How to Plant, Prune, and Irrigate Fruit Trees  EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW

Ever since I was a little kid, I've dreamed of picking and eating fresh fruit grown on trees in my own backyard every single day of the year. And in this video, I'm going to show you exactly what I'm doing to finally make that dream a reality. I'm in the process of transforming my backyard into an urban farmstead. And one of the largest and most important steps in this entire process is planting this backyard orchard. So in this video, I won't just show you how to plant a fruit tree. I'll take you through my entire process from soil preparation to irrigation, each of the fruit trees that I've selected for year round fruit production, planting, pruning, and painting young fruit trees, and all of the other most important steps in planting and establishing a backyard orchard. So whether you're planting one peach tree or an entire backyard orchard like I'm doing, this is the video for you. It all starts with the soil. And for me, the goal was to improve the composition and drainage of my heavy clay soil by building it up with a 50-50 mix of compost and loamy topsoil. One way to determine whether or not you have poor drainage is to dig a shallow hole, fill it with water, and wait. After an hour, if there's still water in that hole, you have poor soil drainage that should be improved before planting fruit trees. Next, I installed the irrigation. But rather than just place the emitters at the base of each tree, this irrigation system will irrigate the entire bed all the way to the edge of where the tree roots will eventually be, which will encourage them to grow out. I'm also encouraging them to grow deep because this irrigation line has 0.5 gallon per hour emitters incorporated right into the hose every 12 inches, which will allow me to keep the irrigation on for long durations for deep watering. And no garden bed is complete without a thick layer of mulch. That's some good mulch. On the north side of my yard, I had to do a little bit of rearranging in order to make space for these fruit trees. I had kale, Swiss chard, and all kinds of other winter crops growing here, and I didn't want to just have a final harvest. So instead, I transplanted them to a longer bed along this pathway, and it actually worked out pretty well. All of my soil is in and mostly smooth and level. I added five yards on either side of this 50-50 mix of topsoil and compost, and that's really going to improve the drainage for my heavy clay soil that I have here. I also installed mulch and irrigation on this side. This side doesn't have that yet, but I'll add that all after planting. So at this point, I'm ready to plant. But first, let's go take a look at the trees. My main goal for this backyard orchard is to have fruit year-round, and here in Sacramento, California, I'm fortunate to be able to do that. So rather than choose a bunch of varieties that all set fruit at once, giving me way more fruit than I can eat, I took some time and did the research to find these 12 different varieties that would all set fruit at different times throughout the growing season. So I'll have full descriptions of each of these in the video description below, and I'll talk a lot more about them in future videos. But today, I just want to briefly describe each one, and I'll go over them in order of when they fruit. First up is this Flavor Delight Aprium. It's a cross between an apricot and a plum, and I should expect my first harvest in early June. Next is the Eva's Pride Peach. This is a yellow freestone peach. It already has blossoms on it, and I expect to start harvesting this in late June. This is a Double Delight Nectarine. It's called that because it has double blossoms, so it's very beautiful in springtime when it's covered in those blossoms. It hasn't started to blossom yet, but it will be a yellow freestone nectarine, and I should expect to start harvesting it in early July. This is the Spice Z Necta Plum, and it's probably the one I'm most excited about in this entire spread. It's already starting to flower here, but I should be expecting fruit from it to harvest in late July. And this is a cross between a nectarine and a plum, so it's supposed to have some really unique flavors, and I can't wait. This is a Shinseki Asian Pear. Sometimes they're called apple pears because they're kind of like a cross between a pear and an apple. They're just a little bit more crunchy than a standard pear, and they're more of an apple shape, and they're delicious. And this one I should start harvesting about early August. This is an O'Henry Peach, very similar to the other peach that I'm growing, the earlier peach. It's also a yellow freestone variety, but unlike that early peach, this one won't be ready to harvest until late August. So I'll have an early peach and a late peach, and this one's supposed to be really delicious, perfect for eating fresh, canning, preserving, all that stuff, all the stuff I love. This is a Lee Jujubee, and I've never grown jujubee before, but I've been hearing so many good things about jujubee, especially this variety that doesn't require another one to pollinate. So having just one, this is a good one to choose, Lee L-I. It's going to actually fruit, according to the label, from early September to mid-October, so I'm really excited for this one. The Pink Lady