I’m going to plant a weeping Santa Rosa in a raised bed this week. I probably need a trash can or two to fill the area. Are there any bagged varieties I should use? The best bagged stuff available locally are the Dr. Earth Foxfarm or Edna’s Best brands. Would those be fine as a raised bed soil? Or is there a better, cheaper option? Those bags run about $10 -12 here.
If you have enough, just use native soil and mulch 3-4 inches.
If not, I like a mixture of coco coir, regular potting mix, compost and vermiculite. Runs cheaper than any of the packaged quality mix.
Could I sub the vermiculite with perlite? I have a lot of coarse perlite leftover from my blueberry mix.
@brownmola, since you live in So Cal, consider a mix of native soil and free municipal mulch to build out your beds. The “muni-mulch” works out pretty well for building soil. I generally compost it first along with a mix of kitchen and yard waste. I spread it around the trees, grass and planters where it keeps the soil critters happy. Free local inputs can’t be beat.
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Thanks. I think I found a place on Craigslist that is offering free aged cow manure compost mixed with topsoil for free pick up. I’ll probably use that.
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Hi! I have raised beds and I use a combination of peat moss, topsoil and my natural soil without rocks and stone. Works well. I add fertilizer depending on what I’m growing. I also add compost. (it all works as a healthy mix).
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What you put in depends on what you’re growing. With trees you don’t want good soil, you want native soil, if you can. The tree needs to get used to the native soil. When you plant trees in the ground you don’t use compost or good soil as the tree roots can stay in the good soil, even girdling themselves. So when I need soil for trees, I use top soil as it’s the least nutritious soil you could use besides say sand! Perlite and vermiculite tend to float to the surface, look terrible, break down in about 5 years and turn to mush. I stopped using them even in my potting mixes, as I dump old potting mix into my raised beds. I use DE now. It does not break down, does not rise to the surface, hold air and water. And should last a few decades if not longer.
If you use raised beds for veggies and such use compost, garden soil, etc. good stuff only! Again I use old potting soil too. Since my veggie beds contain a large amount of organic matter, they need to be replenished yearly. Add compost to your raised bed and it will sink, and you want a tree never to be buried deep, or water to pool around the base. Once older the root flares need to be partially above ground. Again never plant a tree deep and take into account some settling. Error on the side of planting shallow. You can add more soil if you need to! Mound it even in the raised bed, just a little, and use little to no organic material which will decompose on you, volume will lost and the tree will sink.
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Nothing is better than soil in most situations. What you don’t want to do is put something of finer texture over a coarser textured soil. Counterintuitively this leads to serious drainage problems due to inhibiting capillary flow.
Fruit trees perform better in soil not excessively rich, so don’t go crazy with the compost- Ah, but that is based more on growing in areas that get rain during the growing season. In CA you don’t have to worry about overstimulating trees because you have control of the spigot.
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Ah, that makes sense. I’ll see if I can definitely go around the yard to try and find enough native soil to make at least 50% of the mix. I’ll fill in with the other stuff to make up the volume.
As always, thanks everyone for the input, I really appreciate it.
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What I did to get more native soil is I took an area I was going to grow veggies in and removed the top foot or so and added compost and garden soil for the veggies. I used the native soil to help mound my trees.
That agrees with my limited experience. My soil is 5 or 6 inches of topsoil and then sand just like beach sand. Although vegetables don’t do well in that soil the fruit trees are growing fine. I’ve been using wood chips on the surface and I believe that will improve the soil more in the future.
I don’t think my finished compost is necessarily all that rich in nutrients. It isn’t intended to be. The added N in the process gets used up. It might have small, measurable amounts of NPK, but it’s basically dark soil, teaming with life when it’s done.
Finished compost is manufactured soil that serves as an inoculum for microbial activity. I haven’t found it to sink or shrink much unless you allow it to dry out completely. I’ve built up many raised beds with it.
OM is always a source of slow release N and lots of available water after rain. But as I keep saying, it shouldn’t be much of an issue anywhere it doesn’t rain during summer.
Here, after about 10 years of annual generous mulching, my peach trees get excessively vegetative and tend to lose some brix. The humus from the mulching is only 3 or 4" thick but the original soil is pretty good. I expect the problem may be more about the improved water retention than the higher nutrient content but I haven’t investigated it adequately to really know for sure.
N in itself is not supposed to affect brix, even in excess, from studies I’ve seen. Water is the key issue, apparently.
On the bright side, my peach trees tend to be very long lived for east coast trees.
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Agree w/ Alan about the water retention. My guess is the excess water is the dilute of flavor. Alan’s conclusion/reasoning seems sound to me, although I’ve not read any specific research isolating the causative effects (i.e. specific research isolating water vs. nitrogen on fruit quality). Yet intuitively, my thought is it’s mostly water is the detriment.
I’ve used quite a lot of mulch through the years. While I like it generally (for weed control and fertilizer) it does retain quite a lot more water. It reduces soil temperature (reducing evaporation) and absorbs rainfall. Also reduces weed competition under the trees which again reduces moisture loss, increasing soil moisture.
