees in the top row that are 5.5’-6’ apart and then 2 trees in a second row about 7’ below the top and about 7’ apart from each other. second row has less sun, getting a house shadow cast on part of it around 2-330pm. The mini orchard area is in my front yard surrounded on nearly all sides by native gardens, then house/driveway/street and starting within 10-30’ in any direction are other edibles: the most relevant to my question being nectarines (30’ away), apple, another cherry. I’m fencing in the area when I plant in March.
The plan I had settled on with a long list of grafting plans to the base trees:
Top left to right: Lavina, WhiteGold, Pristine
Bottom left to right: satsuma/Rubysweet duo, Silvergem
The nagging voice is saying to pull the Sat/RS (only ones I planted last year, but in the top middle spot) and change the plan to 3 plantings:
Top: Lavina, WhiteGold
Bottom: Pristine
I am not worried about keeping up with pruning to manage the trees at 5-6’ spacing. I don’t want large or even medium trees. What I am increasingly worried about is the high likelihood of failure for disease in my humid environment. But, I want to try because even getting 20% of fruit from each tree would likely be worth it to me. Extensive backup plans if it turns out that it’s not. Going off the premise that it is worth trying, the question I have arrived at is: would changing the plan from 5 trees to 3 have any meaningful impact on disease risk and load? Or, is 2 more not going to move the needle much?
I have “only” 3-4 more weeks to agonize over this, so please dump all opinions here.
Do you have anything you can use to mark the spots? Before I planted my trees I stuck big sticks in the spots I was planning and convinced myself to spread out my trees to 10ft apart and stagger the rows. It helpee me to visualize where the sun would be, where I would be able to walk and pick fruit, etc much better than a drawing.
I can’t speak to actually answering your question unfortunately though!
Yup, did that with sticks all summer. Most helpful was moving trees in 10g bags around the area. And, then there’s all my drawings.
Of note is that the nectarines that are 30-40’ away are upwind with no major structure obstructing the space between. So, maybe it’s all moot. Although, I have the lowest threshold for culling those.
the trees in the 5 or 3 spots are definitely not set in stone. I have 4 other layouts that I’m toying with. I suffer from too many ideas. And, let’s be honest- I’ve moved almost every tree I’ve ever planted, but, I want to be more confident about starting layout and disease pressure. This area just keeps nagging at me that’s it’s just not “there” yet.
Base things on final size and when they ripen. Look at the final size and ripening times to stagger them where they get the most sun throughout the season. Early ripening can take bad sun positions because the sun will be directly overhead when they ripen. Larger trees can also take poor positions. Later ripening or small trees will need more premium sun positions as the sun is lower later in the season being blocked by other trees or structures. Cherry for example is a hard to keep small tree and ripens super early.
Thanks! that’s good to hear again. I have been planning to put WhiteGold in the bottom row since you told me that, figuring it’s done by mid June (?), but then I figured if it’s the tree I’m most invested in, I should give it more sun. Back and forth and back and forth. I went back and looked at the pictures I took tracking sun last summer, and by second week of august, the second row is mostly shaded by 2:30pm.
I’m mostly worried about more versus less disease pressure with more versus fewer trees and borderline not enough sun for two of them. I guess I’m not going to know until I know. But, now I’m considering only planting the top with the middle staggered down a few feet. Too many trees, too little space!
I don’t think 3 trees vs 5 trees is going to be a big difference for disease pressure. I think it’s going to be more important that you keep them thinned and getting light and remove dropped fruits and treat what you can.
You’re going to get disease pressure from pests that harbor in nearby leaf litter, foilage, etc. And from infected neighborhood trees (eg. brown rot from serviceberry) and I’m not sure the distance between your trees is going to matter as much.
I like overthinking things so I came up with a few questions and asked Ai to help me work though them.
With humid conditions cherries and peaches suffer from fungus.
So if you plant east to west Peaches, Cherries, plums, apples and pears.
On the other hand if you plant south to north the tree planted to the south get the most sun and north side trees get the least. So your decision is based on height. .
Then you have an order of peach, sour cherry, apples, sweet cherry and last pears
Now most of the time sweet cherries are grafted to sour to dwarf them so there is some flexibility there and large selection of dwarfing and semi dwarfing root stocks for apples. Pears have fewer options and are usually going to be the tallest.
But wait there is still more to over think. You know your going to have to prune your trees to keep them smaller. But just how do you plan to prune them. Some systems work better then others.
To prevent diseases you want open center for stone fruits. That give you plenty room to see though them to the fruit trees behind
So my house the back yard faces south so ideally pears would be close to the house and stone fruit further back. This also looks terrible. If I had a front yard it would work I could put the tall trees close to the street and the shorter closer to the house.
3, 5 or 15 trees… it’s pretty much all the same. The only way you’re probably going to avoid pests and diseases would be to make sure you keep your trees pruned to allow air flow, keep the orchard as “clean” as possible and eventually implementing a spray program. That’s my 2 cents.
This is my plan du jour. The maroon dots are the trees from left to right: plum, apple, cherry and then bottom right nectarine. I am still flip flopping apple/cherry spots. I’m not super sold on how pretty apples look with different pruning shapes and prefer this top right and cherry center from an aesthetic standpoint. But, the apple will be half Rubyrush and will need the most late sun and don’t want an afternoon tree shadow on it. We’ll see. I can always graft the RR to one of my two other apples that have afternoon sun if it is not optimal. I would love to have faith and put cherry in second row, but I am more invested in its survival than the nectarine. I just have a really bad feeling about all my nectarines, so I want this nectarine in a place that if I decide to axe it, doesn’t affect where I ultimately want to keep trees. The nectarine going in here is silvergem, so I think it should fruit a month before this picture was taken (2pm 8/10). Ignore all the other markings. (Also the redbud if anyone looks close enough is not a shade concern- I have been aggressively pruning it summer and winter. I wish I had known to head it when I got it 4 years ago. I don’t know how long I’m keeping it there)
As a side, it took until a few days ago to realize that instead of simply throwing down pea and clover cover crop, I have a lot of sunny fence real estate to sow more sweet peas. They’ll be out before the pumpkins have taken off. So, that was an exciting realization. Might even throw another mini cucumber in there.
@lordkiwi I hadn’t considered grafting sweet to sour for size control. Thanks for bringing that up. I am going to use that at a family property where I won’t be there to micromanage. Hopefully attentive summer pruning here does the trick, but I’ll report back in 5 years!
Good comments. I don’t have much more to add. Peaches/nects do need more sun to build flavor compared to most fruits, imo. And as Kiwi mentions, peaches are best pruned during the growing season to keep the trees open in my climate.
You’ve probably looked at the Dave Wilson videos on Backyard Orchard Culture. That’s probably the “go to” for most folks trying to get the most varieties in small spaces.
D.C. is humid enough your going to need to spray fungicides, for stone fruits anyway. Once you resolve that issue, it probably doesn’t make a lot of difference whether you plant 5 or three trees.
