- We're about to get dumped on guys.
So right now, in about an hour,
I'm gonna see how much I can get planted
of my third orchard I'm putting in here at the homestead.
So this is the master plan.
We've got our greenhouse here.
The greenhouse has a beautiful gutter
that I accidentally didn't unplug,
so it became a mosquito breeding ground.
We're gonna drop a little gutter coming down off
of this dropping in.
I'm gonna dig some swales here
to create a self-irrigated from rainwater,
backyard orchard.
You can see I already have one plant in.
This is a cherry.
Never thought I'd be growing cherries here at the homestead.
Nevertheless, here we are.
But this is gonna be a cherry.
It's gonna be two pears, two persimmon, and an Asian pear.
Let's get to it.
Before we get to the trees though,
take a look at the back garden right now.
What a beautiful setup,
almost feels like I'm in Jacques' garden,
kind of more of a wild setup.
So there's a lot of little radishes,
huge turnip right there, all winter stuff.
But let me take you on over.
Oh by the way, look at this,
carrots, beets, carrots,
nice little row planting, not great germination,
but hey, we do what we can.
Alright, let's take a look over here.
This is what my setup is.
I've got my bare-roots.
I'm gonna be soaking them in water
in advance of planting them.
So I gotta cut these bags off,
and then I gotta figure out how to space them
in this little corner area.
I want something somewhat close to this setup right here
off of the gutter system that I'm gonna build.
So I'm gonna go straight in the middle here.
That's my asparagus patch.
Over here is the test garden.
I want a nice equidistance between these two points
'cause I don't think those parts of the garden are moving.
I'm gonna go in with the quad-grafted Asian pear right here.
And for a bare-root tree,
we got a whole video with Tom Spellman,
but you don't need to get too crazy here.
You just wanna come down, dig in.
I'm gonna show you what I'll do to prevent from gophers
'cause I know I got some gophers in this area,
and in the first couple years of your tree's life,
you really don't want gophers chewing on those roots.
So I have the quad-grafted Asian pear.
I'm gonna do a little root fit test.
I need to dig a much bigger hole,
not that much bigger, just a couple inches.
And then this is what I'm gonna be using.
This is a stainless steel gopher mesh
that really prevents gophers from getting in.
Now, they'll be able to chew at the roots
that are emanating outwards,
but that's not as big a deal
compared to getting at that core of the root ball.
Before we plant, I wanna show you just a little trick
on resetting one of these four in one grafts,
or you could really do this with pretty much any fruit tree.
So take a look.
I've got one graft right here, one here, here, and here.
And if you wanna know the varieties,
it looks like I've got a Chojuro, 20th century Asian pear,
a Shinseiki, and a Hosui.
So what I've done already, take a look,
is I've actually chopped these down
to the same exact height,
but there's still a more dominant graft
and a less dominant graft.
And so take a look.
This one here and this one here,
these two are thicker stemmed
and they were longer before I cut them down.
So those are more dominant.
And then this one is much thinner and so is this one.
So what I'm gonna do, south is that way,
is I'm actually going to point my weaker grafts
towards the south.
Let these ones dominate on that north side,
they're already stronger.
So that's how you create balance
in one of these four in ones.
So let's get this in the ground.
Depth wise, I can see roughly about here is what I'm trying
to match to,
and I'm trying to match as straight as I can
while getting these non-dominant grafting points facing
towards the south,
so they get the biggest headstart.
When you do this gopher wire,
wanna make sure you really fill in
the actual wire cage itself,
otherwise you get these weird pockets in there,
which you 100% do not want.
It isn't designed to be absolutely foolproof.
It's designed to deter,
and frankly, it does a pretty damn good job of it.
So in the ground,
and what I do before I do anything else,
and there's still more to do on this pear,
is I give it some paint.
This organic essential oils just protects it from burning,
which frankly, sounds kind of like a joke.
But every single one of my tree plants,
my fruit trees burned this past year.
So I'm gonna apply a little bit of this paint,
which is not really a paint per se.
It's all natural.
But either way, it's just crazy how much this helps.
I'll do this with every single tree
that goes in the ground now,
and I re-up it after about a year or so.
Till that foliage comes in
and starts to really block the trunk, I'm painting.
Next, I'm gonna take some of that soil that I dug out
and create a bit of a ring around this tree
so that all the water that falls will actually fall
into the tree planted basin area.
And this is just kind of something
that I picked up from Tom Spellman
that you can do just by hand.
You don't have to get too crazy with it,
but you got a lot of extra soil
'cause of course, you dug it all out in that hole.
So I just come through, come off the plant just a bit here
and start building a bit of a little donut around the tree.
We'll then fill that in with mulch
to create almost like a gray water basin,
but it's more for irrigation water,
not true gray water, but similar idea to how I did
that laundry set up with the artichokes back in the day
or how I did the orchard.
