Howdy. More than half my orchard sits wet. From late Feb to May, I can have standing water in between trees for days at a time. All my trees are mounded 7-10” above grade. 16 peaches, citation, bailey, nemaguard and lovell are all doing great. Most of them have been in the ground 3 years.
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Perhaps tile drainage fails so often here because folks like my clients have it done based on contrasting bids and the lowball bid is based on doing the job improperly and cheaply. I’ve often been amazed by how often the rich in my area get screwed by crooked contractors. One of my friend-clients has been waiting for about 4 years to move into her renovated mansion in CT which has become a money pit even by her and her husband’s standards, who have a different idea about money than you or me (actually, she does have a sober view about money, she wasn’t born with it)…
I talked about it with an honest landscape contractor who is second generation in that area and she told me that my client’s contractor has a rep for being dishonest and incompetent, and yet multi-millionaires keep him employed because he has a folksy charm. I did warn my client, but it was about 4 years too late.
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I could see that. There’s quite a bit to it, so a lot of ways to cut corners. If there is any reverse slope in the tile at all, that portion of tile will fill with dirt until there is no reverse slope inside the tile. On something like a 4" tile, it doesn’t take much of a reverse slope to fill the tile all the way with dirt. Even if the tile is perfectly flat, the water will have a hard time pushing out any dirt which settles in the bottom of the tile. So even tile which runs flat for a while can potentially settle out enough dirt inside the tile to clog it up over time.
You probably know the following if you’ve laid field tile before, but for those reading who may want to lay tile in the future, this is how we did it:
We cut the ditch, and benched it. Then put a lot of gravel (3/4" clean) down before we laid the tile (the invoice above only says 1" of gravel, but the invoice was filled out by the guy’s daughter, and she wasn’t really aware what we did).
The gravel was to make sure there was no settling of the field tile and to make it easier to grade the bottom of the ditch by hand. Once we had a good bed of graded gravel (I checked it every foot of it with a laser level). We laid the tile on top of the bed of gravel, then bedded the field tile with more gravel almost to the top of the tile. Then I checked the top of the tile with a laser level, again to make sure everything was going down hill. The gravel around the tile performs the function of keeping the tile stable while dumping back fill on it. I’ve seen un-bedded tile jump around like crazy while pushing back fill on it. All it takes is a few dirt clods to jump under the field tile, and you’ve got a reverse slope in your tile.
Then we bedded another 2 or 3 feet of gravel on top of the tile to make what they call a “curtain” so water can very easily enter the drain zone. The extra gravel on top also performs the function of keeping the tile from getting crushed by rocks, or hard dirt clods, during backfill. After that we laid non-woven filter cloth on top of the gravel. I’ve done tiling with filter cloth and without, so I’m honestly not sure if filter cloth (non-woven, not the woven type) is necessary or not. Finally the back fill was pushed in the trench.
I’ve seen folks throw tile down without any gravel, or without really grading the gravel, then dump large amounts of fill over the tile, so that the tile is probably collapsed right off the start.
I’ve also hired someone with a tiling machine (for large areas which needed tiling) 30+ years ago. The chain trencher was hooked up to a laser level, so it cut the ditch perfectly smooth and laid the tile at the same time with no gravel needed. Those tiles are still working today, I believe. Unfortunately, I had to go much deeper for my recent tiling project, which required a large track hoe.
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I was coming to say this as well. St Julien is considered a good option for wet heavy soils. It’s a semi-dwarfing rootstock.
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Not in stock.
Currently out of stock, I’m on their wait list.
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Just wondering if you have actual peaches grafted to Prunus Americana that produce smaller fruit, or if you’re going by literature. I only have one such tree, a Veteran, but in my case it produces noticeably larger fruit. And my graft is from another Veteran tree on my property so I have a pretty good way of comparing. Of course, mine is just one example over about 4 years, doesn’t prove anything, but I’ve always been surprised by how much larger the fruit is on that tree.
Yes, they were planted in 2016. At one point I had at least 2 each of Redhaven, Early Redhaven, Contender, and Harrow Diamond. They all produced smaller fruit. However they tend to produce more intensely flavored fruit than the trees on peach roots, which is nice on bad weather years where peaches are normally bland. There were 2 years where they produced fruit and the trees on peach roots didn’t even bloom, so a little more hardy I guess. I also grafted nectarines, but they didn’t take. Maybe Redhaven interstems would have helped.
Where did you get your prunus american from? There could be some discrepancies from genetic variation. I got mine as bundle from the forestry service, so they could have come from seed. I’ve been wondering through the whole experiment if nurseries use cloned strains derived from a selective breeding process. Hardly no one uses prunus american for peaches, so I’m not sure if there would have been such an effort.
I probably got it from Fedco. It’s weird because the tree seems stunted height-wise. It is more like a bush. The graft union is a large gnarly ball, and the rootstock itself is quit a bit skinner than the tree. I worry every year whether it’s going to make it or not, but it seems healthy otherwise.