Orchard People

[00:00:00] Introduction and Community Orchard Beginnings
Susan: Hello everybody. Welcome to the show today.
When we planted
our community orchard back in 2009,
we had the best intentions.
We were excited about future harvest,
about community events in the space,
but the fruit trees themselves that we chose... that was a little bit of an afterthought.
I had read some books and read about specific varieties that I wanted to try,
but it turns out that none of these varieties were available at our local garden center.
So we just picked up some trees from the local garden center, planted them in our park, and that was the beginning of some of our problems. Later on I realized that if you wanna be successful growing fruit trees organically, the most important thing you can do is think carefully about which trees and cultivars you are going to plant.
And think about that in advance. Take your time and source the right trees, and that can make your growing experience so much easier.
[00:01:03] Guest Introduction: Colleen Dieter
Susan: So today we are going to talk about fruit tree garden design
and I have a very special guest today and that is Colleen Dieter. She runs
Red Wheelbarrow Landscape Consulting in Austin, Texas.
She is an ISA certified arborist and she's a graduate of my course Certificate in Fruit Tree Care at orchardpeople.com.
[00:01:27] Designing Fruit Tree Gardens
Susan: So the goal today in our discussion is to explore how to design a fruit tree garden based on fact and not fantasy.
What works, what grows, and what makes sense for any unique site. But first, do you have any ideas or questions or thoughts on fruit trees and garden design? If you are watching us on YouTube, please do put your questions or comments in the chat box and we'll reply as soon as we can. And please don't forget to click and subscribe.
So Colleen, welcome to the show today.
Colleen: Thank you, Susan. Thanks for having me. I'm so glad to be here. I'm so happy.
Susan: When I decided I wanted to do a show on this topic, I definitely wanted to interview you because
I have seen some of the amazing gardens and landscapes that you have created so thoughtfully,
and there aren't a lot of landscape designers or architects who really focus on fruit trees because it's a whole different kettle of fish.
So
[00:02:32] Client Consultation and Common Issues
Susan: can we start off, tell me what kinds of gardens you design for? What kinds of people?
Colleen: Most of my customers are do it yourselfers. There are folks who want to do the gardening themselves, but they don't really know where to start, or they have problem spots where they keep trying things over and over again and not having success, and they need more professional advice about how to proceed.
Susan: So is this kind of, this is home growers with a backyard or organizations?
Colleen: Right now, it's mostly home growers with a backyard. But I also sometimes get, in terms of fruit trees and orchards,
Sometimes I get customers that have larger properties like ranches or farms,
and they have someone who is maybe like a gardener on site who will be caring for the plants, and I'll work with 'em.
But I do have a background of working in community orchards as well.
I cared for the urban orchard in the Mueller neighborhood here in Austin.
And I also cared for an orchard in a community garden in Butta, Texas about 10 years ago too.
Susan: This is what I love about you.
You are not just a bookish person who's looked it up in books. You've been there, you've done that.
When I came to visit you in Austin, Texas, you took me to
an absolutely gorgeous food forest.
This is part of you and your experience,
and I think that's one passion that the two of us have so much in common community, growing, creating beautiful spaces.
So when you are sitting down with a new client, and I'm asking you this because let's imagine all our listeners are your client. So all our listeners are sitting and thinking, okay, tell me how to design my garden. What is the first, what are the main considerations and the main questions you ask people?
Colleen: I usually start with a consultation and I'll ask them what are you hoping to get out of our visit today? And what are your pain points? What are the problems that you're trying to solve and what's on your wishlist? What are the features that you're hoping to put into the landscape?
And so that could be everything from a shed for storage
or drainage problems, and they might need a rain garden or something like that.
Yesterday I was on a property where they had huge pecan trees, and their grass died under the pecan trees and they were wondering. It was all muddy, and they were wondering how to mitigate that.
So it just runs the gamut of, I try to really listen and hear what folks need, and sometimes they don't even really know what they need. Sometimes I'll go into a yard and I'll see tools all over the place, and there's tools here and there and tomato cages over there. And I'll say, have you thought about getting a shed?
Because maybe it can be really time consuming if you go out to do something quick in the garden and you can't find your tools. So simple suggestions like that sometimes can really help folks. Make their gardening lives easier.
Susan: And even in terms you're creating this big picture, so you're thinking in terms of the shed where you can put your tools, maybe some people don't even realize that the fruit trees are going to need hands-on care.