Apple, one of my favorite apple varieties, and one that is adaptable to the chill hours that we have here in Sacramento. This should start being ready to harvest around mid-October, and I'll probably be picking apples all the way until late November. Fuyu Persimmon. So persimmon, there's like a haichiya and a fuyu. Those are kind of the two main varieties. The fuyu are sometimes called apple persimmons, and they're the ones that can be eaten while they're still crispy. The haichiya are often used in baking or cooking, and you really want to leave those in the plant until they almost become like a gelatinous thing. They're both delicious, but the fuyu, those are the ones that I really love, and so I chose two different fuyu varieties for this project here. I've got a Giant Fuyu Persimmon and the Fuyu Jiro, J-I-R-O. I'm probably not pronouncing that correctly, but there it is for you. These should both be setting fruit sometime in early to mid-October and hold their fruit all the way until December. The Giant Fuyu a little bit earlier, the Jiro a little bit later. I love persimmon season. All right, last but certainly not least, the fig trees, and fig trees will typically fruit anywhere from late summer until wintertime, August all the way until November, December. This is a blackjack fig. It should fruit somewhere in that window, and it's going to depend on your climate. This blackjack fig is similar to one of the most popular figs, which is a mission fig. It's a standard kind of a dark purple colored fig, nice and sweet, and this is a panache fig, also called a tiger stripe fig. This one's extra special because it's actually a rooted cutting that I propagated from a larger, more mature fig tree, probably about a six-year-old fig tree at my original urban farmstead. So I'm really excited to have a basically a clone from that tree at my original farmstead now growing here at the new urban farmstead. I have a full video on how to propagate fig trees. I've been doing it for about four years now, and I'll add a link to that video here. It's really easy, really fun, works really well, but I am so excited. The most delicious, most beautiful figs I've ever known, yellow green stripes, bright red on the inside, tastes like raspberry jam, just incredible. So that's it for all the trees. Let's go plant them. Now that we've talked a little bit about what to plant, let's talk about where to plant it. Really the main priority is sunlight because fruit trees, they need a lot of sunlight to grow, especially deciduous trees like all of the ones I'm growing. They want to be in full sun. Sometimes you can get away with a little bit less sun, especially with the tropicals and subtropicals like avocados and citrus, and you can even get away with a But you're going to have smaller fruit and less fruit if you do have that shade. So find a nice sunny spot in your yard and also make sure that it's in a spot that once that tree grows to its full size, it's not going to shade out something else that needs sunlight. So if I've got my vegetable garden on the north end of my yard, I don't want to plant a big old peach tree on the south end of that vegetable garden because my tomatoes won't get the sun that they need next Speaking of considering the eventual size of the tree when deciding where to plant it, the next most important consideration is spacing. But unlike sunlight, spacing is more of a preference that's really determined by your plan for the eventual size of the tree. Even though a tree tag might give a specific spacing suggestion, and a lot of them will indicate the potential size of the tree, you can plant your trees 10 feet apart or three in one hole. It's really up to you, and it depends on your plan for the size of the tree. And that's really all determined through pruning, which I'll cover later. For my project here, I want a tree that I can manage, harvest, prune, do whatever else I need to do from it from the ground or maybe a short ladder. So I don't want my tree to grow larger than eight feet high. So my spacing is going to be six feet apart, which should give me about two feet of growth before I get to that canopy. And then basically a big six foot diameter ball of peaches, nectarines, plums, and everything else. Okay, so I've got all 12 trees out. I'm not going to make you watch me plant every single one of them. But I do want to go over my planting process for this first Fuyu persimmon, and I'll plant all of the other ones pretty much the same. And I'll go over pruning. So I'm just going to start by digging a hole about the size and the shape of this pot. Now before I remove it from the pot, I want to check to see how it fits in the hole. And this looks pretty good. The soil level on the pot is just above the soil level on the ground. And then the other thing I'm looking at is the graft union. This is where the rootstock was grafted onto the scion. And I want to make sure that that graft union, the scar from the graft, is facing north, because that's going to be a sensitive part of the tree. So I want that to get the least amount of sun exposure possible. All right, I've got my hole, the tree fits. Now it's time to get the tree in the hole. And depending on what your tree is potted in, that process is going to vary a little bit. You can have a bare root tree, you can have a potted tree, or you can have a tree in a fiber pot, which