Polk County Master Gardeners
News Articles
Peaches on the Rock Pile
This was the winter we decided that adding some fruit trees to the yard
was in order. They should be planted while they are still dormant. The following
is mostly what we learned in the process, so perhaps you will not need to learn
the hard way as well. Be sure to choose fruit varieties that do well in
Arkansas. The Agricultural Extension Office can be a great help here.
Select your site and prepare the holes for planting before buying the
trees. That way you can do the hardest parts of the job at leisure and make it a
little easier on your back. And if your yard is as well supplied with rocks as
ours, find someone who can dig the holes in a more efficient way than with a
shovel. We found a backhoe works great.
The site should get plenty of sun - the more the better - and should be well
drained. You can fix almost anything else, but sun and drainage are hard to
retrofit.
Depending on how poor your soil is, decide how large and how deep to make the
planting holes. We decided that 3 feet deep and 3 feet in diameter would be well
worth the effort. Of course, 3 feet is much too deep to plant your trees, so we
backfilled the hole, eliminating the larger boulders and adding some peat moss.
About every 6 inches of fill, we stopped and soaked the soil so that it would
settle. The last 6 inches we filled with a combination of screened topsoil, peat
moss, and compost. We continued this mixture about 6 inches above ground level
so that we had at least 1 foot of really good soil to plant our trees in. We had
sent off soil samples to the Agricultural Extension Office so that we could add
the proper amounts of fertilizer and correct the pH.
The trees, by the way, had been kept in a pail of water so that their roots
would not dry out. We dug a hole in the good soil and put the tree in place,
making sure the graft was above the top of the soil. Then we filled the hole
with water and began scraping the soil we had removed back around the tree. This
takes a while because of all the water in the hole, but you can eventually get
it pressed firmly around the tree trunk.
Then the tree should be pruned. You can get diagrams from the Extension
Office or find them on the Internet, but the purpose is to keep the top of the
tree open to sunlight and retain three or four good branches to become the major
support for the fruit to come.
The last step is to put a layer of mulch around the tree. This should extend
out in about a four foot radius. As the tree grows, you can extend the mulched
area so that it covers out to the drip line. It will help conserve moisture in
the summer and keep the soil at a more even temperature.
And long after your back recovers, you can plan on making peach preserves.
By Barbara M. Tobias
Back to News Articles
Back to
Polk County Master Gardeners
|