Colleen: Yeah, definitely. That's definitely a thing that people don't realize.
How much care most fruit trees need, and they just don't have any frame of reference. And especially
there's a lot of folks moving to Austin now who are from other regions, and they just don't have any idea about what the seasons are like here or what is possible to grow here.
So it's very different,
very unique climate and very unique terrain here. Filling people in on what's actually possible and what the wise path is for them,
and not trying to do something that is gonna be too high maintenance or too hard, too hard to care for.
[00:07:42] Fruit Varieties for Austin's Climate
Susan: So if I had a property in Austin and my goal is, I wanna garden.
Colleen: Yeah.
Susan: With lots of fruit. Yeah. I wanna be harvesting so much fruit that I can have it myself. In Austin or in your area, what kind of fruits can you grow and how much fruit can you get out of a small garden?
Colleen: Yeah. I usually also ask people what they like to eat. That's important 'cause sometimes people will say oh, we'd love to grow some food, love to grow some fruit. And I'll say what kind of fruit do you like, and that's important. And then I'll also ask them, what do you plan to do with the fruit?
Do you want fruit that you can just eat out of hand, or are you into baking pies or making jams and jellies, because there's different options. And so to answer your question, Susan, there's a lot of native wild fruits that do well here without much care.
So red mulberries are an example of that.
Red mulberry trees grow wild here.
We have Mexican plums that are also sold readily as landscape plants, but they also can grow wild and they make really good fruit.
And the mulberries you can eat out of hand, off the tree. like you don't have to cook 'em or anything like that.
but the Mexican plums are pretty sour. And so with those, most people, cook something with them. They'll make jams or cook a pie, make a pie, or something like that with those. So most of the wild fruits that are easier to grow usually need to be, you need, they usually need to have sugar added to 'em, or they're, and
Susan: by that, at that point it was still healthy and nutritious.
Who knows?
Colleen: sure. But it's still fun, Yeah, of course. And something to eat.
We have a native persimmon here called Texas persimmon, and we also can grow Eastern persimmons.
The American persimmon too, grow wild depending on where you are in Austin, we're right on the border between the habitats for those two species.
And both of those trees are great, make a lot of fruit, and are easy to grow. But the fruit, you can eat the fruit off the tree, but they have a lot of seeds in them. Not everybody is like amenable to that. Not everybody's okay with eating a fruit with a whole bunch of seeds and then spitting out all the seeds. A lot of people are really into that. Like they don't mind a type of backyard foraging, if you will, but then sometimes I get people who are more interested in the more domesticated fruits, the things that you would typically think of when you think of fruit trees.
So that would be things like apples and pears and peaches and the Japanese persimmon and nectarines and plums. Those are all things that we grow here in Austin. The thing that I just harvested yesterday and had this morning on my cereal was figs.
And there's a long tradition of Texans growing figs, and figs do really well here without a lot of care.
And, I'm always encouraging people to grow figs 'cause I think they're the most like, rewarding of the domestic fruit that we can grow pretty easily here.
Susan: I, years and years ago, did a landscape design certificate at a local university and everybody wants an easy or no care garden. Yeah. As if it actually exists.
Yeah.
What you're saying is you can have fruit and enjoy fruit in your garden with minimal care.
Now we're talking about domesticated trees like apples and peaches, pears, apricots, cherries. In terms of your climate, and everybody's climate, what are the things you consider when you go to choose for your client? An apple tree to grow. They can say, Hey, you know what, my favorite apple tree is Honey Crisp. Oh my God. I love it. So I wanna grow a Honey Crisp and I also wanna grow Bartlett pears 'cause those ones do really well. I really like them. So what do you do when people say these are the cultivars I would like to grow, if they don't actually grow in your climate?
Colleen: So I'll educate the customer about what's possible for our climate, because we are so far south, we have very mild winters here. And so for all of the stone fruits, peaches, plums, nectarines, apricots, and cherries. And the pome fruits.
So the apples
and pears and quince.
The limiting factor for them is chilling hours. So all of those trees need to be exposed to a certain amount of cold before they will bloom, and it's how the trees know that it's springtime.
And so that's one of the things I learned more about from you, Susan, was that there's, and correct me if I'm wrong, there's hormones in the trees when the leaves drop in the fall. And those hormones, as they're exposed to cool temperatures, those hormones start to degrade. And as those hormones degrade, then when they finally degrade, then the tree knows that it's springtime and it's time to bloom.
