We have a few rows of apple trees that are on dwarfing rootstock. The rows are about 5ft apart. The soil is more clay.
But due to heavy rain in the last few months, the inter rows have been more like mini rivers. The rain just runs off.
These rows have been in for 15 years and have been walked upon regularly and the grass mowed every 3 weeks (not for last 3 years as grass all cleared, to control grass born pests). I have been told its due to soil compaction.
But any ideas how I can get over this problem ?? To narrow for a tractor and a sub soiler or even a compact, so any thoughts. I have a walk behind rough mower of 15hp, but no PTO, but what can I drag behind it?? a 3 tine cultivator.
I would think the cause is less the foot traffic, and more that there’s nothing growing there? If you don’t want grass, perhaps there is some other cover crop that would be better? Just having roots of something in the ground will significantly improve drainage in heavy soils. At least, that’s been my experience.
I plant annual ryegrass which is killed in winter. It makes a nice quick temporary lawn, can be mowed but doesn’t grow too tall for me… like below the knee. Farmers in my area use peas and oats, they tell me thats better but i havent tried. A deep rooted grass that is winter killed as a cover crop is probably the easiest. I believe garden lime (not dolimite lime) changes clay to help break it up as well… theres lots of “no till” reccomendations on the web.
If you have an arborist nearby who will provide wood chips or a landscaper who can bring shredded leaves you can simply heavily mulch the middles and most liability of compaction will be instantly solved- in a few years the solution will be permanent if you do it annually. The only problem is the soil may become an excessive source of available water which is inevitable when you add a lot of organic matter to a soil. At a certain point this may reduce the brix in your fruit- at least in regions with summer rain.
Specifically in cases not described here. It only works with salt based compaction. I just want to make that clear, because the idea that it is widely useful to free up clay is an often repeated gardener’s myth. You did not perpetuate that myth but didn’t quite clarify it either.
Do you know anyone who has freed up compacted soil by adding humic acid? It’s a good suggestion, but I don’t think that it would accomplish a lot if used alone or it would be more widely used for the purpose. At any rate, organic matter releases a lot of it while breaking down but solves compaction in many other ways. If it is applied as a mulch it even gets earth worms in the action, big time. They tunnel into the clay soil below and come up to feed.
Otherwise, it seems like the only other approach besides mechanical methods would be to use the best cover plants for the purpose, such as deep rooted legumes in the middle. Such plants may use a lot of water though.
You’re right. At some level we need some kind of decompaction to happen for any of these processes.
Plant roots are the best non mechanical option and They’ll probably want some wood chips/organic material to get started anyway.
It sounds like there might be an ideal ratio of cover crop to mulching that will roughly balance out to keep the water content of the soil the same for his trees.
I would still probably apply humic acid and some form of nitrogen along with the mulch, at least for the first application, to get the ball rolling for the mechanisms of soil development
I agree with everyone above. If you have access to the sticky clay below, you can add gravel or small rocks. They aren’t the only solution, but they will help drainage enough that organic material will get eaten by microbial life because it can survive. If the soil drowns, much of the life will drown with it and it can go anaerobic, a situation you definitely don’t want. All the wrong microbes will be growing in your soil if it’s anaerobic. If you set it up so that life is growing in your soil and has something to eat, it will take care of your problem.
FWIW, I had this issue with our patch of lawn which was compacted heavily after a front loader bob cat was driven for a month during some renovation work.
Initially we used a 16" heavy duty broad fork to loosen the soil. Then layered 3-4 inches of compost and let it be for a couple weeks in late spring rains (PNW).
Finally when it was sufficiently dry tilled in 2" of compost and 3" some shredded bark using a hand driven Baretto hydraulic tiller before laying the sod. So far no issues and the drainage has been working well.
I would back up the wood chip suggestion. I’m a huge fan of arborist wood chips to mulch around trees and pathways. After 3 years of mulched pathways a hand spade can actually dig into it where once a pickaxe was mandatory. The areas under mulch that don’t get walked on have loose enough soil to dig 3-4inches with bare hands.
There definitely was boom of the population of vole and possibly moles with 6 inch layers of wood chips but I’m just viewing them as giant “earthworm” doing major levels of aeration with minimal damage. Anywhere I had weed barrier down and had wood chips on or around had considerably more damage I imagine it was too protective, so all the plastic gets pulled up around perennial plantings now. This year something is hunting and eating the voles now so I guess ~3 acres is large enough to attract a predator.
I live rural enough that to get arborist chips consistently I have to pay for them. They have been worth every penny (100 dollars for 6-9 cubic yards).
I too use wood chips, every year for decades. I have turned really terrible sticky clay into good soil, at least for the top few inches. When I have removed a tree, like yesterday, for instance, I find the soil more than a few inches down still to be really sticky clay. When this happens, I throw in old rotten wood or old leaves. I also throw in gravel or rocks. I don’t put in fresh wood chips below because it will screw up the carbon/nitrogen balance. If you leave the wood chips on the surface it will be fine, because as someone said, worms will bring down tiny chunks of the wood chips when they’ve rotted enough. If you want to research this topic, check out Linda Chalker-Scott on the internet. It’s well researched.
Yeah, vole damage does seem worse when one uses fabric below the mulch. The plastic spirals can protect the trees from meadow voles, though. Protection from pine voles is more work. I get both in my nursery without the fabric. I’ve been trapping them with baited traps under a dozen trays that I move through the apple areas of my nursery until there is snow. I also use the spirals. 2-5% of my smaller trees get their roots girdled every year, but the trees survive after about a 2 year set back.
