GARLIC

    Garlic is one of the main annual crops I grow. I have grown it at our farm for a number of years now and it has proven to be a relatively reliable, low maintenance, high value crop. Much of our garlic is grown to be sold as seed garlic to others who would like to grow it. Because we sell garlic that may be grown by others, I try to be very meticulous when it comes to preventing diseases. Cultural practices, like crop rotation and keeping foreign garlic seed cloves out of my production areas, have served me well in preventing disease problems. 

    The way I usually grow garlic is in slightly elevated 'beds' with straw mulch for weed suppression. This can work fine as long as you don't have weeds that are germinating in (or growing through) your straw mulch. In my experience, hand weeding garlic can require a large amount of labor if weeds cannot be kept under control by other means. 

    Two of the cultivars I currently grow the largest amount of are 'Siberian' and 'Chesnok Red'. 'Siberian' can make large bulbs with only a few very plump cloves per bulb, while 'Chesnok Red' often makes smaller bulbs and smaller cloves but is known for its flavor and beautifully colored bulbs. Both of these cultivars are in the hardneck group of garlics, and are quite different than garlics in the softneck group. 

  For those interested in growing garlic in Missouri, this is my 'timeline' of activities:

August-September (year 1) - prepare an area for growing garlic that you will harvest in the summer of year 2.

Late October  (year 1) - make your raised beds (if you are going to grow the garlic in raised beds) and plant your seed garlic cloves. I have started planting my cloves somewhat shallow, making sure there is about 1 -2 inches of soil on top of the cloves. You can plant deeper if you like, some growers will plant them 2-4 inches deep. I plant them a little shallower because I use quite a bit of mulch. I plant all of my garlic cloves on an 8 inch by 8 inch grid, so there is 8 inches between plants and 8 inches between rows.

Mulch right after planting (year 1) - I generally cover my bulbs with 5-6" of loose straw mulch. This will settle during the winter and will often only be a few inches by spring. 

Late March - early April (year 2) - Pull any weeds germinating

May (year 2) - Watch for scapes. Timing varies. Cut the scapes off low when they are relatively young. They taste better and it can improve the size of your bulbs.

Periodically pull weeds in the beds. Can apply a little more loose straw mulch after pulling weeds in an area.

Late May-early July (year 2) - Watch your garlic like a hawk for the right time to harvest it. I generally will dig/pull all my garlic plants when most of the plants average 50% of the leaves have turned brown and are dying back. I have heard some people harvesting as early as when 25% of the leaves have turned brown. The key is not to wait so long that most of the leaves are dead and your bulb wrappers (underground) have been compromised. 

Post-harvest - I hang all the garlic plants immediately with leaves still attached in a covered well ventilated area. I do not allow the bulbs to be in an area where there is any direct sunlight or where they may get wet again as they dry. I usually allow the bulbs to dry, hanging, for approximately 4 weeks before the tops are cut off and the bulbs go into longer term storage. 

Two things I won't go into detail about, but are important to mention:

1) Irrigation - If you can irrigate your bulbs it can result in larger bulbs in some years. Methods to do this vary.

2) Fertilization - This can result in larger bulbs and there are many various recommendations out there for garlic. Generally, fertilizer or compost is added just before or right at planting, and some fertilization is often done in the spring. 

Expanding the Pawpaw Orchard

 I expanded our planting of pawpaw trees (Asimina triloba) again this past season. I have wild pawpaw stands that I harvest fruit from and manage at a very low level of intensity, and I have young trees planted in orchard settings that receive more management (and will definitely out produce their wild neighbors in the future). If you want to have a crop to sell quickly then you can cultivate the wild trees, but your crop may not be very uniform in production, size, shape, or quality. This is not unique to pawpaws, some other examples of crops in Missouri that are also grown in orchards AND harvested from the wild are pecans and elderberries. In fact, in a number of states harvests from wild pecan trees still make up a sizeable part of the industry. 

Left: Typical small wild pawpaw tree in the understory. This one is actually large enough to have some flowers on it and it may produce a few fruit. 

If this were a grafted pawpaw tree of this size of a 'good' cultivar, on a good site, in a well managed orchard, it could be capable of producing a few pounds of fruit at this size. However, being a small wild seedling tree in a heavily shaded area, it may make a few small fruits if I am lucky. 

Almost all of the pawpaw trees I plant are seedlings, which I will graft later in the field. There are a few reasons for this. A major one is cost, grafted pawpaw trees are expensive. Another is that good establishment in the field is never guaranteed for anything. If a tree does not establish well and dies I would much rather it be a relatively inexpensive seedling versus a much more expensive grafted tree. The main downside of planting seedlings and grafting later is you do lose a little time until you get to fruit production AND you will have increased labor cost of doing the field grafting. Field grafting a large number of trees yourself can take a lot of time and there is some periodic maintenance that may be involved that first season to ensure the grafts are successful. 