So there's certain cultivars that need long chilling hours in order to bloom and produce fruit, and so they will not work here in Austin because our winters are so mild and relatively short compared to the rest of North America. So that's the limiting factor here is we need low chill hour fruit.
So it's changing because of climate change. Our winters are getting more mild in terms of day-to-day temperatures, but they're also getting colder in terms of our cold snaps are becoming more severe. So when it does get cold and we have a freeze, it gets colder than it used to.
So it's a little bit complicated, but I usually look for varieties that need around 500 chill hours. And if we're in town, in Austin, we have the urban heat island effect, where cities stay warmer than surrounding areas because there's more pavement that holds heat. So in town, I might go for even less, even fewer chill hours, but if I'm working with someone who's north of Austin and out more in a rural area, then I'll go a little bit higher, like closer to 600 or 650.
Susan: So Colleen, how much choice do you actually have? Like when I hear about people, oh, you're in a warmer climate. You're probably growing Anna Apples. I don't know what the chill hours are for Anna Apples. But are there like two choices or do you have a good selection?
Colleen: We're very limited, to be honest.
We're very limited. We have, what I would say is, a barely adequate selection. Anna and Ein Shemer are the two apples that I've had the most success with apples, but there's others that will grow.
I have had some success with Gala and Golden Delicious, but you can get those at the store. They're not that exciting.
So it is an issue for us, and the availability of those varieties is an issue too. There's not very many outlets for us to purchase, low chill hour varieties, so that is a problem.
Susan: Interesting. Yeah. I actually did an episode on this podcast, Best Apple Trees for Warm Climates with Larry Stevenson.
Colleen: I listened to it.
Susan: And he is so interesting and he's got lots of different cultivars that can survive in warmer climates.
Whether they're easy to grow or not, but why not try if you've got the space? For sure.
Yeah. But I suppose if you only have room for one tree, you want it to be something interesting that grows easily in a warm climate, you might choose Anna, or what was the other second variety?
Colleen: Ein Shemer.
Susan: Ein Shemer.
Colleen: Ein Shemer. Yeah.
Susan: Interesting.
Colleen: That's another one that I think is actually, I can't remember the relationship, but it's somehow related to Anna.
Susan: Oh, is it? Interesting?
Colleen: Yeah.
Susan: Yeah, I look forward to looking that up. Now, saying this, if people are listening from colder climates. You got the same problem. You may be getting a tree that, like you, you're limited to trees that can only survive in really cold climate. So basically what we're saying is, one of your next challenges is to find the exact right tree that will suit your climate and conditions, and that's where so many people make mistakes.
[00:18:46] Soil Considerations and Solutions
Susan: So you take people through the tree choice, but I guess at some point you wanna look at their soil and figure out what's going there. So what is your thought process around soil?
Colleen: Yeah. If someone is interested in planting an orchard and they're really serious about a large number of fruit trees, I always recommend doing a soil test, and digging a test hole too just so we can get a feel for how much soil they have, because there's different areas in central Texas that have different soil types. The soil types vary a lot here. And, in general, in west Austin and west of Austin, it's very hilly and rocky and there tends to be very thin soil in a lot of places. And you can't dig a hole really.
There's just not much soil to work with. And then in central Austin and east of Austin, we tend to have heavy clay soil and maybe about two feet of heavy clay soil. And then there's pockets all over central Texas that have deeper sandy soil, like along rivers and creeks and stuff like that, or old floodplains.
So I can make educated guesses about what folks are gonna have based on what part of town they're in, but I'm often surprised. And so we'll go ahead and try to dig a test hole, see what it's like to dig, and then, usually take some samples and send them off to the lab to see, what nutrients we'll need.
Because the domesticated fruits, the domesticated fruit trees, they're pretty heavy feeders. They need pretty good soil compared to the native wild plants that are better adapted. So we need to know what we have first before we start anything.
Susan: I love that and I love the fact that you have everything there. Yeah. Everybody's listening, either you have clay or sandy, or you've got loam, but you've got a whole selection.
Colleen: Yeah.
Susan: Yeah. One of the stories that you told in one of our classes that we did together in our meetups, was the wonderful solution that you came up with when it comes to heavy clay soil.
I'd love for you to tell me that story. What was this, what was this design, what was this location? Yeah. What were their goals and what were the problems and solutions?