I would agree with pretty much everything said so far. Getting organic matter worked into the soil profile to the extent that you can would be super. Im glad to see the subject of Voles come up although I dont know if you even have them. They are a major pest for me. Anything that gets left laying on the ground becomes an instant Vole nesting site.
We did a mulching trial on high density apples at the research station, Mt Vernon, and quickly learned that the trial was a failure with almost all products unless we could come up with a Vole eradication program first. The Vole eradication was not practical.
The rows in my orchards are all wide enough that I have grass and am able to mow with the tractor, however there still is the compacted wheel paths where even grass has a hard time. However, It is the grass and Im talking a mixture of annual and perennial native pasture grasses that if left alone would be 7-8 ’ tall, that are a critical part of what make my orchard work. The cut grass clippings provide the only artificial source of Nitrogen that my trees get. Other than the natural Nitrogen Cycle thats it. The grass softens the impact of the rainfall and foot traffic as well as providing a home above and below the surface for a huge abundance of life. If your using Dwarf rootstocks a lot as I do then the upper regions of your soil profile are most important. My trees roots reach out from the tree row into the alleyways, looking for those nutrients in the alleyway.
I would just use a good, course, hardwood compost and rototill it in. Heavy seed with a native pasture blend and enjoy the mow…,
I tried radishes, specifically the big dikon radishes. They grew great, got like a foot long, deer loved them and winter killed them. My soil was a little too compact for them, most of the radish was above ground. I’ve had best luck with annual ryegrass. No need to mow and leaves a fantastic mulch that you can seed into the following year with no till. My sites may be a special case because I scrape the orchard to even it out. I also pile up the top soil and use to back fill holes (after removing the stone when planting trees) and move alot to the garden. I have areas with just smooth red clay like a fancy tennis court.
I’ve had some bad vole years. I still have big brush piles that im working through. I decided to poison them for now, only in the late fall and just collect the traps in spring when the snow thaws. Harware cloth alone isn’t enough some years. Im going to start planting daffodils one of these years… i hear that helps… if not it would look cool.
This tidbit would be a lot more useful if it included what eradication methods were used. It would also be good to know the region of the country Gray’s orchard is located.
In my region there are as many voles as there is available food, including the most difficult to control, pine voles. Long ago I read of a ten year Cornell experiment of using wood chips as an annual mulch for weed control in a commercial orchard type set-up- I don’t know how large it was or what was the vegetation on its borders. After 10 years of annual mulching, the conclusion was that the wood chips worked fine in all ways besides creating excessive vegetative growth after a few years. 30 years of anecdote enforces my belief in that conclusion, but I live where it rains all summer- if you control water during the growing season you can control growth, and endless sunny days without too much water almost guarantees the ability to produce high brix fruit.
I have much more trouble with voles in orchards where only annual mowing is done than in orchards that use chipped or shredded wood mulch. I use tons of wood chips in my nursery, but avoid it around my apple orchard trees because it eventually reduces quality and may contribute to corking and bitter pit via excessive potassium.
On my 3 acres I don’t have to work very hard to adequately trap my voles. Pine voles badly damage maybe 3% of my nursery apple trees annually as a high end estimate. As I mentioned, the trees eventually recover. My orchard trees never suffer noticeable damage from them. In big apple trees I manage elsewhere (say over a decade in age on vigorous root stock) that are growing in an annually mowed meadow, I have seen meadow vole damage that damaged but didn’t kill trees. There is about 2 cubic feet of wood chips around every nursery tree on my property.
The worst pine vole problem I ever saw was on a small commercial orchard I used to prune where no mulch was used but it was bordered by oak trees that seemed to serve the pests well. They bred like crazy under the leaf litter. Perhaps the problem tended to be when the oaks failed to produce nuts. At any rate, it was a constant battle using poison baits in short lengths of PVC pipe shallowly planted in the ground. It was simply part of the cost of doing business, in this case, a high end apple cider business.
To answer your curiosity, eradication was not practical, there were just too many of them and due to property lines at the station, bordering farms were breeding grounds for huge populations of them. After a snow melt off you could see their runways by the hundreds (or more) coming under the fences and into the test plots. Keeping the ground, around the trees, bare and clear of any vegetation has proven to be the best defense in this case of major vole pressure. They dont like to cross open ground. They would prefer to be just below the thatch or mulch girdling your tree as apposed to above the ground doing the same thing. This is why having grass, sawdust, mulch, plastic or most anything is unadvisable to have against the tree.
At the research station, just do to the size of the operation, and the massive amount of vole pressure, it was decided to adopt a live and let live approach in all orchard areas except the nurseries. I definitely dont endorse the use of some of the herbicides I had to use while keeping the tree rows spotlessly barren but that was the WSU protocol. Then there was very wide grassed row spacing and very large grass areas in-between the plots. These were kept mowed very low by maintenance personnel much like golf course appearance and there was rarely a vole seen.
Nurseries, due to close row spacing and tender young trees that appeal to voles appetite, we did use poison stations. The Nurseries were located furthest from the property lines so as to minimize vole pressure.
Hope that answers your question.
Yes, it suggests your situation was unusual, that you didn’t protect trunks with plastic spirals as is common in commercial orchards here.
Incidentally, snow is all the cover meadow voles need, in my experience, and fully dwarfing rootstocks tend to be much more attractive to meadow voles than free standing ones. I agree that the younger the tree the more attractive. .
