Pruning of the orchard is DONE!!!

Looking north out of a deer blind

Looking east

I finished pruning the Upper Orchard today except for one or two trees that I am treading-water on. I will deal with them when I make a decision.

I got the last chestnut tree planted. The chestnuts are in a short row on the steepest part of the hill, five trees on 16' centers. "Why 16 feet?" Because a standard stick of lumber is 8' and I used baling twine as a marker and I wrapped it end-to-end and tied a loop-knot for markers. Even multiples of 8' are very easy to generate.

While pruning the orchard, the different "vigor" between apple varieties can be striking. Hazen is a very compact variety. Keepsake (one of the parents of Honeycrisp) is also low-vigor. Yellow Delicious is fairly low vigor. Most of the "McIntosh" types are vigorous. The heavier bearing types like Liberty are vigorous before they come into bearing but slow down when they start producing fruit. Others...well, not so much. Nearly all cultivars that are triploids are vigorous and relatively disease resistant. GoldRush is to Yellow Delicious what Liberty is to McIntosh. You need to control fruiting to get tree-size on GoldRush or it will runt-out.

The Upper Orchard and the Hill Orchard combined are about one acre in size. A mediocre commercial fruit grower will get 40,000 pounds of apples per acre and a good grower will get 50k to 60k pounds of apples. They are also sinking about $25k per acre into trees (1000-to-1500 trees @ $15k), trellis, irrigation and so-on. Some of them have wind-machines to reduce risk of frosts. They are into full production three-to-four years from the starting gun. They can change the apples they are ship as market as demand changes in a very short time.

That is a very high-input system. Like a plane flying very fast at very low altitude, small hiccups have expensive consequences.

The upper-orchard has a nominal tree density of 115 trees per acre instead of the 1000-to-1500 trees per acre that a high-input orchard will have. Each tree has roughly ten times as much surface area and a larger volume of soil to draw moisture from. Larger trees tend to have deeper roots which means they are not totally reliant on irrigation but can draw on moisture banked in the subsoil.

The price of designing an orchard that can survive lapses in operator attention are that they will produce fewer pounds of apples, will have obsolete-and-unmarketable varieties*, will have higher labor to pick (unless you shake the trees) and will have a higher percentage of Grade B and Grade C apples. In Eaton County, Michigan a low-input grower might get 14,000 pounds of apples per acre (120 pounds per tree) or about 1/3 of what a mediocre commercial fruit grower would get. That would be a reasonable expectation MOST years.

*One of my tasks next fall is to start keying out which trees are what varieties. I have a partial list of what was planted in the orchard:

• Liberty (McIntosh types)
  
• Melrose
• Cortland
• Empire (lots of Empire!!!)
• Macoun
  
• Starkspur Golden Delicious (Golden Delicious types)
  
• Gala
• Spur-type Red Delicious (Red Delicious types)
  
• Hazen
• Gloster 69
• Idared (Jonathan types)
  
• Jonafree
• Melrose
• Northern Spy
• Spigold
• Keepsake