After recently scooping up ~20 potted 6-8’ fruit trees from my local nursery that was going out of business at an amazing deal, I have decided to do a full mini-orchard plan and order more trees (bare root) to build a ~45 tree orchard (apples, pears, peaches, nectarines, cherries, apricots). Orchard will be for fresh fruit consumption for extended family and friends, as well as trying to learn to make apple cider. Looking for advice and feedback on scions, spacing, rootstocks, etc. from this amazing forum on what I plan below. I have fell in love with the amazing information I have gotten from this forum the last month or so.
I live in zone 7 in Northern Virginia, and am looking at planting in an area that is 120’ x 120’. The area is pretty flat and borderline floodplain. Winters are not completely waterlogged, but definitely slow to drain. Because of this, I am planning on planting on mounds with mixed in compost and wood chips well below the rootball to improve drainage, as well as avoiding rootstocks like Nemaguard and M106.
See the image below showing how I plan to do 5 rows that are 120’ long and space between rows will be 18-20’ That gives me ample room to move around the rows with my Farmall Tractor as well as avoids the early morning shade from the east.
Row 1 (Western most row): 9 apples all on M.7 with 14’ of space between each apple in the row. Scions are Zestar, Liberty, McIntosh, Red Fuji, Snowsweet, Royal Gala, Golden Delicious, Red Delicious, and Fireside. Will plant in that order, and all these trees are 6-8’ already.
Row 2: 9 Apple scions with varying rootstocks I plan to order from ACN as bare root the next few days. Scions and rootstocks are Crown Empire (G.935), Cortland (EMLA.7), Arkansas Black (EMLA.7), Franklin Cider Apple (EMLA.7), Goldrush (Bud 9/EMLA 111 graft), Nittany (G.980), Nova Spy (EMLA.7), Dabinett (M.111), Honeycrisp (M.111). I was going to do spacing of 10’ for the G.935, 12’ for the Bud9/EMLA 111 graft, 14’ for the EMLA.7, and 16’ for the M.111.
Row 3: 6 peaches and 3 apricots. Peach rootstocks are Bailey and Lovell, and apricots are Krymsk-86. Plan on spacing the peaches 15’ apart and the apricots 12’ apart. Peach scions are Contender, Crethaven, Loring, Carored, Red Haven, Sugar May and apricot scions are Goldrich, Harcot, Blenheim.
Row 4: 5 Nectarines on Lovell spaced 14’ apart and 5 pears on OHxF 333 or OHxF 87 spaced 10’ apart. Nectarine scions are Fantasia, Flavortop, Arctic Sweet, Nectafest, Eastern Glo. Pear scions are Bartlett, Comice, Anjou, Tawara, and Olympic.
Row 5: Cherries split between Krymsk-86 spaced 14 feet apart and Mazzard spaced 18’ apart. Scions are Bing, Stardust, Black Pearl, Emperor Francis, Regina, Rainer.
Having young children, I would think somewhere between once a month and every other month makes sense from an availability perspective. I of course didn’t choose completely fire blight resistant apples, so totally recognize work to do, but wanted to keep it as close to organic as reasonable
Thank you. My logic was a lot of this may fail, but I will learn which rootstocks and scions do well with my level of commitment and environmental conditions, so then I can focus on what works moving forward after a few year experiment.
I admire your ambition, you burn with the desire to plant trees. I am going thru a bit of this myself and probably will be buying more trees (too many) this year too. But I think you should slow down and research more what you need to do to be successful with fruit trees. The trees you are wanting to plant and your post on how you plan to spray indicate you don’t have a good feel for how all of this works when it comes to managing fruit trees either with an organic or a synthetic spray program.
Many of trees you are planning to plant are not suited to West Virginia especially if you don’t have a really good spray program. You are also buying too many trees if you don’t have a handle on how to spray, prune, train, and space the trees during planting. It is better to start with fewer trees and learn what the local disease and insect pressure is before buying a large number of trees that you may end up replacing. I think you will want to change some of the trees to something else that is more suited to your location conditions once you have done some research.
Thank you for such a detailed and thoughtful response. I guess I looked at this as throw as much at the wall as possible to see what sticks, so I have a greater sampling what works in my area (zone 7a Northern Virginia). I can stomach losing a bunch of bare root trees at $20 a pop versus buying a more mature tree for say $70-100 and losing loads of them. Totally agree I have no idea what I am doing with spraying and have only watched like an hour of YouTube videos.