Below: New pawpaw trees just watered in after planting. This orchard was established over a site where garlic was grown last season. 

After the ground was prepared and the trees planted, I seeded a groundcover of white clover, creeping red fescue, and perennial ryegrass.

 In my newer pawpaw plantings I have moved to a more intensive spacing of 15+/- feet between rows and 12 feet (or less) between trees within the rows. 

  Above: Caging and placing shadecloth over newly planted trees is in progress 

I use cages around pawpaws for two reasons: 

1) prevent deer from rubbing on their trunks

2) I think some shade their first season seems to promote survival of the trees (especially if the trees are very small) and the cages give me something to easily attach some shade cloth on. 

Orchard Ground covers and Legumes part II

           I talked in some length in a previous post (see here) about the value and relative ease of adding legumes to an orchard groundcover. That post included some photos of some areas I had seeded legumes in previous years in areas that are (or were about to be) planted as orchards. I did extensive frost seeding of legume species in the winter of 2018 and 2019. The winter of 2019, and spring of 2020, were moist and cool in this area and conditions were excellent for germination of many of the legume species I planted, especially the various white clovers. I wanted to follow up that post with some pictures of how a really low-input, low-cost frost seeding can really pay off when environmental conditions are really favorable for the the planting.

Above: This picture was from earlier this spring and the white clover came on very early, it came on very dense, and with continued heavy rainfall it just kept on growing. The Ladino clover made especially tall, dense growth in favorable areas this year. 

Below (2 pictures): These are from mid-late May 2020. The first picture is of one of the typical small bare root pecan trees I planted the previous year. It has made fine growth with all this rain and many of them went from little 12" tall sticks into 3 foot tall trees this season. I generally like a fairly heavy straw mulch a couple of feet in diameter around the trees, then around that mulch I like to keep the legumes mowed consistently quite short. 

Pawpaws as an orchard crop and improving wild stands

I have posted some about pawpaws (Asimina triloba) before, but I haven't said a lot about them in detail. Pawpaws grow wild throughout much of the eastern, southern, and central U.S. Efforts to improve pawpaws and develop the species into a productive, domesticated, orchard crop have been made for decades. Some efforts have been much more organized and successful than others. If you are interested in pawpaws you should check out the work going on at:

Kentucky State: https://kysu.edu/academics/cafsss/pawpaw/

Neil Peterson's: https://www.petersonpawpaws.com/

My experience with pawpaws is that, here in Missouri, you have one of two things:

1) Wild pawpaws - relatively low production, smaller fruits, sometimes have 'off' flavors, some years they make no fruit, are relatively abundant in some areas, but are relatively scarce in others, generally un-maintained and growing in wooded areas (especially in the under story with partial to heavy shade).

2) Pawpaws grown as an orchard crop - often grafted trees, usually uniformly spaced in rows, can require some level of maintenance (but often less than other fruit crops in Missouri). Almost always in full (or almost full) sunlight.

There are also combinations of these. For example, you could graft wild pawpaw trees to cultivars that produce more and larger fruit. You could also graft young wild pawpaw trees so that they will produce fruit sooner. There are obstacles to attempting to turn wild pawpaw groves into orchards, but interestingly there is a history of doing this in Missouri with other crops, notably pecans. Missouri has many wild pecan groves where other trees species have been cut over the years to encourage the pecan trees to produce more nuts, and in some of these wild pecan groves now contain trees that growers have grafted that are more productive and/or disease resistant.

There are many differences between pecan and pawpaw trees, but the premise is the same. Find areas where there are wild pawpaw trees, thin out some of the other tree species, leave the pawpaw trees, and manage them for production. The advantage to this method is basically the same as it is for creating pecan groves, you can get production faster and it is possible to keep establishment costs lower. The trade-off is you may not have an ideal site, and you may never see the maximum production potential you would see if you picked and ideal site and planted the orchard there, spaced the trees at an ideal spacing, grafted only the most productive cultivars, etc.

I have done both of these at my farm and combinations of them. I have planted organized orchards of young pawpaw trees, I have unmanaged wild pawpaw stands, and I have managed and grafted wild stands of pawpaw trees. Basically this is the same thing I have with pecans as well (although the pawpaws take up much less space than pecan trees, which is great).

Here is a video of me talking about a small area I have grafted some cultivars onto wild pawpaw rootstocks.