Colleen: So I was working with a family who has a farm. It's southeast of Austin in the Blackland Prairies ecoregion, and that's like really heavy black clay soil.
And we had planted fruit trees on their property, directly into the clay and made a small orchard and it was doing okay, and they wanted to add on to another section. And I started thinking about it and I was like, these trees, they're not thriving. They're doing okay in the clay, but they're not thriving.
And at the time they had just dug a new pond. They keep cattle, 'cause Texas, they keep cattle. So they had just dug a new tank for the cattle to drink out of, and for them to catch water. They call it a tank in Texas, but it's just like a big pond. And so they just dug a new pond and they had a whole bunch of soil from that digging.
And they also had a big pile of sand from like another project. They had a party and they had a bouncy house at the party and they needed sand. They put sand under the bouncy house. So they had a whole bunch of sand. And I was like, this clay holds water for so long and it doesn't allow a lot of air penetration into the soil so that the roots can really get the air that they need and that the microbes that support the trees can get the air that they need.
So I thought, let's try planting into mounds.
And what we did was we took the soil from the pond that they just dug and the sand from the bouncy house, and we bought,
we brought in compost and we mixed those together and made a custom soil mix basically on site. Mixed that together. I believe we did, I can't remember the exact ratio, but I believe we did, clay to compost one to one and then half part sand, so half as much sand, and we mixed that together and
then we planted into mounds, also known as berms, BERM, berms, and made the berms about,
oh, they're like about five feet wide, maybe four or five feet wide and about 18 inches high.
And they have better drainage and more nutrition than the native soil because of the sand and the compost that we mixed in.
Yeah. And then we planted the fruit trees into the berms, on the tops of the berms.
Susan: So if I'm getting this correctly, you've got this heavy soil. The trees are okay, but they're not thriving because the heavy clay soil means that air can't get into the soil. Roots need water. And they also need air.
So by planting on these very big berms or mounds, you're allowing the roots to stretch out to a certain extent above that heavy clay soil line.
Do you think five feet wide round circle. Fruit tree roots go way past that.
So where do the roots go after? Do they go down and then, how does that work?
Colleen: Susan, I always say that I wish that I had x-ray vision.
That would be my superpower if I had one. Yeah, so I could see where the roots are going. I don't really know, and my theory that I can't really prove unless I dug up a really good, happy, healthy tree, which I don't wanna do to see where the roots are going. My theory is that some of the roots can stay in a little bit more shallow, where there's more nutrients and air and they're feeding on the nutrients in the air.
And then maybe there's other roots that get down deeper into the clay. And they're able to get more water and moisture during drought. I'm not really sure.
Susan: What's fun is that in one of our meetups when we were talking about clay soil, Ron Perry, who's been on the show before, he actually did dig up some healthy trees because he was doing some studies on planting on mounds.
Colleen: Oh, wow.
Susan: And he actually, if I can find it, I'll put a picture in the edited version of this.
They did a cross section and they saw that the roots were definitely filling the mound, but they fought their way also down into the clay.
So, Ron was saying. It works. We've done some studies.
There have been some published studies. There probably should be lots more, but it's just a creative solution. What I like about this story is don't just think, I want fruit trees. I've got some problems. I'll just stick them in the ground anyways. There are ways to work with a property to make it more sustainable in the long term. Yeah.
Colleen: Yeah, and definitely these fruit trees that are growing in the mounds are thriving and definitely grew faster than the ones that were planted directly into the clay. Even though we did amend the clay, we did add some compost to the clay and some fertilizers according to the soil test, but definitely the ones in the mounds were really producing better than the ones in the ground.
[00:28:13] Community Orchards: Challenges and Solutions
Susan: Talk to me a little bit about the community orchards you've been involved in, and how design is catered to their needs, and how that's worked out.
Colleen: Yeah. It's interesting. The two community orchards that I worked in, I arrived after they had been planted or partially planted, and I really got to see in those experiences, how complicated orcharding can be and how you really have to plan ahead to get the right trees because, so the one orchard I was in, they planted all Bartlett pears, and they don't get enough chill hours. They never really bloomed.
They did manage to leaf out every spring and looked okay, but that was it. And they didn't have a partner variety to pollinate, either. And most pears need two different varieties in order to make fruit. So, I'd come in and, inevitably with fruit trees, the domestic fruit trees, something's gonna go wrong.
