Orchard Journal 2022

Five years ago on the summer solstice, I was camping at the Steens Mountain in a remote part of Southern Orgeon. I was finishing a 15-day solo road trip around the state. That evening, things coalesced in my mind and spirit, and I made a major life goal to grow perennial crops. After years of moving toward that goal, this year it finally happened. Here are a few details of year 1…

Over My Head

I spent September 2021 through March 2022 managing the installation of a major irrigation improvement funded by the Natural Resources Conservation Service. It was professionally engineered and had to be installed meticulously to receive the funding.

I was humbled immediately. Exactly one mile of PVC pipe arrived on a truck. It had to be buried, bedded, and backfilled to the strict NRCS specifications. Multiple concrete structures, pumps, filters, electrical hardware, and thousands of irrigation fittings all had to be assembled. The entire material cost was $60,000. I was way over my head in the technicality of the task. Two unforeseen challenges were supply chain delays and labor shortages.

In short, I felt a major sense of urgency once the materials were delivered.

Linnaea was born in November, right in the heat of it. Two individuals essentially saved my ass—Augustine and Alberto Pantojas. When Sara and I were in the hospital for several days after Linnaea was born—and essentially out-of-commission for weeks afterward—they continued working. They buried almost ½ mile of 6” PVC pipe in cold/wet weather with several technical challenges. I’m still extremely grateful.

I spent the next several months piecing together the project, hiring an excavator and an electrician to help get it done. I was doing my best to support Sara, and would tend to soil reports and emails well into the night. It was an intense period of focus and coffee consumption.

I also knew that another mile of irrigation tubing had to be installed immediately after the trees were planted. 

680 peach trees arrived in April. I had miraculous help from Augustine, twelve friends, and a very athletic nomad passing through town in his van. The trees were planted in a little over two days. The planting was quick, intense, and glorious. My friend Harrison explained how to best do it without a tree planter, and the planting method worked great.

Riding my bike at sunset around all the baby trees made me feel like my orcharding dream had finally come to fruition.

I pruned all the trees in May. I asked three different experienced orchardists how to prune and got three different answers. I did half one way and half another. At this point, I’m not convinced the difference mattered.

I had a 12-species cover crop ready to plant between the rows of trees in the “alleys”. I contacted a local farmer who was scheduled to seed drill the seeds for optimal germination. I couldn’t get him to show up. Instead of manually throwing seeds in the alleys and hoping they’d germinate, I kept waiting for the guy. A month and a half went by before I gave up on the seed drill and I threw seeds by hand. Not seeding immediately turned out to be the mistake of the year, which I wouldn’t realize until later in the season.

The Borer Crisis

In early July I was struck with a heavy infestation of Peach Twig Borers. I noticed several dead shoots when walking the orchard one day.

I told myself not to freak out, but simply to observe closely. The next day I saw a few more, and started asking around in hopes of identifying the cause. Once identified, I called CropwoRx (Western Colorado’s supplier of conventional and organic agricultural chemicals, seed and fertilizer) and picked up Entrust.

Entrust is the certified organic pesticide spinosad. The product is produced through the fermentation of a naturally occurring soil bacterium, spinosad, and targets many insects in the order Lepidoptera (worms, thrips, leafminers, etc.) It’s totally safe for animals, birds, fish, but not all insects. Unfortunately it isn’t the safest for honeybees when it’s wet, so it must be sprayed at night when they’re in the hive. It’s insanely expensive. Over $600 for about a liter.

I fired up my tractor-mounted orchard sprayer, only to find a damaged rubber diaphragm on the pump was blasting water out of the engine block. My sprayer was busted.

By this point it had been four days since identifying the pest, and I could tell it was spreading quickly. It seemed that the borers were eating one apical meristem per night. The plants looked limp and stressed because when a plant is attacked it devotes much of its photosynthetic energy to fight the attacker. I felt like I had days, not weeks, until I would lose most of my orchard. First year trees are extremely weak and mortality rates increase with any kind of stress.

To make matters more complicated, Sara has two beehives about 10’ from the orchard. The first night I wanted to spray, the bees were outside the hive cooling off (called “bearding”) until 4am because it was so hot the day before.

