Growing Orchard

Changing the pH of the soil is slow business, but the blueberries continue the fight. Enough flowers this spring to feed my hungry face with blueberries this summer! Maybe next year the soil+age of the plants will = surplus available for sale!

Grapes have been unimpressive in my poor soil, but this year their roots finally seem to have established some dominance against the stubborn grass. After two years, we see some top growth. (Grape plants have since been weeded)

The orchard will produce its first grapes!

The lonesome Kiwi survives. Two of her sisters and her mate have died. Without a male, these plants cannot produce fruit.

One of five blueberry varieties in the orchard.

There will be a huge amount of currants coming my way! I am excited to have a crop to harvest. Growing perennials is a game of patience, seeing results is a gift. One of 50+ currant bushes at the orchard...yum!

A few Haskap/honeyberries have already ripened. Unfortunately the 30 plants I planted last spring have produced collectively 8 berries. Here's hoping next spring will prove more rewarding. In the meantime, I have planted a further 25 haskap plants this spring and continue to propagate new plants from cuttings.

Saskatoons ripening in the sun. I purchased two varieties of Saskatoon. Lee 8 (pictured here) is producing fruit on every plant. The Martin variety has not produced a single berry.

Seven

Fall is a time to take stock. I tried a few things this year and learned a few lessons that will allow me to move forward into more focused plantings.

1.     Asparagus loves my site/soil/climate. Now I am trying to decide how much more to plant next year,  whether I should invest in roots or start plants from seed, and how to prepare the soil in advance for a massive planting.

Asparagus in July. Next spring it will be possible to harvest two spears per plant.

Dwarf cherry, the leaves slowly died
 back until there was only this little
 tuft left. It lives, for now.

2.       Cherries and miniature kiwis are not suited to my site. While the plants still cling to life, the amount of trouble they are having surviving does not bode well. In the spring I will replant these plants in a different area and plant more worthwhile plants in their place. There is no point leaving the prime top-of-the-hill real estate to a group of plants that won’t bear fruit. Better to fill the space with fruit trees that have been doing well.

3.       Plums and apricots are fantastic. More of these will be planted. I love them- they are tough and not many local producers have these crops which means should I ever take them to the farmer’s market I won’t have competition.

4.       Strawberries are delicious, and I am still harvesting in October. There are a lot of strawberry producers in the area, though, so I will keep my production for personal consumption only.

5.       Praying mantises live in Canada! They, along with snakes, love my bit of land and I expect this has to do with leaving tall grasses. I will keep the areas directly below my trees tidy in the future, but will leave wild areas for biodiversity. This will also help wild pollinator species as I want to introduce more species of flowers to those areas.

This red currant produced
DELICIOUS and sweet berries!

6.       Some red currant varieties are delicious and sweet. They bear fruit the second year. I will plant more. Saskatoons taste good and bear the first year, but the skin breaks upon picking. This destroys their potential for even short term storage.

7.       Since the field has no irrigation, there is no point in preparing a vegetable garden with non-drought tolerant crops. Most of my vegetables did not grow. 

I love my project. I love that I can make mistakes and learn and always keep dreaming of potential futures the project could have. I was afraid of taking this risk, but it is the most worthwhile risk I have ever taken.

Have a lovely week.

Apricots have beautiful red tinted foliage all summer long.

Munching on grape leaves, this is one fat caterpillar.

The Flowering spring

Eden’s Rise has gone from a low-maintenance uncultivated bit of land to an orchard screaming for attention. A week and a half without rain, grass growing through the mulch, vegetable gardens need to be prepared, the last raised bed box needs to be built and the flowers…

When transplanting bare-rooted trees, many roots are lost in the process. These little trees have a compromised root system and very little wood in their trunk. To compensate for the loss of root, I trimmed back the branches at planting time, being sure to leave only 50% or less of the wood (technically it should be closer to 30% but it was my first time and it’s scary hacking away at $50 trees!). Now the roots are able to adsorb enough water to support their remaining limbs.

This first year is a dance for life, if the roots don’t develop well enough this year, it will mean regular watering next year and the year after… it is better to encourage root development now and then have peace of mind next year that if it doesn’t rain for a week and a half, I don’t have to run over to the field with buckets of water every three days to help them out. I also want them to be developing a healthy thick trunk that will help them survive harsh winter temperatures.

How to do this?

You can imagine I gave my young trees a severe talking to this week when I walked into the field to find a dozen of them flowering! I quickly picked off all flower buds and open flowers but I know when I return today I will have more flowers to remove. Deflowering at three weeks! They are far too young!

The wood from these trees was originally a branch on a mature tree. They were cut off and grafted to a rootstock (most of mine I chose a semi-dwarfing rootstock) and shipped to me after the graft was properly healed. We can talk more about grafting in another post, but for now it’s just important as the trunk still thinks it’s a branch in a much larger tree system (plants don’t think in the sense humans do, but bear with me here guys, it’s artistic license).

When the tree flowers and a bee visits to introduces male pollen to the female flower’s stigma (the open end of a tunnel that will draw pollen into the ovary) it takes a lot of energy from the plant. By the time a fruitlet is visible, half of the energy required to make a fully ripened fruit has already been expended. This year I cannot allow/afford for the trees to bear a single fruit as it could come at the cost of losing the tree in the winter.

Simple as that.

Next year some of the smaller bushes will be allowed to fruit, like the blueberries, saskatoons, and currants. The apples, plums, and cherries will have to wait until year 3 at the earliest.

You don’t plant an orchard if you’re in a hurry!

Have a lovely week.

Saskatoon Berry

It has been a week since planting day, and I have returned almost daily to see the progress of my plants. While most of the trees are still dormant, the cherries are tentatively opening some buds. The winners in the race are my smaller fruiting plants- the bushes. There are signs of life from most of them, and several varieties have already been brave enough to unfurl a few leaves!

The real stars of the show are the Saskatoon berries. They have grown so rapidly I can almost see them grow. From a bare stick a week ago, they have shown a tremendous desire to thrive and survive. (The three pictures along the left are of the same plant a few days apart.)

Never heard of a Saskatoon berry?

 I have never heard of it being grown as a commercial crop, and had you asked me a year ago what they looked like I would not have had a clue what to tell you. It is the description from the nursery catalogue that pressed me into ordering 8 of these plants—but really after waiting so many years to have a chance at growing my own orchard, I had trouble not trying one of everything in the book!

Saskatoons make a good hedgerow, which is why my 8 plants are lined up with the neighbour’s fence, though far enough away that his horses can’t reach over and eat them! The plant is native to the prairies which makes it extremely hardy (up to Zone 2!) and the catalogue promises that Saskatoons are the easiest berries to grow, they will accept any type of soil! Perfect! Of course, now if the Saskatoons fail I will know that the problem is not my soil—it’s me!

As for flavour, I am not sure that Saskatoons are very palatable if eaten raw, but I am told that birds love them and this can be a useful crop for luring birds away from fruit that has higher market value.

How long before we can taste the berries? Hopefully these plants should be well established enough by next year to allow pollination of some flowers. A nice relief to have some plants that will bear fruit early. It is a shocking investment planting an orchard and then having to wait 5 years with your fingers crossed for good weather and low pest pressure before harvesting a decent crop!

 The star of the week, the lovely Saskatoon berry!