Unlike many pecan orchards/groves in Missouri, my pecan trees are growing in the uplands. Missouri has relatively narrow strips of deep loess soil along the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers (and their tributaries) and given enough moisture, these soils can be great places to grow pecans. In central Missouri, the Missouri river hills are absolutely full of native pecan trees. At my farm there was already a large number of mature pecan trees throughout the property when it was purchased a few years ago. Some of these trees are very old and have likely been producing pecans for many years. Animals and mother nature spread these nuts around and buried them. Many of the fields had been neglected in terms of mowing, or any type of cultivation when we purchased it. This led to an explosion of pecan (and other tree) sprouts throughout the fields. This made it easy for me to quickly establish pecan plantings because I simply monitored the fields and protected small pecan sprouts with tree cages, then grafted them when they were large enough.
ABOVE: You can see it just looks like a pasture starting to turn back into a woodland. The key was really to identify the young pecan trees, make sure I didn't kill them by mowing them off, then graft them. Most of the trees above were grafted using the three flap graft. Some of the advantages of establishing an orchard this way are:
1) Low upfront cost for planting stock. Buying a 4 foot tall grafted pecan tree would likely cost $30+ per tree, and it may require irrigation, good weed control, and other maintenance for at least the first year to ensure its survival during our hot summers (like in 2018).
2) Low maintenance. These trees I am grafting onto have already very well established root systems, so I do not need to worry very much about them at all in terms irrigation or weed control. I will do some weed control around them to promote FASTER growth, but in terms of survival these trees have already 'out competed' other local vegetation. Likely, if I were to try and dig these trees up I would find root systems that have already penetrated many feet below the soil surface into the subsoil. As an indicator of how well established the root systems are on these pecan trees they actually made decent growth last year during the prolonged drought and intense heat, we had here in central Missouri. Some have 2-3 feet of new growth.
3) Faster production. Since these trees were already growing well and had established roots when I grafted them they will produce nuts sooner than any other method I am aware of. Even if I were to have purchased large grafted trees for this orchard I would still have to wait for their roots to become well established and since the time it takes for trees such as pecans to start bearing nuts is already so long anything I can do to significantly speed up the process (without spending too much $$) is likely to make the endeavor more profitable sooner.
ABOVE: This is that same field from the bottom of the hill looking up. Strips have been mowed along the sides of existing pecan tree sprouts and were just grafted. Once I have marked and protected any trees I want to 'save' the rest of the field will be completely mowed to discourage competition from other woody shrub and tree species. Normally I will put cages around the trees right after I graft them because grafts are sensitive and deer bumping into them or nibbling on them could completely destroy the graft. I try to select wild sprouts that are roughly in rows to make future maintenance easier.
BELOW: This is a graft I did earlier in May. It is not a pecan, it is a pawpaw tree, but it was a fairly large native pawpaw tree and I removed the top and grafted a different variety onto it (which will produce higher quality fruit). I used a bark graft on this tree, which is also the type of graft I use on larger pecans. It seems to work very well with pawpaws as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment