Orchard planning

Now that the plan for the front humming bird garden is in place time to starting doing a little more long term planning which is our orchard.




This orchard has been something Gloria and I have always talked about. I am not even certain how we got on the subject but I can imagine it had something to do with the fact that Me and now my son will eat all the fruit in the house and Gloria was tired of not being able to get any cause we ate it too fast.


So when we purchased this house we knew having land was important. Which is why we have over an acre of land for our small fruit orchard.


Now I must admit I am new to this so the plan is more than likely to change. Especially since I do not fully understand how pollination works and how to manage it properly.


Step one clear the land!
Below is an old picture from 2010 of what our land looked like. As you can see about half of it is covered in trees.

The portion boxed out is the area that will be deforested.

After removing the trees we should have something like this.

 Finally time to map out the trees. Our lot is 100' wide roughly and most trees require between 20-30 feet for spacing. I would like to not have the trees drop fruit over the property line. So all trees need to be within 10' of the property line. So now the width is only 80'. Assuming 20' between each tree we can have up to 5 trees per column. I plan to start out with only 3 threes per column. With a lot of spacing to make sure they get plenty of sun and to bring down the cost of the irrigation system. So we should have something like this.

The trees I would like to plant are:
moonglow pears
ozark premier plums
glohaven peaches
yellow glass cherries
fugi apples (my favorite)
gala apples


and maybe the paw paw fruit since it is native to these parts.


Well I'm off to do more day dreaming!