Well, the answer is simple, it’s low maintenance and high producing. It can take a couple of years to get going, but an orchard can produce so much that you can as much as you can and still have so much excess that you’re giving fruit to every person who comes to your house.
When I say orchards are high producing, I mean it. Lets use apples as an example. My grandparents have a massive apple tree in their yard, and every year they have more apples than they can possibly use, just from that one tree. This year, they gave us about 20 lbs. and we made and canned a large batch of applesauce, a couple years before that we had a cousin in town and we took a baseball bat a just hit apples off a cliff.
The only maintenance orchards really needs is annual pruning. It’s also good to have a bee hive to pollinate the trees, but you don’t need a honey bee hive, you can just use mason bees, which have no maintenance and work great for pollination.
To start your orchard, you just need to find trees that can grow in your area and order/buy and plant them. Make sure you also pick fruit and nuts you’ll eat. Plant them according to the guidelines and wait for the fruit. This can take several years, so it really depends on the age and size of the tree when you buy it. I got a peach the first year we got our peach tree since we bought rather large trees.
There are several sizes of fruit trees, standard, semi-dwarf and dwarf. Dwarf trees can be hard to come by and most orchards use semi-dwarf trees. I wouldn’t suggest using standard size trees in an orchard unless you have a lot of room.
It’s also smart to fence your orchard. We haven’t gotten to this yet, and just did little circles around each tree, but it’s smart to fence an orchard since the fruit and bees, if they’re in your orchard, will attract bears. We’ve had bears pull down full grown plum trees to get the plums on the top branches.
Our orchard includes peach, apple, pear and cherry trees, and we’d love to add to it in the future!
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Highschool Homesteader 