One of 'em is gonna die. Something's gonna die because they're just vulnerable to so many diseases and problems and animals eat the trunks and stuff like that. So as soon as some of those Bartletts started to die, I started replacing them with other varieties that would actually make fruit.
And if the Bartletts ever bloomed, which they probably won't, but if they ever bloomed, maybe these other varieties would be able to pollinate them. So it was things like that where I was coming in after the fact and saying oh, okay, we've got this, but that's not exactly gonna work.
Actually I think that happened in the other orchard. I think the other orchard had Bartletts too. And it's just because there's a variety called Southern Bartlett and it's just like what's available in the southern us. If you try to buy pear trees, and you're a landscaper and you're not exactly a fruit tree expert, it's really likely that you're gonna find Southern Bartlett pears at the wholesaler and they're just not gonna make fruit here.
So just editing like that. I did a lot of editing like that and filling in, and oh, I think I sent you a picture, Susan. They planted Asian persimmons and they were very floppy, like they were whips that had been, instead of planted bare root, they were like whips that had been staked and then put in containers and then planted, and they didn't chop the top of the tree off.
So I didn't know at the time. I was still learning too. I didn't know at the time that you're supposed to, after you plant a whip, chop the top of the tree off. And so I kept trying to stake 'em and they're floppy and eventually one broke in a windstorm. And then when I saw how it grew back, it was like, oh no, the is why you chop the top off. Okay, I get this now.
Something that I, to get more to the point of your question, something that I always ask my customers is, for your orchard, do you want really high production? Do you wanna get a lot of fruit out of it or do you want the orchard to look pretty and be inviting, because there's different pruning styles depending on your goal.
So if you're an orchardist professionally and you are like producing for market and that's how you're making your living, you're gonna be pruning all your fruit trees down super short so you can harvest easily and you can see all the fruit and you can spray them and everything like that, but it's not the prettiest. It doesn't look very good.
And so for home orchards, I'll ask people Hey, do you want it to be prettier? Then it's a different sort of management where you want the trees to actually look like trees and you're okay with getting a ladder out to harvest them.
[00:33:25] Urban Orchards and Pruning Techniques
Colleen: And the urban orchards are a little bit more like that too. It's a little bit more look at these beautiful little trees and we're gonna prune them so they'll produce some fruit, but we're not gonna, like in the Orchard people courses from you, Susan, I learned about UFO pruning except for cherries, right?
Susan: Yeah.
Colleen: And they're basically like a stick with a few branches on a stake. And there's nothing. They're still plants, but it's not beautiful at all. And you wouldn't recognize it as a tree, like a lay person wouldn't recognize it as a tree. So that's why with the urban orchards and the home orchards, we'll use a little bit more relaxed pruning system that supports the tree, but still makes the tree look nice and inviting and people recognize it as a fruit tree.
Susan: Amazing. I just love everything you've said. Okay.
[00:34:30] Common Mistakes in Fruit Tree Planting
Susan: You started off with the experience of the, was it Bartlett pear orchard? And it just made me giggle because that's what I would've done. Let's get a hundred trees and we'll have lots of Bartlett pears, not realizing that fruit trees, you often need pollination partners.
And there's so many reasons not to plant all of one variety. Lots of reasons. You have to harvest it all at the same time, 'cause the harvest time will be the same. So a big mistake people make is not researching pollination. And it's really cute to hear that story, but it's also an example of, was this the right tree for the climate?
Clearly if it's not even blossoming, could that have to do with chill hours? Could that have to do with plant hardiness zones? All of that didn't have to happen, had research been done. Yeah. And hey, I've been there. I made all these mistakes, so I am not criticizing.
I've done it myself. Yeah. But it's just when you know these secrets, these little secrets ahead of time, yeah. You can just save yourself so much trouble.
[00:35:37] Choosing the Right Trees for Urban Orchards
Colleen: Yeah, for sure. The other thing I was just thinking too is those Bartlett pears, available from the wholesalers, they're big trees too.
And that's something with the urban orchards, a lot of times, they want it to be finished right away. They want it to be done. We're gonna plant big trees that came in containers and they're just gonna start making fruit right away, and that's not the best way to go about it.
And, that's how a lot of the urban orchards get planted if they're part of a bigger landscape design scheme for a whole neighborhood. And so I learned, again in Orchard People classes, that the best thing is to plant the bare root whips and train them when they're little, and then train them up to be the shape and size that you want.
