As summer turned to fall, we finished up the irrigation system (more detail on the final system in a future post) and the rains started in Northern California.
Our moonscape-looking dusty farm took in the rains and the cover crop we spread + native vegetation started showing. We were especially pleased with the amount of tillage radishes we saw emerging in the rocky parts of the farm. The deep ripping broke up these hardpan rocks, and we're hoping the radish will keep open the fractures rather allowing the hardpan to reform.
Below is the cover crop mix we used. We selected this one to help build the soil nutrients & structure while also providing habit for native pollinators.
The farm was now ready to be planted. The trees however, were not ready. It's been a warm fall on the West Coast so the ~900 tissue culture Colossal chestnuts we had at the nursery for the planting, were VERY slow to enter dormancy. They just kept growing!
It wasn't until December that the trees were clearly dormant and ready to be bare rooted and planted. We called on some local friends and family and got nearly all the planting done in two days between Christmas and New Years. Below are some pictures of the planting process with a bit of commentary.
The picture above shows how we measured the in-row spacing of the trees. The berms were built by a tractor with GPS, so we used a 300-foot tape measure attached to a stake at the end of each row to mark where each tree was to be planted - every 20 feet in most of the rows. As long as we placed each tree in the center of the berm, they lined up in both directions across the orchard.
Below you can see the small hole we dug for each tree. The trees roots were not quite a foot long and about 4" wide at the widest. This meant we only needed small holes that usually took one shovel scoop in the soft berms.
A close up of some of the trees we planted are below. You can see that the tree in the middle has both a smaller root ball and a smaller stem than the ones on the left and right. We wouldn't send trees as small as the middle one to a customer, but decided to plant these "B" trees in our demonstration orchard to see how the perform in the compared to the larger ones. My hunch is that we won't be able to tell the difference 12 months from now, but I'd like to collect the data and see what we learn.
Each tree was hand-planted in the berm, level with the soil which was lightly compacted around it to remove air pockets and reduce the chance of settling.
We got ~1.5" of rain in the couple of days following the planting. This was great to help settle the trees. However, when we got back out to the orchard after the rain, we found two things that we needed to address....
1. Many of the trees had indeed sunk. We had to again walk the orchard with shovels to pull up & add extra soil around any tree that looked like the one below. This took many hours but was absolutely worth it. No amount of fertilizer, irrigation, or other farming practice in the future will be able to fix a tree that is sitting in water or getting smothered by soil. We'll continue to walk and adjust trees as the continue to settle this winter.
2. Deer had already nibble our trees - even though they are dormant and across the street is a neighborhood with tons of tasty landscape plants!
Thankfully, they'd only tasted a handful around the edge, but it underscored the importance of having cages or tubes.
Speaking of which, we're using Plantra grow tubes to protect and spur the growth of our young chestnuts. The good folks at Plantra are supporting the various experiments were conducting in our orchard, which we're very grateful for! Their support is allowing us to test all of the following combinations of tubes and stakes and share the results with those of you who are designing your own chestnut plantings.
- 71" Buck Shield Tube with Trunk Builder Stake and #3 rebar
- 58" Doe Shield Tube with Trunk Builder Stake and #3 rebar
- 47" Beaver Shield Tube with Trunk Builder Stake and #3 rebar
- 35" Jack Rabbit Shield Tube with Trunk Builder Stake and #3 rebar
- A few other custom trial sizes
Stay tuned to see which tubes and stakes perform best. We've got some pruning trials lined up as well to see which height of tube and tree shape combination performs best.
One thing we can say out the gate is that the fiberglass stakes weigh ~20% as much as the rebar. That's nut a huge issue down the road, but carrying 500, 6-foot rebar stakes is not fun.
We've updated our planting layout since our original design. The main change is that we planted Colossals on every other row and will fill in the odd rows in the Spring or Fall of 2025 as the pollinizer cultivars are ready. Below is the updated layout in Overyield.
As you can see in the plan, we'll add Torakuri, Gillet, BdB, Okei and maybe some other cultivars later in the year.
Finally, a few glamor shots from the planting days. It's been almost a full year's worth of work to get the farm ready for planting and really gratifying to have the trees in the ground.
Thanks for following along and let us know what questions/comments/ideas you have. We appreciate input from those of you who've gone before us and are happy to answer any questions from our (very limited but growing!) experience.