Based on your comment, I assume there are scions that screamed out to you that are not a fit for zone 7a? I did check all these across multiple nurseries and zone 7a is a fit. Most are from ~60 miles away from me.
I used to grow peaches no spray organic and it worked well… for 5-7 years… then OFM showed up… wormy peaches… and it got worse every year… and ended up if I picked 400 peaches off my 2 trees… i might get to eat 40-50 of those … the large majority were trashed.
Then near the end… brown rot showed up one spring and took the large majority of peaches from my later tree and ofm gotthe rest.
My earlier tree… i got a few good fruit from early June then brown rot consumed the rest.
I am in Tennessee (southern middle) zone 7b now.
Be prepaired to have to employ a good spray program if you want to have good peaches long term.
Apples and pears here… most live to be 3, 4 years old… start blooming… then fire blight wipes them out.
Only the most fire blight resistent varieties should be planted here… and even they get fireblight… but may be able to survive it with proper care.
There are many apples that are resistent to CAR and they do well here even if eastern red cedars are 30 ft away. There might be some small red spot on the leaves… but that is about it. The trees continue to thrive.
I have never seen apple scab here… that may not be an issue in the south east ?
And remember later on… after you fight that fight… if it does get to the point that you are loosing the battle… there are some fruit trees that produce delicious fruit and require no spray… for example mulberries and persimmons.
Where my peach trees used to be… l now have raspberry beds and get loads of delicious fruit with absolutely no spray.
I would definitely look into getting at least a few of the “Bullet Proof” trees for a reliable harvest. Maybe some apple-crabs, or some specifically bred disease resistant trees.
With low spray, a mono culture may not be successful, consider inter-planting strategies like Stephan W uses for his organic orchard.
Stone fruit is difficult, but my grandfather had two peach trees in his P.A property that were over thirty years old and still produced good crops with minimal pests and no spray. Sometimes you just get lucky.
I think black pearl is regarded to be tough for a cherry. you may want to reconsider planting so many, as the pest and disease issues would be harder to control if you are unable to harvest and clean the trees. What pruning style do you think you will use?
I would plant some things along with the trees to get a more immediate harvest. Berries, asparagus, rhubarb, even a garden patch. With your spacing, some under story plants are probably able to keep producing for years. And if a tree fails, you at least have something there.
The layout seems good, but you have trees of varying Rootstocks and vigor so make sure they don’t get in each others way.
Consider growing fruit trees that require little to no maintenance like Paw Paw, Persimmon, Mulberry etc.
You may need deer protection, raccoon protection, squirrel protection, groundhog protection or other measures to protect from animal damage.
All in all though you’ll definitely get some fruit in a few years. I am envious of the land you are able to cultivate!
Your plans are indeed ambitious, but I don’t discourage you from them. I had a similar journey many years ago. As they say, “Anything worth doing, is worth overdoing”
As you point out, one has to look at the downside of overdoing. In this case there are not a lot of downsides (mostly just your loss of spare time, and the cost of some trees). When I first started planting trees in my backyard, I planted a bunch of stuff I ended up pulling out because it didn’t work for me. But I learned a lot in the process. At one point I had about 70 trees in my backyard. It was a lot of experimenting, and a lot of fun at the time.
Ordering and planting trees is full of hope and promise.
Here’s some specific advice I might offer.
I don’t really know much about Northern VA (never even visited the area) but from comments of others, I gather that insect/disease pressure is significant. The summer rainfall, which is generally a good predictor of pest pressure is pretty close to KS/MO where I live (about 4-5" of rain in the summer months).
Based on that, I think I may be able to offer some advice which may be helpful.
On your apples, I might recommend you put them in harvest order. Same thing with all your other fruits. Keep the fruits separate if you can, but place them in harvest order, if you can. It makes for a bit easier harvesting, when they are in order. Not a big thing, but something to consider.
I’m not a big fan of (M7/ELMA7). The rootstock suckers like mad, which is a pain in the rear. I like MM111/ELMA111. It seems like a nice balance. Good anchorage. I also have some apple trees on standard roots. I’m able to keep them at pedestrian heights, but it does take a lot of pruning. And they are slower to come into production.
On apple cultivar selections, make sure you try some of these cultivars before you plant. Specifically Arkansas Black, Golden Delicious, Red Delicious.