But it is hard in an urban area to start with whips because, especially if you have landscaping crews caring for the areas around the trees, it's hard to even recognize them as trees 'cause they're so small and it's hard to protect them from mowing crews and the public in general and stuff like that.
So you have to strike some kind of balance between planting whips and planting something that's recognizable as a tree already.
[00:37:19] The Benefits of Planting Younger Trees
Susan: We've dealt with that one in our part. We recently have planted. So just for people listening who don't know what a whip is and what a bare root tree is.
So Colleen, you mentioned that some people go to the garden center and they say, I want the biggest tree you have.
Colleen: Yeah.
Susan: And even if there's a piece of fruit hanging on it, it's whoa, I am ahead of the game. It's already producing fruit.
Colleen: Yeah.
Susan: I'm willing to pay hundreds of dollars for a tree that's gonna give me a harvest this year.
Colleen: Yeah.
Susan: Okay. But it's short term thinking because the tree gets totally traumatized by being replanted in a different environment. Its roots are already stuck in that pot and you think you're ahead of the game. If, right beside that tree you plant a whip, which is a 1-year-old, newly grafted tree not too long ago, one year before, just looks like a stick, basically. Maybe it has little side branches, maybe it doesn't. You get it in during the dormant season. It's has no soil on its roots because it's dormant. It can be transported that way. You plant it, you do the whip cut cutting off, let's say at least the top third of the tree, and then boom, you start to shape your tree from there with correct fruit tree pruning.
So that's what you're talking about in terms of a bare root whip. So this year, earlier in the season, we planted a little seedling peach tree, actually grown from seed, not a grafted tree. Little cutie.
Colleen: Ooh. From seed. Neat.
Susan: Yes, that's exciting. Yeah. We got that from Silver Creek nursery.
Seedling tree. Anyways, so we did the whip cut, even though it's not a whip. It's a seedling, but we still wanna shape the tree and I thought, how do we protect it? And years ago I had some plastic tree rings. They're just like little, plastic mini sort of walls or whatever. So it is like the mulch circle.
It goes around the edge of the mulch circle and it tells the tree crew, Hey, there is a plant here. Stay away.
Colleen: Yeah. Don't mow it down.
Susan: Don't mow it down. Yeah.
And we also put a big stake in there and use the figure eight tie thing to tie it to the stake, even though right now it doesn't need a stake, but it's just another way of saying, Hey, tree here, stay away.
So that's how we get away with using the whips. And I'm very passionate about planting younger trees and sculpting those trees with correct fruit tree pruning. Starting from the day you plant your tree, you're going to be pruning that tree into the perfect fruit bearing structure that will last a lifetime that will be resilient in harsh weather.
I love to tell the story about our young trees after being Red Wheelbarrow Landscape Consulting in the ground and pruned properly for a few years. In 2013, we had a really big ice storm and trees around our city were falling down, left, and center.
It looked like a disaster zone. Yeah. I was really worried about our fruit trees. So I go to the park and I see big trees, broken branches everywhere. Yeah. But our little fruit trees, not one branch broke.
Colleen: Wow. Amazing.
Susan: And that's because we prune fruit trees in order to create a strong fruit bearing structure for the tree.
So for the tree, it's Hey, I'm designed to hold a bunch of fruit. Some ice on me, that's no problem. I can handle that.
You and I, as we go through our adventures with fruit trees, we learn so much.
Colleen: Yeah.
Susan: And all the science and all the things that we're trying. Yeah. Sometimes you have to see it firsthand in order to say, yeah, that really works.
Colleen: Yeah.
Susan: And sometimes you have to try things and see it really doesn't work.
Another little fun thing that I tried was, at one point I was exploring what's the difference between winter and summer pruning, and I had two apricot trees. They were planted at the exact same time, same cultivar.
And I decided one year I was gonna do winter pruning on one and summer on the other to see what the difference was.
Ooh.
And it was very interesting what happened. So what happened was with the winter prune tree, I got a lot of water sprouts.
I got lots of branchy growth that I didn't want. It had bad air circulation. So lots of leaves in there, so more likelihood to get disease. And for the summer prune one, it kept its beautiful structure. Nice and open. So I had varying things that I had learned, but it was me trying it on the two trees.
Yeah. Okay. It does work. I've seen it. It does work.
Colleen: Yeah.
