When you get trees too early, put them in an compost pile. Dig down into the north/east side of the pile at an angle and then lean the trees into the pile and cover up their roots well. Pack the soil so it won’t move. The trees won’t wake up until a couple weeks usually after planted trees wake up.
My honeyberries didn’t do well at all, although I gave some to Mom and they are growing and fruiting for her in big planters.
I moved here from Virginia and thought I could get away from having fence. LOLOLOL. Everything I planted the first year was eaten, even if it was deer proof. We have more deer, and they’re not hungry since I live in the boonies,but apparently they like variety. Around here the only thing that works to keep deer out is metal fence that is at least 7’ tall. I use 2 4’ tall graduated livestock fence(one on top of the other), with 8.5’ tposts. I put the smaller holed sides of the fence together to make the middle stronger, and the bigger holes at the top and at the soil. If that’s too complicated, shorter metal fence with something inside all the way around making it too complicated to jump works great, too.
Have you tried doing a four leaf clover shaped hole for planting, with the tree in the middle and the cross/leaves taking extra water away? Neither have I. Just somewhere I saw it recommended. I have thought about planting on mounds, but mounds of soil. I found out (also the hard way) that heavy layers of carboard or mulch mats attract rodents too much. Then the rodents eat my tree trunks.
Yeah, that low ph is exactly what blueberries want.
Hey, there. I thought I’d just prune my semidwarves and plant them about 10’ apart. Don’t do that unless you are ready to prune and shape from the start. I did almost no pruning at first, and never thought about a delayed central leader as a way to stop the top from continuing to expand 20’ up off the ground. It’s hard to move a 12’ ladder around in the middle, and the 8’ ladder is a little too short. Learn from my mistake! Now I can totally see planting a semidwarf next to a dwarf at that spacing, or a semidwarf next to a shrub you don’t need a ladder for, like a nitrogen fixer.
On my hill orchard, I have curving rows of mixed semidwarf and dwarf trees, more or less 10’ apart in the row, and about 12’ apart between rows. That seems to be working ok, too.
Quick answers:
I know the right solution to a January delivery of bare root plants was to heel them into soil, but I literally had no soil/compost/anything that wasn’t a solid brick of ice at that stage. It’s great when the nurseries say ‘just heel them in,’ but, when you can’t actually move the soil, you’re stuck. (I did have bags of soil sitting around, but stored outside and frozen solid.)
I’ve been usin 7’ deer fence with 1’ on the ground, so effectively 6’ deer fence. It’s been working pretty well for me. I get a lot of deer pressure, but, if I put a decent barrier in their way, they just won’t bother. I guess I’m lucky in that regard. With lots of snow cover this year, though, I’ve been wondering if a 6’ deer fence with 3’ of snow on the ground would actually work but, so far, no problems. It’s the groundhog that’s my nemesis.
With the wet soil, the problem is that there’s literally no place for the water to drain so, at ground surface, I can dig as many holes as I want, but, when it’s wet, the water will fill up to surface level every time. It’s like I have soil inside a swimming pool with no drain (in at least a few places). I can’t use any form of French drain because water won’t flow uphill. I thought of digging some ‘bore holes’ and putting in sump pumps to pull water out of those, but didn’t get a chance to implement that last year… and it seems like the current solution is working plausibly well without that. The only way I could use gravity to drain would be blasting through all of that rock and that’s more than I’m willing to pay for.
(I didn’t realize the soil was boggy because it was all lightly forested before I had an arborist cut everything down to make space for the orchard. I suspect the trees camouflaged the problem or, better yet, were sucking enough water out of the holes that there wasn’t a problem. The only way I know about the rock under the soil is because we had someone use a tractor to dig all of my planting holes for me and kept running into ledge in unexpected places. There are many other lessons learned there, too.)
But, bottom line, what I have now seems to be working. We’ll see what happens in the next really wet year, but… I’m keeping my fingers crossed.
Zone 4 has very long winters. Around now is when I’d be out winter pruning but leaf-out is still over a month away and overnight freezing temperatures mean no painting or deck staining. So there’s lots of time for pruning. If 12x12’ plot size lets me plant small shrubs like raspberries or blueberries on the corners between pruned semi-dwarf trees then that would be great.
