Guidelines for Establishing an Orchard

Reader Contribution by Anneli Carter-Sundqvist
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Fall has descended on us here on Deer Isle. The Hostel is closed, the cucumber vines but a mere shadow of what they were a month ago and the Brassicas are singing in the much needed October drizzle. Fall is not only a great time to enjoy garden bounty and peak foliage but also a great time to plan for spring, and our plan is a new orchard.

Two years ago, we went to visit a friend of ours who had cleared an acre of his woodlot and now had 40 young apple trees growing there, in among a myriad of other edible and beneficial shrubs and plants. The area looked nothing like most people imagine an apple orchard—branches from the felled trees were left in big mounds to decompose and provide fertilizer, shrubs and brambles that had naturally planted themselves grew scattered throughout the area and each tree was encircled by herbs and flowers. Most people would describe what they saw as a mess, I would describe it as something I could do to, in our own backyard. Our friend’s theory for this way of mimicking a diverse landscape in its natural state was based on the observation that he often found disease free and vigorous apples in the wild that when cultivated in a conventional orchard quickly got infested with pest and diseases. We revisited his orchard this fall and he told us that the more “orchard-looking” fruit trees he had up the road had severe problems with apple bores (one of the worst apple tree pests) while this natural-looking, poly-culture orchard had little to non apple bore damage.

Up until then the area behind the hostel building had been left pretty much as is was when Dennis started the clearing for our homestead. Dead and blown down trees in a thicket of brambles and brush. After our visit to our friend’s new orchard, we’ve spent part of each winter cleaning up the mess and we now have a roughly 70-by-30 foot area where we’ll plant the first fruit trees next spring. Time has been essential to observe and be resourceful, for example have we not wanted to fell more trees than we could stack in our wood shed so to not waste them and last year we realized that more drainage was needed, something which at that point the ground was too we to do.

We’ve also sampled our way through the island apple trees to find the varieties we’d like to grow—a mix of early and late, keepers and eaters, sauce apples and drying apples. In the winters, we’ve gathered our scion and in the spring we’ve grafted the trees on rootstock we bought from Fedco, a Maine fruit tree company. The young trees are growing in our vegetable garden and by spring they’ll be ready to transplant to the new area.

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