Another day went by, more limp trees.  

The next night I carefully covered the beehives, managed to Macgyver the tractor sprayer with a zip tie and duct tap—advised by the sprayer company—and got the spray on the trees. I sprayed at 2am on my tractor my Bose headphones blasting good music in the moonlight. It ended up being quite thrilling and fun.

The next day I cut open about 10 newly damaged and limp branches to find 10 little peach twig borers. They were all dead.  Various other insects (flies, bees, moths) were flying around happily. It was a very effective, targeted spray.

I was told by several other growers that I wouldn’t have any pest pressure in the first year. For whatever reason, I got hit with borers right out of the gate. I didn’t kill the first generation of borers, and the second generation got me. I had heard that every commercial organic peach orchard in Western Colorado sprays the first generation of peach twig borer with Entrust every year (or an alternative like BT). You have to. But I was caught on my heels.

In my romantic perennial agriculture dream, I never imagined myself spraying a pesticide. Of course Spinosad is far different than synthetic chemistries that can be dangerous to the operator, or persistent in the environment, or toxic to animals/fish/birds/bats/etc. But it’s still a pesticide. I was shocked at how quickly things declined in a week. About 6 trees died from the attack. I believe if I had waited one more week, I would have lost 50% of them. I was reminded that in commercial farming, you spray or you lose everything.

My advice to myself a year ago would have been: “spray the first generation in year one, set up traps right after planting, and put aside any Permie ideology that you don’t need to spray.”

The trees recovered after about 7 days, and continued growing very well.

The Weeding Crisis

We all got Covid and I struggled to do anything but irrigate sloppily for 5-6 days. I came out of the slumber to realize the weeds were proliferating in my alleys, sprawling quickly and rapidly onto the weed fabric. Many of the weeds started covering the sprinklers, preventing water from reaching the trees.

My tractor-mounted rotary mower did not swing to the side enough to reach the weeds.

Within two days I found an old banged-up zero turn mower, drove to Glenwood Springs, and bought it. I then spent the next week manually raking the weeds off the landscape fabric and chopping them up with the zero turn mower. Row by row. I immediately did the math in my head: one row would take about 45 min, I have about 32 rows. A lot of work as I still felt covid lingering in my body, and a lot of time I didn’t anticipate.

I chipped away at it morning and night for the next week until the orchard looked like a golf course.

It was monotonous, lightly physical, and somewhat therapeutic. I really got to see the orchard at a slow pace. I experienced rainbows, wind, rain storms, thunder, intense heat, sunsets, flocks of birds, and it was all glorious.

I became intimately familiar with all the weed species in the orchard: bindweed and mallow the primary culprits. I see no value in bindweed. However, mallow has a deep woody root. It’s extremely prolific and I came to think of it as a wonderful subsoiler. I’d argue it’s better than a daikon radish for subsoiling: faster growing and a better, woodier web of roots. I imagined that killing it with my new mower would leave a long woody root going a foot into the soil. This would decompose and become a wonderful channel for water and gas exchange. It would host fungi that would decompose it. Soil Food Web folks swear that a “fungal dominant” soil is the best for crop production, mimicking a mature ecosystem at the apex of ecological succession. I was inspired by this idea, so I purchased 60 cubic yards of lightly composted chicken manure and set out to make a Johnson-Su Bioreactor. From my research, this method of composting creates the most consistent and fungal-dominant compost. It takes over a year to produce properly, much faster than any commercial compost company could afford. Therefore, you simply can’t buy compost this good. With this type of compost you can create a compost extract (like a tea bag in a cup of water), which can then be fertigated through the irrigation system, inoculating the entire orchard with diverse and dense fungal spores. This would help decompose orchard prunings and the mallow roots, acting like a jet fuel for soil nutrient-cycling, and would theoretically improve crop health dramatically.

Immediately following, I had a fairly severe outbreak of a parasitic weed “dodder”. It’s a creepy yellow vine. I didn’t like it the moment I saw it. My first move was to mow it several times. Bad move. This propagated the vine, sending small bits of it through the air to a new area for it to colonize. Mowing twice quadrupled the amount of fast-growing dodder.