Susan: Anyways, back to our conversation. The other thing that you talked about, we didn't mention root stocks. I've done episodes on root stock choices, which determine the mature size of the tree.
But one thing there's always a little stress when we're planting a tree. How far should it be away from another tree?
Colleen: Yeah.
Susan: So talk to me about people's choices. Do they want the big tree?
If they want the big pretty tree that they need to use a ladder with, how far away should it be from local shrubs and other trees?
Or if it's a small tree on a dwarfing root stock, how far away would you plant these or design in your design?
Colleen: Yeah, it depends. We don't have access to dwarf root stock around here.
I don't remember why. I know there's a reason why there's no dwarf root stocks available around here, but I can't remember what it is.
[00:43:16] Designing and Planting an Orchard
Colleen: This is a wild generalization.
Generally gonna keep 'em about 15 feet apart as a jumping off point, but it depends on the situation and what we're growing. With the farm that we were talking about earlier, where we planted into mounds, I designed it where the mounds were on contour with the grade of the site.
That way, they would catch water when it rains. The site was just really slightly sloped, and I made them more curved. And the curviness allowed for the trees to be planted a little bit closer together.
The trees are circles and so you can fit circles in closer together when they're on a curved line rather than a straight line, so it allowed for them to be a little bit closer together and the intention is to keep them pruned. And at that particular orchard, we were
Mostly growing apples. Apples tend to have a pretty big upright structure and aren't super wide, and we were growing Asian pears that are extremely upright. And then we were growing stone fruits that you can trim very heavily, and we tend to do heading cuts on the stone fruits. At least my preference with stone fruits is to trim them to an open vase shape and do a lot of heading cuts to make sure their branches don't get overextended, where the fruit is out at the end of the branch and causes the branches to break, so I tend to keep 'em short to get 'em to fit into that plan.
Does that make sense?
Susan: Yes, that absolutely makes sense. Okay, you've created this design. Maybe you even are there for planting day. You talk about this is for DIY people.
Colleen: Yeah.
Susan: How do you walk away and leave them with the knowledge that they need in order to care for those trees? Like you've been talking about your pruning strategies and there's irrigation strategies, and what do they feed the tree, or trees. How do you leave it with them? Do they already know what to do somehow?
Colleen: It depends on the customer. If they're truly DIYers and we're just putting a few trees in their backyard, most of the time, then we'll schedule in a visit for pruning time, and I will do another consultation with them and we'll do the pruning together. I often recommend Orchard People classes too, for people who I can tell are really into it, are really interested in more in depth learning.
For the folks who are larger properties with gardeners, like the farm that we've been talking about and a couple other farms and ranches that I have worked on, I'll often leave an info package for them saying do this at this time with a calendar, and still make myself available if the crew there needs more consultations. So there's usually some sort of info package that I'll leave or I'll have a relationship with the gardeners, and they can text me when they have questions and stuff.
Susan: That's fantastic.
Colleen: Thanks.
[00:47:34] Central Texas Seed Savers and Fruit Tree Preservation
Susan: Before we wrap up, I wanna talk about the work you're doing with the Seed Savers organization.
Colleen: Yeah.
Susan: Let's talk about the Central Texas Seed Savers. You and I are arborists, we have passion with fruit trees, and I thought, wow, that's cool that you're in interested in seeds. I never realized that fruit tree seedlings are maybe part of your mission. Tell me about your organization.
Colleen: Central Texas Seed Savers is working to prevent extinction of plants that are important to central Texans, and a lot of the plants that thrive here in central Texas, whether it's fruit, trees, vegetables, or native plants, there's a lot of really great plants that aren't available widely in nurseries or from seed companies. And so for us it's really important to share those seeds with each other. Or in the case of fruit trees, sometimes we're sharing cuttings and scions and root stocks, and it's important for us to share those to preserve access to them, because they're not widely available.
They may be available from one or two seed companies or one or two fruit tree nurseries, but that's not sustainable long term. We need to have more access to them to prevent them from going extinct. And a lot of these plants, particularly the domestic fruit trees, if we weren't growing them as backyard gardeners, we would lose them and they would go extinct. They're not growing on their own.
There's a local cidery here, a place that makes hard cider, called Texas Keeper Cider, and they named their cidery Texas Keeper after an extinct apple. There used to be an apple called 'Texas Keeper', and it was called 'Texas Keeper' because it could keep for a long shelf life. So you could keep it, you could harvest it in the fall and eat them all winter.