Short pawpaw video

There are two things that make a lot of sense to me about pawpaw cultivation.

1) Low maintenance - For a FRUIT crop in Missouri. Pawpaws are more flexible in their site requirements than many other fruits. This does not mean you will get high yields on all sites (you will not). This does not mean you won't have problems on some sites, but it does mean that you can successfully grow pawpaws in areas you would never be able to grow a peach tree for example, or a grape vine (ex. in partial shade).

2) Profitability - If you have a market to sell your pawpaws, it can be quite lucrative. If you have no market to sell your pawpaws, then they probably won't be very lucrative. This concept is not unique to pawpaws, but it means that you need to plan at least a little before you are holding the fruit in your hand wondering what to do with it. There is often not a huge supply of pawpaws available (especially fresh) so if you can get them to people who want them you have a little more flexibility in your pricing (you are more of a price maker than a price taker, which is a good situation to be in).

Since costs of production can be relatively low, and prices attained for quality fruit can be high, the POTENTIAL exists to actually see some profit.

In the future I will make another post about some pawpaw cultivars I like and why I like them. There are quite a few out there right now. I will say 'Sunflower' is one of the cultivars I really like, but a full discussion of pawpaw cultivars is a post for another day.

Orchard Groundcovers and Legumes

Orchard Groundcovers

There are a lot of different options out there for orchard ground preparation, and options for plants to establish in young and mature orchards. A lot of the information out there for establishing young pecan orchards isn't really geared towards really low input approaches.

For example, in some of my orchards (pictured below), conventional tillage before planting to 'prepare' a seedbed for ground cover establishment was not really a good option in my opinion for a few reasons:

1) Cost in terms of $$. When you start talking establishing acres of grass and legumes from bare ground seed costs start climbing quickly. 

2) Cost in terms of soil erosion. Most of the trees are on extremely erodible ground, and I know these areas have lost enough topsoil in the past that I didn't want to lose more, so very minimal soil disturbance was a MUST

3) I already had some really desirable plant species growing in some of these areas and I would rather not kill them. 

I could have went with some different approaches using herbicides. If I had wanted to use herbicides on this site, my best bet probably would have been to go from tree to tree and spray a wide circle of herbicide all around them. In my opinion spraying strips of herbicides within the entire row would not have been a good idea since some of these rows of wild pecan seedlings run downhill, so it is likely I would have suffered some erosion from that approach. Some areas are a fine silt loam and others are a sandy loam, and they have a tendency to erode the instant water moves over bare soil. So when thinking about orchard preparation in your own orchards pay attention to your unique conditions, because it is very likely some of the recommendations on 'best practices' for some locations may not work well for yours.

Working on so much highly erodible soil, I always try to prioritize protecting the soil. I can replace a lot of things, trees, others plants, etc, but I can't replace soil once it is gone. If I lose an inch of topsoil through carelessness, that is more soil than is going to be created in my entire lifetime. 

In the end, what I chose to do in terms of ground cover establishment was extremely minimal and involved no herbicide or tillage. 

So what did I end up doing in terms of orchard prep?

I thought about what I would need in the future for these trees. I wanted a ground cover that I could establish with minimal inputs (no tillage, no herbicide), and one that was going to work for me to help the trees meet the high demands for nutrients they will have in the future when they are trying to grow AND produce a nut crop. Since I knew these were two of the important things to me, I decided to look into legumes and combinations of legumes I could easily establish and that were most likely to persist (and/or set large amounts of seed) and continue to fix nitrogen into the soil for years to come. I decided to establish a mix of legumes, mostly through frost seeding (if you aren't familiar with this look it up). I bought bulk quantities of red clover, common white clover, ladino clover, and korean lespedeza and frost seeded them (after I inoculated them with the appropriate inoculant) for two winters over the entire area of the pecan orchards. The results have been excellent (see picture below). 

ABOVE: Red clover and white clover are dense, the mowing early in establishment really helped.

ABOVE: You can see the prolific flowering of white clover across this field. Two years of frost seeding different types of white clover (among others) over this areas has really paid off. White clover seed especially is incredibly cheap per lb for the amount of seed you get. It also has a very low seeding rate because there are so many seeds per lb. It is also very effective at fixing nitrogen. It was a no brainer to include it in my mixtures. Note that frost seeding with clover was incredibly inexpensive for me. My total seed costs per year average out to something like $5 or so per acre, and my labor (it took a few hours to walk the whole pecan orchard using a hand broadcast seeder, but it worked very well for the extremely low seeding rate needed for things like white clover). I do not see any way to get that amount of nitrogen on these fields more efficiently and for such a long amount of time than what these plants are doing right now.