My next move was hand cultivation. I meticulously got every inch of yellow vine, which took days. I left for an 8-day trip, came home, and the dodder was back, but a third the size. At this point my $100 propane flame thrower had showed up and I started burning the dodder patches. I experimented with vinegar. No luck. Whenever small patches would appear, I’d burn them. I hope my efforts this year reward me with reduced pressure next year, but who knows.

I learned that burning is best for small patches of dodder. For large patches, rake and remove, then burn all vegetation that is left. I’ll also have a strong organic acid product in the lineup next year. 

The prolific weeds and invasive dodder were both a result of failing to get a cover crop established in my alleys. If only the guy had shown up as scheduled with a seed drill—or if I had only been more self-sufficient and immediately hand-seeded the alleys—there would be a living cover that would have suppressed the weeds. This mistake cost me days and days of labor later in the season as I manually chopped, cut, burned, and hoed weeds week after week.

Water Obsession

With so much time in the orchard, I learned that my soil dries quickly. It’s a sandy loam. Sandy soils are known to drain water quickly. They also don’t hold as much water compared with a silt or clay soil. However, if irrigated properly they can be very productive soils due to their high gas exchange (when water drains out, oxygen is pulled into the pore space). By July, I watered every other day for about 3 hours. In August I moved to 4 hours every three days. We had fantastic monsoons in August that made it easier.

I performed a soil test and a series of tissue tests to start monitoring plant nutrition. I’m still undecided how in-depth I want to dive into peach nutrition. I don’t have enough acreage to justify the high cost of weekly sap testing—the Cadillac approach—but wonder if the learning alone might justify it. I’ll likely perform two soil tests and four tissue tests per season as a baseline.

Every night after Linnaea went to bed, I’d head straight for the orchard during the Golden Hour. I’d spend about 15 minutes simply walking, feeling, and observing. Mostly I was feeling the soil. I became absolutely obsessed with managing soil moisture. I think it is by far the most important element of farming in the arid West. Plants just seem to grow proportional to the water they receive. I’d measure with an electrical volumetric moisture meter, three in-field tensiometers, and a soil probe. I’d probe soil at ~4-5 locations every day around the orchard at shallow and deep depths to evaluate the moisture. I’d determine the next day’s irrigation set based on those soil cores.

2023 Dreams

The pending project that’s inspiring me is to set up in-field soil moisture meters, connect them with telemetry, upload their data to the cloud every few minutes, and observe moisture levels graphically. I’ve found a hardware company that has the hardware to make this happen, plus programmable software to automatically turn the irrigation system on/off at the exact moisture level I set. It’s a daunting project but I’m committed to doing it. If I can figure it out, it might be a valuable tool for other farmers in my area. As I write this, the federal government ordered the Lower Basin states to create a plan to cut water use two to four million acre-feet. I feel like it could somehow be a small solution to that complex problem.

Doing so would send me deeper into a personal paradox that’s become a dominant struggle in my life: doing all these things that excite me, and doing less. My orcharding pursuit is extra. It’s an indulgence in nature, beauty, health, and science. It feels very important to me, but extra. I desire more simplicity in my life but managing an orchard is anything but simple. In year one, it required a lot of action, decisions, and attention. Most of this was unique to year one, but I get the sense it will never actually be a simple endeavor. My obsession with the orchard made it feel easy this year. But that energy will eventually wane—it always does—and I’ll need to find a better equilibrium with the amount of my limited energy and attention I put into it. Managing three acres alone as a side project is a lot of work.

But for now, I’m still reveling in the magic of the new orchard and enjoying my walks with Linnaea through the trees. 2022 felt like I hit a walk-off home run in the 1st inning: a good start but a long way to go. I remain humble—paranoid even—as I know anything can happen and my trees are still young and susceptible.

Everyone asks: “Peaches next year?” I’ll most likely pull the blooms off the trees to put one more year of the tree’s energy toward shoot growth (not fruit growth). This will set the trees up for a much larger harvests in 2024 and beyond. But I’ll leave a few blooms to become peaches as a sweet reminder of what’s to come.