Some small nurseries on the west coast have begun using Pacific (swamp) crabapple as a rootstock for very wet areas. Pacific (swamp) crabapple can even be grown in areas with standing water. I have purchased a few apple trees with named apple cultivars grafted on top. The young trees I planted this winter seem to be doing well in an area only feet away from the lake shore. Pacific crabapple used as a rootstock is supposed to result in a semi dwarf apple tree.
Buying Pacific crabapple trees is rather expensive if intended as a rootstock. Pacific crabapple is supposed to grow fairly true from seed, so I purchased 40 seeds cheaply over the internet last fall. I cold stratified the seeds in a 50/50 mix of damp coco choir and wood shavings in the fridge for 3 months. I planted the seeds this spring and I was rather surprised when almost all the seeds grew. I now have more crabapple rootstock than I will ever need for my wet areas. I also purchased a winter banana apple tree so that I could use scion wood from it as an interstem to graft pears onto the Pacific crabapple rootstock in case I wanted pears near the waters edge as well.
I just thought I’d mention some other less expensive options.
I understand and empathize with that sentiment. The difference is that southeast Louisiana is way wetter than your area or mine. And his soil looks flatter and more poorly drained than yours but I could be wrong on this point.
where did you buy the seed for that crabapple? it sounds like the ticket for my clay soil. when it rains hard i get pooling here as well and im at the bottom of a hill.
We do have wild (I’m assuming callery) pears growing all over, and landscaped Bradford pears
I currently have 7 on callery in another (not wet) spot doing well, planted last year:
Hartwell Cook, Leona, Olton Broussard, Orient, Pineapple, Sweet Cheeks.
I’m looking for relatively cheap material to build berms to plant in. I’d love to build a pond but $$,$$$
Why not start getting free wood chips? Stack them as high as you can for 3 or 4 years bury them in dirt and wind up with burms 4 feet higher than your soil is now. Drift wood , logs etc. Bury them and build it up 10 feet if you can. This is what i’m thinking start with Hugelkultur . Mostly it is hard work and not money involved. If you only plant 30 trees a year you will have the ideal orchard! My only goal ever was to outplant my pests.
Not that i’m advocating it for you, but if i were you and i was driving down the road and saw callery or other wild pear growing in standing water i might ask the owner if i could have some of those trees. The first planting would be water tolerant callery or similar tree on a burm made of whatever i could find. Once you have fruit coming in it is much easier to plan on growing more. The hardest part is starting!
In that situation he will need something that can survive where other fruit trees cannot. I’m using BET for that now but this year, some were hit with fireblight worse than callery. They still work for me but in Louisiana they won’t work. I’ve not been planting callery for a couple of years because of their tendency to be invasive when not grafted. I might use them responsibly but not everyone would or did. We are running out of rootstock options for pears. There are people who plant callery as an ornamental instead of using them as a rootstock which has caused huge problems. I have a wild callery in my ditch on county property i will need to kill. There are buried cables in that area. I’m not the type to let them flower.
Considering the look of that ‘soil’ in the pictures, you are likely going to save yourself a lot of misery if you either import dirt or create it. Berms, either from imported soil or something with a wood center for hugelkultur, or a couple feet of chips left for a few years if you have the time.
I’m also considering planting all my potted trees (200+) in my current garden field which is almost completely overtaken by nutsedge, and relocate the garden to the front here after a few years of building up.
Thinking now I might plant a few trees (like callery grafted pears) on elevated individual mounds around the perimeter. I could stockpile wood chips, bring in chicken/horse/cow manure, rotate cover crops, etc and make a slower more gradual planting over a couple years, gardening along the way as the soil improves.
This is from where the drive comes off the highway, as seen in the above pic.
You can zoom in and see where water (and debris) flows across the drive in heavy rain. The ditch at the highway is probably 6-12” higher than this point. The whole yard drains here’s across the drive into the woods.
The problem with trying raised plantings with wood chips is that when they rot down, they don’t give you much above grade. I’d estimate when wood chips rot down, they will give single digit percentages in volume from where they started. In other words, if one started with a 4’ mound or terrace with wood chips, or manure, by the time it settled and rotted, you’d end up with maybe 6" tall mounds, which isn’t much of a mound.
I’ve built terraces and mounds by hand (a lot of work) by skid steer, and by motor grader. However, I have a friend who built terraces for a commercial peach orchard using a cheap disc plow (you can youtube it to probably get some examples). Likewise I think a person could do a lot to build terraces with a 3 or 4 bottom plow to loosen the soil and a good heavy rear tractor blade to windrow it into a terrace.
As I mentioned, I used a motor grader to move dirt. Mostly because I had a lot of dirt to move, and didn’t have time to move it really slowly.
I built some terraces with a motor grader I bought and then sold, and some many years later with a rented motor grader.
Here are a couple videos I posted a few years ago showing me expanding the orchard area for enough room for about 300 new peach trees.
I agree with Olpea, wood chips will not provide any elevation once they rot down. For apples, P.18 is another root stock that is noted for being tolerant of wet feet. It was my intention to use it in the wet areas of my orchard. My property is a large bowl with no outlet for water, so I get pooling in the spring with snow melt off. I get enough of an area under water that I haven’t been able to plant P.18 trees in all of that area. Regardless, I’ve had good luck with the trees tolerating it. Should I see issues develop I’ll begin to create mounds to deal with it.
@AndySmith, have you considered the idea of creating infiltration basins in order to consolidate all of the runoff in locations where it can slowly percolate into the soil, leaving you with additional arable land that isn’t sodden?