They were real shelf stable. And so when I heard that, I started thinking about fruit tree culture in central Texas and there used to be a lot more fruit tree varieties here. And there was a strong culture of fruit tree cultivation here, at one time. But a lot of those varieties have gone extinct post World War II, the industrialization of agriculture, and fewer backyard gardeners. And so, Central Texas Seed Savers is, we have a fruit tree scion swap every winter to get everyone together to share scions. And we have an heirloom fruit tree preservation project where we're teaching people how to graft. We just kicked that off last year. Last year was our first year with our grafting classes, and we're asking folks in central Texas to contact us if they have a fruit tree that is very productive, makes pretty good fruit, and doesn't need a lot of care, to try to get more of these good trees into the mix for us to increase access to fruit trees and all the plants too.
It's true with vegetables and with the native plants as well. So that's what we're working on. And it's my educated guess that the fruit trees are most at risk of all of the groups of plants because they require some extra knowledge to grow them. And because growing a tree is a big commitment, not everybody has room for more trees, and they're not particularly long lived compared to other trees. Especially the stone fruits have a tendency to die after 15 or 20 years. Most of the peaches have a tendency to fall apart or just drop dead from disease and stuff like that.
So yeah, we're just trying to get people together who are fruit enthusiasts in central Texas and to share scions. And I love hearing about other fruit. People growing peaches from seeds and stuff like that to see what happens, and yeah, it's exciting to me.
So that's what's going on with Central Texas Seed Savers and the fruit part.
Susan: Yeah. it's fantastic. And you've been doing this for a long time. What keeps you motivated with this work?
[00:52:56] The Importance of Gardening and Civilization
Colleen: Oh, I have an obsessive personality.
I just find it continually engaging. To me, there's just so much to know and learn all the time. I'm always learning something new. And particularly with the fruit trees, the fruits are just their whole own realm of knowledge, and I feel like you could dedicate your life to growing apples alone. Just apples, and never learn everything there is to know just about apples.
And for me, I always go back to gardening as the foundation for civilization.
For hundreds of thousands of years, humans were hunter gatherers and moving around and someone said, what if we took these seeds and planted them in the ground and stayed in one place?
Oh, then we don't have to move around all the time. The food's right here. We don't have to follow the food. The food's right here. So that's the foundation of civilization. Then we started settling and building and creating societies. And I guess when I engage in this kind of work, particularly the fruit trees, I feel like I'm engaging in human civilization and I'm connecting with not only nature and connecting with where my food comes from, which is so vital and crucial to our lives and so enriching to our lives, i'm also connecting with humanity and one of the oldest professions. Yeah. That, and a whole deep realm of knowledge, of human knowledge, and it brings meaning to my life.
Susan: That is so awesome. I totally hear you. I agree with you so much.
Instead of reading the newspaper while I was eating my lunch, I started to think about the people that grew the vegetables.
Colleen: Yes. Yes.
Susan: Or I started to think of the people that packed 'em, or I started to think about the trees that produce them if I didn't grow it myself.
And who took it off the tree and who harvested. And I started to just sense this feeling of love and gratitude through to everybody who was involved in bringing this beautiful nutrition to my plate.
Colleen: Oh, I hear you.
Susan: There is so much more than just popping a tree in the ground. Yeah. And waiting for the harvest.
It's just beautiful. It's so much gratitude. And I'm so grateful to have you on the show. This was so fun.
Colleen: Thank you.
Susan: Yeah.
[00:56:00] Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Susan: How can people learn more about you?
They can visit atxgardens.com. That's "ATX" as in Austin, Texas.
. Colleen, thank you so much for coming on the show today. It's been wonderful to have you here.
Thank you so much for having me, Susan. I so appreciate it.
So for you listeners, we are hoping to create an article with more information because Colleen talked about a whole bunch of great stuff. So we'll put it in the article. If you're on YouTube, look at the show notes and you can go straight to the article.
We'll include the URL and please remember to hit and subscribe. For more fruit tree care information, you can go to orchard people.com and sign up. You can sign up for my newsletter where you'll get information about anything new, books, new podcasts, whatever is going on. So I would love it if you would sign up and if you have a question, you can always just send me an email back once you get the first email from me.
So that's all for now. I hope you will join me again next month when we're going to dig into another great topic. I'll see you then, and bye for now.