The nursery folk are going to hate me for changing my order the 10th time. Maybe I will try some m111 given your experiences. Most of my pears are OHxF87 (if I recall correctly).
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Those ohxf87 do fine but rabbits love them. Mm111 work good for me and they are all that works. They barely work by the way but they stay alive on some parts of my property.
@HunterHomestead, Mm111 have done fine in my Virginia clay, but I’ve also done okay with some Bud9 as well as some G969 roots. But my clay isn’t probably as bad as Clarks, plus I don’t have the dry weather he has to deal with. Most dwarf stocks are going to hate dry weather unless you irrigate them.
One other thought as you choose rootstocks is that I’ve found dwarf rootstocks less practical with the regular deer pressure I have. Besides eating any fruit, they keep munching back the new shoots and it runted out most of my dwarf trees. I’ve decided I like more vigor and then just making sure I summer prune to keep them in check if they start getting bigger than I want.
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I have clay soil, but no puddle, they are on a slope.
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Hi Clark,
Your property appears to lack much topography; is there a low point within a 1/4 mile you could drain to? If so maybe look at recontouring certain parts to redirect runoff. Clay can absorb tons of water but it also quite often forms a hardpan!
clayey soil
Hardpan is an impermeable compact layer of clayey soil found below the top soil. Hardpans can be formed due to drought or by calcium carbonate, dissolved silica and iron oxide deposits that act as binding agents and fuse the soil particles together.
You might want to rent a long mechanical auger to drill down about 4-5’ just to see if it’s possible to break thru your impermeable layer. Here where I live I have a hardpan typically about 2-3’ deep, but once I punch thru it, things drain fairly well. In west Tn where I lived in my youth our farm have many places where hardpan required a subsoiler be brought thru about every 3-4 years to break up the soil and allow root penetration in our pastures.
Just a couple of thoughts
Dennis
Kent, wa
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Everything works pretty good as it is for me. I have put in many drains and water ways, ponds, terraces at great expense. The thing about clay is it does not drain quickly. The water will cut ditches if the water ways are to steep or it will drown everything if not steep enough. Clay is high in nutrients but difficult to work with.
https://growingfruit.org/t/ponds-are-a-great-investment/7033
As an example this many years ago in 2016
More recently 2019
Clark, I assume you have, but have you tried any of the Geneva rootstocks in your clay? I read some materials saying G.11 is particularly is good in wet clay soils (as well as G.41 to a lesser extent). Cummins also said the same when I asked them.
Granted, I don’t see to have standing water like you (just dense clay), so that may be a difference.
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The problem with geneva is it technically needs staking. Prefer mm111 over all of the apple rootstocks yes and i wish they did even better than they do. Geneva might work for you but it doesn’t work well for me.
I have poorly draining clay soil, but from the sound of it not as difficult as Clark’s. Also, I only have a handful of trees so I can make mounds of soil from which to grow them. Many of orchards/u-picks round here seem to use mm111. As part of my apple planting experiment, in addition to some of the Genevas that I am trying, I also have some mm111/b9 interstems. I am hoping that the trees will be a bit smaller/ more manageable than those of local orchards but will still thrive because of the mm111. We’ll see in a few years.
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I think I said it above but not all clay has that problem of lack of drainage. I have clay soil and my soil drains great. My issues are it is hard for plants to penetrate the ground because it is so hard. Another problem is things that are not drought resistant either need constant watering or they die here. Perennials are a bit better as they can reach down deep with their roots and after a set amount of years don’t need watering but annuals are a net loss here. I have tried fully dwarfing rootstock where I live but due to the dryness and lack of humidity they don’t do well here.
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We need more than 3 categories and could communicate better if textures were given at least 12 categories starting with blue straight clay being one and 12 being about the coarseness of beach sand.
Maybe your soil is 3 or 4 in this scale.
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I believe the soil texture triangle has 12 categories. With a little practice it’s fairly easy to put soils close to one of these just by the feel of moist soil.
soil texture triangle - Bing images
All the soils with less than 40% clay have the potential to be great fruit soils with the exception of sand and loamy sand.
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I’m not sure which clay mine is. Whichever one it is like I said it is amazing for perennials that can break through it and go around rocks. We have an apricot tree and a few crabapples that came with the house. We don’t have to water them but we also don’t have drainage issues. Mine is a brown clay for what it is worth. Like I said very hard and lots of rocks ingrained in it. If you get through the rocks and get the plants established boy is it a nice soil though. We do have to water flowers like Choriopsis however you spell it but many things grow well water free.
How do you communicate texture by using this pyramid?.
Soil classifications usually label a soil as for instance Muscatine silt loam. Silt loam is the soil texture and Muscatine is the soil series. That’s the texture of the A horizon, ie the top soil. Often the B horizon is higher in clay because the clay tends to move down as the soil ages. So the subsoil of the Muscatine series might typically be a clay loam.
The Muscatine silt loam is a soil series in Ilinois and Iowa that developed from silty material, loess, that blew off the Mississippi river floodplain after the last ice age.
My orchard has a lot of wet spots like that and I had some things die until I bought a truckload of soil and made mounds to plant it. Just keeping the crown slightly above has allowed me to even grow cherries and apricots in spots that killed them in a previous year without the mound.
We have heavy clay and I’ve been able to grow almost everything I want. The wetter spots tend to grow a lot slower but they still grow.
Patience and determination is the key to everything you want. If something doesn’t work, try it again in a different way.
I also have 7.2 pH and have over 30 blueberry bushes planted in the ground that are steadily growing and producing more and more each year. Cornell told me it wouldn’t work but I made it work. I just mixed in lots of pine bark and peat moss and amended an entire row. It’s been 5 years now and no pH issues yet. You can make anything work if you’re willing to do the extra labor to succeed.
As I said, we need a simpler form of classification that pertains purely to drainage properties.
There are seven classes of soil drainage: CT_ECO_Resource_Guide_Soils_Drainage.pdf (uconn.edu)
But there are complicating factors such as depth to water table and surface drainage.
For many fruits well drained or moderately well drained are great. With irrigation excessively well drained could work fine. With good surface drainage and a deep water table a somewhat poorly drained soil might work.
Drainage and soil permeability are related but not the same factors.
OK, so now we only have to figure out how soil fits in to each specific class and share a system of classification so your list has some purpose to folks like us.
You have to admit that it is a lot easier to measure and discuss pH.
I have no problem with sand or loamy sand if I have access to irrigation. Hell, loamy sand is great with a thick mulch most years without irrigation here.
There’s not a whole lot of difference between growing trees in sand and growing them in potting soil. Frequent watering and supplementary watering is involved with the success of each.