is kind of between bare root and potted. This was a bare root tree about a month ago. Then at the nursery, they potted it up, put it in this fiber pot, and it's just barely started to grow its roots into this soil, as opposed to a potted tree, which is usually in a plastic pot that's been in that soil for a year, up to, you know, maybe two, three, even five years, and it's become somewhat root-bound. So with a potted tree, you're going to want to take that out, break up the roots so they go out into the soil. With a bare root tree, you put it straight into the soil, bury those roots. With a tree in a fiber pot like this, you want to be very gentle as you don't want to disrupt these roots too much because they've just started to grow. So this type of pot is meant to be planted in the soil, and it's just going to break down over time, but it's going to take a couple of years for this fiber pot to break down. And in that time, the roots could become more root-bound. They could start to spiral around if this doesn't break up properly. So in the very least, you want to break up this pot a little bit. You can break it up with a hammer, just kind of disrupt the sides a bit. You can slice it, or what I prefer to do is remove it completely, but I want to remove it in a way that's not going to disrupt these roots. I'm not going to pull it out like I would with a plastic pot. So let me show you how I do that. Take the tree on its side, and first I'm going to take a box cutter. You can also use a saw. I'm just going to cut off the bottom of the pot. Next, I'm going to continue that cut from the base all the way up the top of the tree. And then I'm going to do the same on the other side. Okay, the pot's removed. Now I'm just going to backfill the hole. As I do this, I want to be sure to push the soil in nice and tight around the roots. I don't want any air gaps. I want to be sure that I'm planting only to the level that it was planted out in the pot. If I see any roots right here exposed above, those need to be covered up. But I don't want to fill up so high that I'm covering up that level, and especially don't want to go over this graft union. So keep it right here, no higher, no lower. I didn't amend the hole with any soil amendments or fertilizers. And the reason is, studies have shown that if you do that and just enrich the soil around the root ball, it doesn't encourage the roots from these trees to reach out to better soil. They just become content with that and results in a smaller root ball for this tree. So I did, of course, amend all of this soil in this entire area with that compost and healthy topsoil. Didn't add any fertilizers. But if I wanted to add fertilizers and soil amendments when I plant a tree like this, I'm only going to add them at the end on the very top here. But for this tree and all my trees, I'm not adding any soil amendments. What I am going to add is mulch. And that's one of the important things you can add to your fruit trees when you plant them and really any plant in your garden for the life of your garden. It's something you should be applying annually. Adding a nice two to four inch layer of mulch to your garden at least once a year will help to reduce evaporation, cool your soil, suppress the weeds, feed the beneficial bacteria, microbes, and beneficial fungus in your soil. And as that mulch breaks down, it will feed your plants and improve your soil composition. I'll mulch this entire space after I install the irrigation. So for now, the last thing to do is water it in. I am going to prune each and every one of these trees after planting, but it's supposed to rain tonight. And it's never a good idea to prune when you have rain in the immediate forecast because that can easily spread disease and fungus. And I don't want to do that to my young, fragile, new trees. So I'll finish planting all these trees. Then in a while, that rain did come and it actually rained quite a bit over the last couple of days. So it was probably a good thing that I didn't prune these yet. They probably would have been fine, but I'd rather not take that risk with this many young trees in the ground. But the rain actually came at a perfect time because it helped to kind of settle the soil, allow these trees to establish a little bit. And now the sun's out and I'm going to prune these trees. The most important pruning tip I can give you is to always start with sharp, clean pruners. I clean my pruners between each tree by wiping them down with isopropyl alcohol. I'm going to start back at this Fuyu persimmon because this tree is a really good example of how this initial pruning is a great opportunity for you to make this backyard orchard your own by taking that first step in determining the eventual size and shape of the tree. The cuts I make today on these trees will determine where my scaffold begins, at what height the first lateral branches come off of the main trunk. And as a backyard orchard, you know, that's up to me. It's not a commercial farm where I have to consider tractors moving through and mechanical harvesting. It's all about what I envision for these trees. So whether I want to make my cut a few inches off the ground and have my branching start down here and basically have a bush or clean up all these branches, let it come all the way up straight here and let it branch from right here and have a giant shade