Many today discuss changes in weather, growing conditions, disease pressure, chemicals used, finances, new dangers etc. In the orchard. Is it time to pay the piper in your orchard or do you have plans to kick the can down the road a bit longer. After a lifetime literally of growing things one thing i can tell you is nothing stays the same. Nature adapts and i adapt to nature i dont fight it. What worked for me last year no longer works. Plants adapt , we adapt but diseases and pests change also. What are your plans and what are you fighting in your orchard? Deer , rabbits, fireblight? Weather?
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Damn Rabbits,rabbits rabbitts!..lol
Our problem is our foe here is the plucky, very small, well camouflaged Swamp Rabbit. Unless they are zipping across the yard flipping and jumping as they like to do; it is tough to spot them.
I’m sure we could set loose our Aussynnes hybrid dog and he would take care of them ; but he hates people who are not his. We do not want to risk him wandering away at night. These rabbits go right up the dogs in the goat enclosures. They really push it.
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Have you tried putting a loose cage of chicken wire around the trunks of the trees? I do that to prevent porcupines from stripping the bark.
I can sympathize about them in my vegetable garden. I have a deer proof fence, and then inside the garden I have to put up a cottontail proof fence until the plants get big enough. Maybe this year there will be more for them to eat so they won’t come visit.
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We have put up some cages. Had a few tipped by the buggers. Guess I will have to break out the ole squirrel rifle and dig up the rabbit recipes. I’m not real fond of squirrel, but our family is. Squirrel, cheese grits, homemade biscuits, greens and sweet corn. Family you have not seen in months show up on the doorstep then.
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That’s my biggest argument for breeding your own, through large scale seeding and neglect. Whatever survives may not be the best tasting, but chances are if you started with good genetics it will taste pretty good and be tough enough for your location.
Many of the old heirloom apple varieties that i read about have the same story. They were chance seedlings that survived in utter neglect until someone came and found that they had decent fruit. God has built a lot of genetic variability into these fruit species and it is extremely likely that every problem whether disease, pest, or climate can be solved by the right combination of genetics. Increase the number of combinations, and pray a little, and you increase your chances of coming across a variety that can solve your specific set of problems.
I don’t know nearly enough about the topic but I read a book, mainly dealing with annual vegetable gardening, called “Landrace Gardening,” by Joseph Lofthouse. He breeds his vegetable varieties by allowing as many vastly different types of a vegetable to cross pollinate over a number of years, and then he plants out the seeds and doesn’t fertilize, water, or weed. What survives makes it into next years breeding. Obviously fruit trees take longer to breed and trial, but i think that the same principles can be applied, and that we have no better solution.
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True to a degree. Though breeding for size or other trait is fun.
I’d love to breed a very,very large apple with decent taste, zone 9 heat tolerance and 2-3 months storage at a minimum.
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Clarkinks,
We started our tiny orchard with Cherry and peach trees. Same year planting we picked two perfect peaches and 2 cups of cherries. I thought, “this is fun and easy…”
Next two years were the college of bug control. I graduated year 3 with 1500 nice peaches and 2 gallons of cherries. Year 4 was nearly the same. OK, not as easy with all the spray but working. Year 5, hard freeze killed all but two buds on peaches, voles girdled 2 of the 3 cherry trees and damaged one peach trees. Last week, another hard freeze, 2024???
To have fruit trees, you must be optimistic. Maybe this years hard freeze will mean less thinning!
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The time is now. Get to it, man!
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That sounds like paradise! Every year i plant or graft something different to stay ahead of my adversaries. My pears have bad years sometimes, i have other fruit. My goal is to always have excess food growing where even a 100 deer and racoons cant steal enough for me to even notice.
Can i drop off some of my rabbits any place you know of? We need to take a truck load to @fruitnut he likes a good rabbit dinner. There was a time i did but i think that was 10 000 rabbits ago.
I agree the next great fruit tree hasnt been created yet. We can always graft over the rejects.
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Wire mesh for rodent control! I hear most stone fruits catch up with you somewhere around year 3 to 5. Maybe re-assess and trial more varieties? Some may bloom earlier/later, have less good tasting but more reliable harvests? That way you’re more likely to have something for your efforts most years instead of a total loss. I’m sure I’ll find out the hard way with my peach and bush cherries soon.
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Bug control college?
Maybe bug control is a topic for its own thread, but pesticides currently labeled and available for backyard use are limited.
Now that Scotts-Ortho pulled from distribution their lower applicator risk neo-nicotinoid acetamiprid in the form of Ortho Flower Fruit and Vegetable Insect Killer Concentrate and the Insecticide Formerly Known as Sevin no longer contains carbaryl but has been switched to a pyrethroid, the choices are limited.
I guess the faceless “they” want you to use a pyrethroid. Besides being pricey, I have been warned they are too broad-spectrum and could result in mite outbreaks defoliating your trees. And I guess there is Malathion, an organophosphate, which is supposed to be one of the lower risk of those agents (labeled Caution) but also less effective than Imidan (labeled Warning and only labeled for farm or commercial use, but very effective on the common insect pests of many types of fruit).
I recommended spinosad (available in Bonide Captain Jack’s Dead Bug Brew Concentrate–check the label for the version having spinosad) to my brother-in-law, who has a medium sized backyard orchard. Being the metabolic product of a bacterium, it is qualified as Organic, and I don’t see a Warning or Caution on the product label, but it is a neurotoxin, so at the very least change out of your orchard clothes and wash your hands before touching your eyes or mouth or eating or drinking anything.
I guess this acts on nicotine receptors, but it has a different classification than the neonicotinoids. It is pricey and it has very low persistence, which helps the environment but it is not spray two times a year and forget about it as one could do with Ortho Fruit Flower and Vegetable Insect Killer Concentrate.
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Paul,
I did graduate from Bug college, I use Triazicide and Captan mix about every 10 to 14 days. Bugs, OFM, are under control. I even sprayed some last year without any real fruit so they wouldn’t move back in.
I also graduated from the college of Deer, Racoon, birds and squirrels deterrents. The electric fence, .22 rifle, traps and bird netting did the job.
If I was reading these posts sooner, I would be a head.
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