Pretty sure Jacques is doing this exactly right now.
We were texting a little bit earlier.
We're both trying to beat this crazy storm
that we have coming into San Diego pretty soon.
So in we go there.
Let's bust out my mulch.
Actually, this is compost but it's probably fine.
Let's do that.
You wanna be careful not to pile up around the stem.
So I'm gonna bring it back just a touch,
but just throwing some,
effectively, mulch is just compost.
But it's not, frankly, it's not that well broken down,
not one of my favorite brands frankly, but it's what I have.
So I'm just gonna use it.
So there we go.
We have the Asian pear in the ground.
See how many we can get done before the storm comes.
By the way, you wanna fill up one of these buckets
or a a wheelbarrow.
Just soak your roots
while you're actually digging these holes out.
So let's take a look at what I've done,
which does, again, seem pretty crazy.
I've planted two pears pretty much right next to one another
and I've oriented them in such a way
that they're not really hitting each other.
A lot of the productive branches are kind of coming off
this way.
Now, what I wanna do is grow these effectively as one pair.
So I'm gonna come through and make some pruning cuts
to shape this tree in the way that makes the most sense.
Now, of course, this branch crossing into
what will be the new double canopy probably has to go.
So I'm gonna make a cut right there.
I don't want it to come back.
So that one's gone.
I'm going to bring this one back just a touch right here.
This guy right here probably has to go.
This one actually is semi productive.
This is sort of coming outwards, not into that center.
So I'm gonna leave that one.
And then, honestly, the rest of this looks okay right now.
We're soaked up, we're painted up.
Let's get these persis in the ground, AKA persimmons.
I've got the coffee cake persimmon, Nishimura wase.
And I've got the Jiro persimmon,
most popular persimmon in the country.
Going two in one hole right here.
Keep it easy, keep it breezy.
See this graph point here?
It is shooting way out this way.
So I'm gonna play with that and say thank you to the tree
and actually plant it going that way
because I need a little more space
between these two bad boys.
Okay, so take a look at these two trees.
They are spaced out quite well,
but what do you notice on this one?
Well, there's pretty much nothing on it
except for just the main trunk.
This what's called a whip.
It's a first year tree.
So what I need to do is very similar
to what I did to this cherry,
which looks depressing and absurd,
is I have to actually cut off a significant portion
of the tree.
So I mean, I'm coming all the way down here.
And where am I gonna cut, it's actually very important.
I'm probably gonna match this cherry's height just a touch.
And I want to cut right above a bud
that is not going to be shooting into the center
of this double planting here.
So this guy looks pretty promising.
He's coming off.
He'll be coming out this way.
So I'm gonna come in right about there,
seems insane, 45 degree cut.
There you go.
So got a nice clean cut up top.
Now, what I want to do here is take a look.
I got a lot of nice branching on this one here,
but it is really tall
and it is now way taller than this one.
So I'm gonna do the exact same thing here.
Basically this tree is
what this tree's gonna look like next year.
So in the principles of balance,
I'm gonna bring this tree down a little bit.
I don't see a great bud.
This one is going in, this one's going back,
this one's going in, this one's going out up here.
So I'm gonna go ahead and prune that one right there.
It's the next day.
The sun was getting a bit low,
but I'm gonna show you the back orchard now
before hopefully this storm gets here tomorrow.
So there's our Asian pear, really nice.
The next day, you can tell it is nice
and firm in the soil there,
got a nice little berm going around.
Don't have the gutter set up just yet.
Now this one was creating a bit of weird mud.
I think I put a little bit too much water on,
but overnight, it drained.
I think just a little bit worse drainage in this area.
The only thing I've done here additionally
is remove a couple extra stems.
There's one right there.
But I may experiment with a spacer of some kind
to force these to remain exactly this far apart.
So I might use some wood down there, get that job done.
We turn around,
we've got our royal crimson cherry right here,
and then pretty simple, just the persimmon right here,
both, again, nice and affixed into the soil
before that rains.
So the little wooden pathway garden is looking really nice
right about now.
This, still trying to decide what I'm gonna put in here.
Did a really nice prune job on the royal apricot,
the hens, the thickies.
Man, they are getting big.
The new ones honestly are quite large.
Look at Loaf right there.
Loaf is massive.
Loaf is an absolute beast.
Say hello to the camera, guys.
Say hello to everyone.
There's our good old, tried and true Butter right there.
There's Chetty.
We've got Lobster right there.
We got Lav, we have Rufio.
We have Cortado in the back.
We've got Loaf.
Who are we missing? Are we missing one?
I don't think so.
Finally starting to get eggs as well.
Man, it took a while.
Bit of a down period.
It's like one or two a day still.
Hopefully, pretty soon, we'll get more.
Got a beautiful last little bit of sun here,
beautiful sunset before that storm starts to come in.
So stay tuned.
You know I'm gonna get up to some antics
here on the channel.
Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.