tree where my branches don't begin until about head height. That's really up to me. For me, I want to have it somewhere in between. I want my scaffold to start right around knee height and that's kind of where these branches are on this tree already. So all I'm really going to need to do is make one more cut to get this main leader out of the center. So it'll start to branch right here and then I'll tip prune all of these at outward facing buds. As I said, this Fuyu persimmon was a great example, not only because it has a nice kind of scaffold already starting, but persimmon trees can be pruned to either a center leader like this would be if I let this keep going or an open crown where if I remove this completely, it would have branching just around the outside in sort of a goblet shape. As you might understand, peaches and nectarines and a lot of those stone fruits have more of that open base, open wine glass kind of shape. A apple tree or a pear tree are usually on a center leader and a persimmon tree can be pruned either way. A nice scaffold should have between three and five branches all growing out at different directions from the main trunk and they should also be about 45 degrees at their angle. Not too steep, not too flat, somewhere in between. This tree fortunately has all of that for me. It's got three all in different sides, all coming at a pretty good angle and so all I need to do now is clean up this main leader by removing it. But in doing that, I have two options. I could either do a heading cut where I take it off right at the base of the top lateral branch that'll heel over, give me that nice three branch scaffold, or I could bring this up to the next outward facing bud and cut it right above that and that will encourage a branch to come out right there which would give me four branches in my scaffold. Because I have a pretty big section here that doesn't have a branch, I've got room for another scaffold branch and that bud happens to be at a really good spot, I'm going to make that cut. So I'll take this cut at a slight angle just above this outward facing bud and this bud will become my next branch. Next I want to head off each of my scaffold branches about halfway up an outward facing bud. So I've got an outward facing bud right here, I'll cut just above that, slight angle. On this side, same thing. Come up the branch about halfway, outward facing bud, slight angle, done. And then on this back branch here, same exact thing. I've got an outward bud that you can't see from there and I'll cut just above that. That's it. This tree is done pruning until summer. Here's my other Fuyu persimmon. It's a giant Fuyu and it's completely different than the other one. This is what's known as a whip, just a single stem, no lateral branching at all, and this makes pruning really easy because I don't have to decide which of those scaffold branches I want to keep, where to head them off, make sure they're at the right angle, none of that. All I have to decide is where I want my scaffold to begin. And because I have another Fuyu on the other side and I want this one to be the same height as that one, I just determined its height, which was basically the bottom of my pocket. So all I need to do is head this off at that height. All of these little buds around the stem will turn into branches this summer and I'll have a tree that looks like that in no time. All right, here's my Flavor Delight Aprium. It's a nice tall tree. It's almost head high. It's got some nice branching. And I think when a lot of people buy a tree like this at the nursery, they look at it and they say, wow, this is a nice tree. It's a big, almost a full-sized peach tree. I'm just going to put this thing in the ground. It's going to give me some nice peaches pretty soon. And this is the tree. And sure, you can do that, but what's going to happen then is a few years down the road, you're going to have this tree that's 20 feet high and you won't even be able to get to the top of it with a ladder. Instead, you want to cut all of this off. And I know that's hard to kind of wrap your head around when you see this big tree that you paid for all of this and you don't want just some stump, but believe me, you do. Because by cutting it right here, by mid-summer, all of this will grow back. But rather than have one center leader like you don't want with a stone fruit, you're going to have this open crown and it's going to create a nice, great structure with plenty of fruiting wood that's going to give you fruit for years and years. And you're not going to have to get way up there on the ladder to harvest and maintain it. So I'll make my cut way down here. And as you can see here, I've got three branches all coming out at different directions for my scaffold. This one's at a really nice angle. This one's at a really nice angle. This one is a little bit flat and it's a little thin, and that's probably because it's so flat. The more vertical they are, the more energy they're going to get from this tree. The more flat they are, the less energy. They usually become a little bit spindly like this. So this might work, but it might not. It might be too flat. If it is too flat, then I might only end up with two if I cut it right above this one. So instead, I want to go above this bud. That will encourage this bud to become a new branch and sort of as an insurance policy in case