There will probably be some members defend these choices, but the vast majority of apple growers would pan those choices. Most fruit growers call Red Delicious, “Red Undelicious”. Arkansas Black supposedly had a reputation for being slighly insect resistant, and also people resistant.
There are better choices for a golden apple, than Golden Delicious.
That was one of my mistakes in early apple planting. Planting varieties which honestly didn’t taste that great.
I grew Liberty. Easy to grow, but flavor was pretty ho hum. I also wonder if McIntosh will be any good there. I’ve never been a fan of it, and suspect it won’t be a top notch apple grown in your climate.
If you plan on using some of these varieties for cider making, then that’s a different story. Some of the more disease resistant apples would be great for that. Easy to grow, and generally very productive. For apples which you want volume and easy production, I think most of the PRI apples are good choices.
I would not plant Honeycrisp in VA. It doesn’t like heat and will likely be difficult to grow. I would recommend Pixie Crunch as a substitute. Same magic crunch, but without all the Honeycrisp growing baggage.
Apricots were a bust for me because of late spring frosts. I eventually cut them all down. But your area may not have that issue.
I didn’t like Sugar May peach. It had a really poor flavor here. For a white peach with some flavor, you might consider Raritan Rose. I also wouldn’t plant Cresthaven. It gets terrible bac. spot. I didn’t know this when I first planted it. I once met Bill Shane (MSU peach guru). We were discussing peach varieties and I complained about bac. spot problems Cresthaven. He said it’s unaffectionately known in the industry as “Spot Crest”.
Nectarines are hard to grow in my climate, but you do have some good choices if you want to try them. I grew about 15 different varieties or so, at one time. I eventually pulled them all out.
Nectafest the tops in terms of flavor. It was out of this world in flavor intensity. I might question Arctic Sweet. I’ve not grown that one, but I have grown other Zaiger creations, and they typically aren’t bred for wet climates, which means they are generally harder to grow here.
In terms of pears, you have some fireblight magnets there, which will likely kill them. And it will mean more fireblight pressure on your apple trees.
Get rid of Bartlett. There are lots of Bartlett type pears which taste as good, and have decent fireblight resistance. Harrow Delight is one example. @clarkinks can give you a lot more advice in that department.
I did grow sweet cherries at one time. They are hard to grow here. I eventually pulled them all out. Mazzard is a good rootstock for clay soils, but sweet cherries are very vigorous on Mazzard. Look for varieties which are crack resistant. I definitely wouldn’t try to grow Bing in your area. Rainier would also probably be hard to grow in VA. Just make sure you put in the right varieties for cross pollination. There are all kind of charts on the internet for that.
Your Captain Jack isn’t going to do a whole lot of good for pests in your area. Neem just doesn’t do much on major pests in rainy climates.
Here’s a thread on Neem. You may pay special attention to a post from @Vortom . He’s from VA. Thomas hasn’t posted in a few weeks, but perhaps he may chime in and offer some helpful comments on your new fruit tree plans.
Great advice, and I’d add figs for sure.
I would delete McIntosh apple; a no go. Ditto Bartlett, Anjou, Comice pears. By including those pears tells me you haven’t done any research into blight resistance, a fatal mistake in your/our zone.
A couple weeks now of researching disease resistant varieties, plus scaling your plans waaay back, will save you years of disappointment and wasted effort, money, time.
I second the idea of fencing. Deer will eat seedlings and new growth. Raccoons and squirrels won’t be kept out completely, but it may slow them down. I’ve read here of possums and groundhogs devastating fruit crops, and I’ve had issues with gophers and voles. I protect my young trees with hardware wire cylinders around the trunks (mini-fences, I guess).
I’ll also second the idea of planting berries, etc between trees and suggest you look up the idea of guilds… I favor local perennial native plants to attract beneficial insects and provide blooms all season.
A lot of us got started with a few trees, then added more (and more and more). You learn as you go. Everyone makes mistakes and everyone eventually gets some fruit.
Too much fruit is a nice problem to have… but some planning up front can at least help spread out your harvest (and pest pressure).
I hope some more folks from VA, MD area chime in as they will have better ideas on insects and pests.
My favorite quote for growing fruit (at least in Colorado) comes from Dave Barry: “There is a very thin line between “hobby” and “mental illness.”
Take care and enjoy the journey!