BELOW: This is a close up of what is going on. There are a lot of other plant species that are in the orchards as well, and that is fine with me. At this stage in the orchard I am not harvesting nuts from the ground so I don't need an orchard floor that is clipped very short to facilitate nut harvest. I can let the clovers, other legumes, and native plants grow relatively tall then mow them down a few times during the year. I try to time my mowing so that I am letting some of the clover and other select species go to seed if it is a species I want to see more of.

The moist winter of 2018-2019 and moist spring of 2019, coupled with regular mowing to control some of the grasses and other plants in the orchards, have allowed large numbers of the legumes to establish rapidly and make satisfactory growth this year. I have dug some samples of these legumes to check for nodulation on their roots (an indicator of below ground nitrogen fixation) and I am finding a large percentage of them with nodules. I am also favoring various native legumes including large areas of partridge pea (see picture below, really an attractive looking plant). When I mow I leave the large areas of partridge pea standing as it flowers, and allow it to go to seed. I have dug multiple partridge pea plants and I am seeing nodulation on their roots as well.

BELOW: Partridge pea on the edge of a field

BELOW: Nodules on a white clover plant 

Getting Pecan trees into nut production quickly

Wild seedling pecan sprouts versus planting your own 

If you have seen my previous posts on pecan you know I am a big fan of finding vigorous native pecan sprouts that are located on good pecan sites and grafting them whenever possible, versus planting them and spending more time and money in tree establishment. It's not always the case that good seedling sprouts magically appear in perfect rows and work out with my plans, but when they do I absolutely choose to work with them, versus spending the extra time, energy, and money to plant and establish the trees myself. In fact, if within he first year of planting seedling pecans I see a wild pecan sprout come up near my tree I will often leave it and if it outgrows my planted tree that year, or the next, I will cut down my planted pecan (as long as it is also a seedling) and begin to care for the wild sprout.

This year I took a few pictures of good examples of why it makes more sense to favor wild seedling sprouts like this. The odds are favorable that they already have a fairly extensive root system and are often capable of fantastic growth with very, very, minimal care and inputs. This isn't to say your 1st year planted seedling tree couldn't make similar growth, but I have never seen a 1 year old pecan tree planted in the field that competed favorably in a low input environment with an already established wild seedling pecan.

Here are a couple examples.

BELOW: 

This tree was grafted in SP 2018. It was a relatively short sprout that had even had the top browsed off by deer before I grafted it. It was roughly 1 inch in diameter at about 2 feet from the ground and was relatively short (likely from being continuously eaten by deer) probably around 3 feet tall. I grafted it at about that 2- 2.5 foot mark (which is lower than I would normally graft) and caged it to prevent the deer from eating the graft. This is the tree in the summer of 2019. It is now approximately 10 feet tall, the very top of the tree is just off the top of the picture. The wooden post on the right in the picture is about 5 feet out of the ground. In 1 year and a half this tree has made 7 feet of growth (from the original 3 foot tall tree to the current 10 foot tall tree). Last summer was also a fairly severe drought in this area that killed quite a few seedling pecan trees I had tried to establish, but instead of dying this tree thrived.

BELOW: 

Another seedling that made relatively good growth this year. It is now approximately 9 feet tall. 

BELOW: 

I grafted this pecan at about the height I like to graft them when possible. It is grafted at around my chest height and it was grafted in SP 2019. It has a little competition for light from some nearby trees, so it is really trying to grow up. In the future most of those trees it is competing with will be thinned. This tree is 9 feet tall now as Summer 2019 wraps up, so over the spring and summer of 2019 it has done really well. We were blessed with heavy rainfall in 2019 so even the newly planted seedling pecans have done well, but still the already established wild pecan sprouts have done even better.

         BELOW: 

This is likely one of the parents of many of the seedling pecan sprouts in my upland pecan orchards. It is one of the large mature pecan trees on the edges of the woods and fields where my young trees are growing. Throughout the forested areas near my orchards there are large (50+ years old) mature pecans as well as younger pecans (1-20 years old) near any forest openings.

Identifying Young Wild Pecan trees at your Orchard Site

In some of my previous posts I have talked about the advantages of grafting wild pecan trees that are already established (saves you time, saves you money, you get pecan nuts sooner, etc.). As I have said before, if you already have some larger pecan trees around your property, it is very likely that squirrels and mother nature have planted more pecans for you than you can imagine. If you want to let them grow, arguably, the most important thing you will have to do is not kill them. Whether they are in an area you mow, brush hog, or in an area where you have animals grazing, you will probably have to do something to protect them when they are very young.