It also produces a somewhat unpredicted consequence for me. Roots of peach trees grow in the top layer of the mulch (it’s wet and fertile). Then, when the mulch breaks down after a few years, roots are exposed, unless they are continually covered. What that means from a commercial prospective is that one has to go through and sever the exposed roots before any herbicide is sprayed beneath the trees.
As mentioned, mulch/higher OM produces higher vigor trees requiring more pruning. This is a pretty big deal w/ apples, as high vigor seems to produce more vegetative growth (reducing fruit production). Because peaches fruit only on one year wood, the extra vigor doesn’t seem to affect crop load as much. Still, peaches crowded out by vigorous growth don’t taste as good. Summer pruning is pretty important, if you have to deal w/ excess summer growth, as I do.
I’m still a fan of free mulch wood chips for all the benefits (moisture retention in dry years, earthworm promotion, OM, reduction in soil erosion, etc.) Just pointing out it has some disadvantages, which must be managed, and are somewhat counter intuitive for fruit growing (at least for me).
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Compost is organic matter and it decays in various ways.Again bad to use when planting for various reasons, loss of mass from decay is a big one for me. Compost doesn’t last long compared to wood chips etc. If you want to use compost with trees, use it as a mulch. Wood chips are a form of compost, same thing happens.The merits of feeding your trees appears to be in debate, but the fact organic molecules breakdown to the basics elements is not in dispute.
Right the bacteria breakdown the soil, to basic atoms in some cases, and smaller ,molecules at least so the plants can absorb and go into growth. [quote=“MrClint, post:12, topic:4233”]
I haven’t found it to sink or shrink much unless you allow it to dry out completely. I’ve built up many raised beds with it.
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I lose about 3 inches a year, as it is being utilized by the life teeming in it. Plants, fungi, and bacteria all decay the product. I add more in the form of leaves, and coffee grounds, straw, bagged compost etc. I have to put in at least a dozen bags of compost a year. I really don’t add compost for the NPK, I add it for the trace elements, and to provide food for the worms, bacteria, fungi, and my fruit trees, veggies, whatever. Shifting mass from soil to plant material takes a lot of energy so I use various fertilizer products for the needed transfer, and to supply some of the basic molecular building blocks. Mass is neither created nor destroyed, just transformed.
These beds were filled to the very top, and even mounded in the middle. All have sunk a lot. The mix was very high in compost, and other organic material like pine bark and peat moss, which are really just other forms of compost that will breakdown. In some places it could use 6 more inches of soil. I try to keep up but it decays faster than i can put it in! Also in some cases like with perennials, the plants have to be dug up and repositioned. A pain!
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I ended up using dirt from a neighbor’s front yard that was doing construction. Voila, the finished piece, Weeping Santa Rosa in the raised garden box.
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Nice! I like the way you kept the stagger going with the top plate. The bed will weather nicely and last a lifetime.
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Olpea, I would your or Alan’s thoughs on a statement I read in a UGA peach publication that stated 1 year shoot growth over 18" is excessive and peach trees with over 18" should not have N applied the following year.
Thanks, Chris.
Chris,
For my part, I pretty much agree w/ that. Saying so, I would rather error on the side of too much shoot extension, than not enough.
I’ve had trees which didn’t put enough shoot extension out and what you end up with is a bunch of short shoots, which don’t produce very good fruit and take extra time to be pruned off. Most people recognize fruit produced on those short spindly shoots are small and less flavorful - all other things the same. I think this is because there aren’t enough leaves to feed the fruit, and to a lesser degree the spindly small shoots have so little energy stored to start with. This is obviously more of a problem on older trees which generally require more N.
Too much N will produce too much foliage which will demand summer pruning to avoid shading/crowding out, but is generally easier to manage than the other. In other words, if you have a bunch of short worthless shoots at the end of the season, you don’t have much to work with. But if you have too much growth, you can manage it a little more throughout the season.
However, it is possible to get way too much vigor. In that case you get too many shoots which branch off. In other words, if a shoot has too much vigor, it won’t stay a simple straight pencil sized ideal shoot. Instead it will want to grow so much it will send out lots of little shoots from the vegetative buds developed that season (this is particularly true of vigorous water spouts). Then you are almost right back in the same scenario as having too little vigor (i.e. a bunch of little 6" shoots which are worthless).
All in all, 18" of shoot extension is ideal, but again I’d rather have a little too much than not enough.
I was at a pruning demonstration at another orchard today and one of the things a friend told me he is doing is a fall application of foliar N - post harvest. He said not only does it reduce N losses - leaching and evaporative - (the foliage absorbs almost 100% of the N, which is translocated to the roots) but it increases bud hardiness, while giving the trees a boost at the optimum time in the spring. Most of my trees are still young enough and the soil fertile enough I don’t want to add extra N right now, but I plan to keep a close watch and when the trees need N, I’d like to try a post harvest foliar application.
Thanks Olpea for the excellent, detailed answer, as a semi rookie grower the 18" growth rule give me a pretty bright line rule on whether or not to fertilize or not.