this doesn't work. And even if this does take and this takes, then I still only have four. But actually there's a nice bud on the backside of this as well. And there's a big gap between these two branches. So I'll actually cut it right here above this bud and that will be a good spot. Okay, that's three trees down. I've got nine more to go. And I'm basically going to continue these techniques with all of the rest of the trees. So I'm not going to show you how I'm pruning each of these separately, although I will record it and I'll have separate videos showing my pruning today for each tree, my pruning this summer and next winter, and basically the entire process of establishing every single variety that I'm growing in future videos. So subscribe if you want to see those. But for now, I'll continue these trees and then I'll show you a couple of more things that I'm doing to establish this orchard to get it ready for spring. And a heading cut right there. So I mentioned that these are at a slightly steeper angle than that 45 degrees that I really want. And I said that what I will do is cut them to an outward bud to improve that angle. But another option is to take the piece that I cut off and actually make a spacer that I can put between that branch and the main stem. And that will help to force that branch out to create that nice 45 degree angle. I can even make a little slice in the center of it, a little v-shaped slice like this and slide this in here. And that's really pushing that out to a nice 45 degree angle. So maybe I'll try that out, see how it works out. Make a couple more of those. And this one's pretty good. Okay, and that's it until summer. All right, all of my trees are pruned and now I need to whitewash these trees. So basically what I'm doing with whitewashing is painting the main trunk of the tree up to the branch scaffold to protect it from sunburn. And it'll also provide some protection against wood boring pests like termites and beetles. And you can use any interior white or bright colored latex paint. No oil-based paint and no exterior latex paint. Exterior paints often have a fungicide in them that's not good for plants. Or you can use something like this that's marketed for painting trees. This product doesn't need to be thinned or diluted at all. If you're using a standard interior latex paint for your house, you will want to cut that by about 50% by adding some water into it. So I'll just shake this up real well. And then I want to clear all the way to the soil level. And I want to paint the entire trunk of this tree all the way from the soil all the way up to here. I don't need to go higher on trees, even established trees, than usually where their scaffold starts because that will be shaded by the leaves when it leafs out in spring. I'm not as worried about protecting the trunk in winter. It's mostly the harsh summertime sun that I'm concerned about. And I'm really most concerned with young trees like this because they have thinner bark, just like thinner skin. It's going to be more sensitive to sunburn. I'm also most concerned about the south and southwest aspect. The north side of the tree here isn't really getting sun, so it's not going to sunburn over here. This is the side I'm most concerned about. But it's a thin tree, so I'll just paint it all the way around. There are certain types of trees that are more susceptible to sunburn than others. I would say any young tree should be painted. But citrus trees, and especially avocado trees, they have really thin skin. I would absolutely not plant an avocado without painting it. I have planted peaches and nectarines without protecting their trunks by whitewashing them, and they've been okay. But it's not worth the risk. All right, this one looks pretty good. I'm going to go paint the rest. It's been a few weeks since I planted these trees, and about half of them are already starting to break dormancy. And they're looking pretty good. But the other half haven't started to wake up yet, and that's completely normal, especially for young, dormant planted trees. They're usually about a month or even two months behind their normal bud break schedule. And if they're still like this a month after you plant them, and spring is starting, it's probably okay. If you're concerned that the tree is just dead, just give the bark a little bit of a scratch. And if it's still green underneath that bark, it's still alive. Give it some time. It'll wake up soon. Some of these trees will set their first fruit as early as this summer. And most of them will set their first crops the following year, if not the year after. But I'll remove every single one of the fruits from these trees in the first two years, because fruit takes a lot of energy from the plants. And I want them to focus on developing a healthy root system and a vigorous canopy that's capable of producing and supporting large, heavy crops for many years to come. And in those years, I'll continue to make videos like this, showing how I'm pruning and maintaining my backyard orchard. So if you want to see those videos and watch this orchard progress, and if you want to see any of the other upcoming videos on how I'm creating this new urban farmstead, consider subscribing. If you enjoyed this video, hit that like button. And if you have any questions at all, ask them in the comments below. Happy gardening, everyone.