The easiest thing I have found is to follow these few steps:

1) Identify the young pecan tree - often this is easiest in the late spring-early summer. First year pecan trees will be sprouting at this time and it is very easy to miss them and mow them over.

2) Drive a wooden stake in the ground next to the tree once it is identified. Make sure this stake will be taller than any of the vegetation around it. You want this to be tall enough that you will be able to see it above any grass.

If you want you can use a metal post, or a t-post instead of a tall wooden stake. I prefer using a durable wooden stake versus a t-post because I generally remove the stakes and cages in a few years when the trees are taller and since I do this with a lot of trees I don't want to have to go pull a few hundred t-posts out every year.  Also, if you are someone who may want to leave the cage and post around the tree longer (maybe you have livestock that might bother your tree?), then you need to make sure you pay attention when the tree is getting large enough that the trunk is starting to touch that post, or if the roots at the base of the tree are growing close to your post. It becomes very difficult to pull metal posts out of a tree if the tree grows into the post.


3) Put a cage around the young tree and attach it to your wooden stake using wire or rope. What I usually do is do to a hardware or farm supply store and purchase small rolls of 4 or 5 foot tall, 2 by 4 welded wire fencing, cut out a 6 foot length of it, bend it into a circle and use it as a tree cage. You can also use other types of fencing if you have it. The cages come in handy to protect the trees from deer. Deer will eat pecan trees, they will rub the bark off them, and further down the road they can also eat (or otherwise damage) your graft (if you graft your trees in the future).


So back to step 1. Identifying young pecan trees. This is actually somewhat more difficult than with some other tree species because very young pecan trees actually look much different than they will when they are a few years old.

It will probably be easiest for you to identify pecan trees in late spring and early summer when they have their leaves. Below is a picture of mature pecan leaves. Older pecan trees (normally older than 1 or 2 years old) will have what are called compound, alternate leaves. The leaf consists of all those individual 'leaflets' (this is what compound means). That entire structure is the leaf. Usually there will be from 9-17 leaflets on a leaf. Notice that those little leaflets always have small serrations, or 'teeth' along the edges, they are NOT smooth. Also those leaflets are almost always very narrow, or lance shaped. They are very pointed on the ends.

ABOVE : We have a pecan LEAF, it is a compound leaf, with 17 leaflets. Note the toothy, jagged edges of the leaflets. Note all the leaflets are pointed and relatively narrow. This leaf is from a tree that is around 4 years old. If you are identifying pecan trees that are a few years old by their leaves this is what you should look for. This is a relatively typical leaf. This is what you will find described in pecan leaf ID guides. At this stage the pecan tree you are looking at is likely quite large, it could be 4 feet tall, 40 feet tall, or 80 feet tall. Almost all the leaves will look similar to this.

BELOW: Here is a group of the leaves from that same 4 year old tree. This particular tree is around 8 feet tall. This tree is already so large that I would not really bother to put a cage or stake around it. If you have really big problems with deer rubbing your trees you could put a cage around it if you wanted.

BELOW: This is what you are unlikely to find in the tree ID guides. What we have here are TWO pictures of a pecan tree that is 1 month old. It looks very different from older pecan trees. If you are trying to find young pecan sprouts in an area you regularly mow, or that is fairly intensively grazed pasture, this is very likely what you will see. It does not even have the compound leaves with the 9-17 leaflets. It has a few simple leaves. If you are looking around your yard or field for small pecan trees that have just sprouted and taken root this year, this is what you should be looking for. These are small, and tender. They are easily mowed over and are easily consumed and trampled by deer. Notice it's leaves are a little wider, but they are still pointed on the ends, and they also still have the jagged 'teeth' along the edges of each leaf. This tree is only 8 inches tall. 

BELOW: Transition. If you are looking through hay fields, or pastures that are not mowed multiple times a year you may see something like this below in these TWO pictures. This is also a pecan tree, and it has some characteristics of both the really young (newly sprouted) pecan trees, and the older ones. Note it still has those simple leaves at the base of the tree, but it is forming compound leaves at the top. This tree is about 15 inches tall. Note that the leaves and leaflets still all have those jagged edges, and they still have points on the ends. 

When you are just starting to identify pecan trees you are going to make a few mistakes, that's the way learning happens. If you think you have misidentified some trees, then try to find out distinguishing features of the species you actually found and then look closely at those differences. 

In Missouri there are a variety of hickory species, and some look somewhat similar to pecans. I may dive into some of those differences in another post, but if you think you might be looking at something that might NOT be a pecan, but looks similar, look up Missouri's hickory species, and also the black walnut. Look for their distinguishing features and compare that to the tree you have.