Myself… healed of 40 year+ autoimmune disease… by eating nothing but fatty meats for 30 days.
There are many many people like me out there.
There are also many vegans… who’s health declined seriously over time… that were healed when they conveted to carnivore diet.
A very nice young lady… named Steak and Butter Gal (on youtube) is just one of many of those that you can find. I think she has been carnivore for 6 years now and completely healed all the maladies veganism caused. She tells her health journey if you are interested.
Myself… I cycle thru strict keto, ketovore and carnivore diets thruout the year to maintain my health.
I did two months of carnivore last year and so far this year 1 month.
After a month or two of carnivore… it is like a health reset happens for me… I can then fall back to the more generous strict keto diet… and do well for months…which eventually degrades some and when I realize that… i cycle back thru ketovore… and if that does not resolve issue in a month or two… i go full carnivore.
I am not telling you what I believe by listening to others… like that guy at nutritionfacts.org.
I am telling you what I know by thoroughly testing and journaling via eliminatiin diet… what works for me… and what does not.
i started out thinking that i would want everything to be as easy as possible because i tend toward laziness naturally, but with one exception it’s paid off in that those things are easier to get to and manage as i age.
the exception is my paths, which should be wider in case i need a walker eventually. so laying my paths flat and plenty wide would be another thing i’d have done differently from the start
I definitely followed this bit of advice when I planted new trees last year. I read so many threads where people wished they had a bit more space to drive equipment/ move between trees.
The other way to do this would be to do a very tight planting and prune and train to keep the plants manageable in size. One might still want to make wide paths between rows of trees to get a cart, walker, scooter, etc between them.
I may do a second planting sometime in the future that is tighter and more garden-like.
This advice I definitely did not follow. Partly because I wasn’t sure what would fail. Also by the time some of my trees (pears) reach fruiting age it will be a while and I can’t go back in time and plant them. I am also 42 and planning for when I am 50, 60, etc. Which may influence some of my decisions.
I do wonder which trees become more work and which become less work with age.
For my newly planted trees I spend a lot of time to protect them from deer and racoons, to weed around them - which takes longer since my trees are in cages (peaches especially seem to hate weeds) and to carefully shape them (a skill I hope I will get faster with). I also hooked up and maintain irrigation for them which was considerable effort.
Spraying is difficult and peaks at a tough time of year for me, but it seems like less work than starting the young trees.
With over 250 trees in my hobby orchard. Even maintaining pruning has become a chore to keep up with. I have now started to remove trees not producing well and not replacing.
Creating Frankenstein trees in cases of trees I want some apples off but not whole trees.
I need help with spacing on a property that’s most constrained north to south. I went to a commercial apple orchard in California and they had their trees flat topped at 7 ft with spacing of “height +2 feet” for 9 ft north-south spacing on centers.
Someone into landscape planning and permaculture told me as a hobbyist in Minneapolis humidity, I would be reducing disease pressure and thus my workload by adding one extra foot spacing over whatever I saw at a commercial orchard. I hypothesize visually I would like the look of a tree one foot higher than 7’, which is 8’ = hand reach while standing on a plastic lawn chair.
So I can’t decide if I should be doing 10 ft on the centers or 11 ft on centers N-S for 7’ to 8’ tall trees???
East-to-West I’m doing 15 feet between centers so that I can scrunch 3 blueberry-sized bushes E-W across on the south plots and let them dangle a little into a 3’ to 4’ between-row space.
Orchard is starting at 3 rows of 4 plots, which is just enough space for me to grow an extra of few cultivars and post reviews to e.g. this forum. Expandable to a 4th row. So I’m fencing approx 50x50 feet or 1/16th an acre.
How many trees are you planning on having? how many rows? are you saying 10’ between trees or between rows?
I think advice will be very different for Minneapolis Zone 4 than for CA. I’m not sure what conditions in Minneapolis are like but CA has limited water and low disease pressure. Also, commercial orchards use certain rootstocks, varieties and pruning techniques to maximize production instead of maximizing things a hobbyist might value.
There are people doing high density hobby orchards here, so maybe look at some posts from those folks or ask them what they would do? Also I liked this article when I was thinking about that: High Density Apple Orchard Management | NC State Extension Publications. It has a lot of economics of it, which didn’t apply to me but it laid out the ideas.
I guess you could look at it that way. In my case I have too many trees to prune and spray. By combining let’s say 5 trees on to one tree I still get the pleasure of having the apples I like and don’t have to manage the rest.
When I first started I was a lot younger and had hopes of selling apples and maybe a small fruit stand even a self pick. I had my daughter and wife to help as well.
My poor planning forgot that my daughter would get married and leave and my wife and I would get old, who’d figure!
Combining trees just makes getting older a little less stressful but still having varieties that you can enjoy even if you now have gotten old with only a few teeth that work.
Oh! this makes me feel better. Often when people talk about reducing number of trees I think they’re talking about going from ten to five.
I have less than half of what you have but have started removing things that I don’t want for one reason or another - but I’m still adding things I do want in other areas.
Just talked to someone in the Minneapolis area… while growing up (before the days of the personal computer & Nintendo when kids spent their summer days outside) they grew 300 apple trees. Brother now lives at the place and has it down to 50.
In my case I didn’t know squirrels, raccoons, possums and birds would eat or damage almost all my fruit if not protected. I should have grown all the trees spindle shape instead of open center so that they would be easier to cage or cover.
Bags on individual fruit doesn’t work since the animals just rip the bags apart. An electric fence would help some but it’s not practical in my situation.
So far, it has been a small enough amount that my friends and neighbors are able to take care of any excess!
I bought a neglected orchard - well, I bought a house and it came with a neglected orchard. I would say most of the trees are a bit of fussy types, but some were also just buried in invasive plants. It’s been slow getting them pruned and sprayed and things. I was so so happy the day I got to give my best friend two big buckets of peaches.
Since I realized I like working out in the yard and I learned how to spray peaches and I like peaches, I put in more peach trees. I also added apricots because I love them and they’re hard to get. I know I might only get them every few years, but I think apricot trees are pretty, so I will be happy (I LOVE my flat wonderful tree even though I’ve never had a peach from it).
Live fruit trees I’ve taken out were all overgrown Asian pear trees that were very closely spaced: 8-10 feet between the tree and 20+ feet tall with no branches I could even reach. I have yet to eat a properly ripened pear from any of them! I ate a couple Asian pears off of some trees two years ago but they didn’t taste very good and I don’t think they were ripe.
I would be much less ambitious about trying to make things work and instead lean heavily into things that just work naturally. Take a series of long hikes around your neighborhood. Do European pears get consistently covered with those orange dots but European plums fruit heavily and look perfectly healthy with zero input? Fig tree hosts a murder-fest with entire ecosystem of animals fighting for them while the apple trees around get zero attention? You know what I would choose now lol.
Here’s a similar thread from a few years ago that might be helpful:
At this point if I could redo anything I would make my paths a foot wider in the garden and all my apple trees in my garden area would be interstem trees. They just seem to do better all around than the trees that are just on Bud 9.
