The Fruit Tree Planting

We had a great fruit tree planting event on Sunday, the sun shone as we tended to our new trees and people wandered through the park to say hello and tell us what a great job we were doing.

The trees are part of the ‘edible park’ we are creating on the northern field. We are putting in a large open circle area with seating around it over the summer. The trees we planted yesterday arc out from this central circle. They face the north east and we have planted them to step up in height so that all the trees get sunlight. On the edge of the circle we have citrus trees: lemons, limes and mandarins, as these are smaller trees we planted them closer together, with about 2.5m spacing, behind the citrus we have apples spaced at 3m and behind that the bigger trees, plums and nashi’s spaced at 4m. It is really exciting to get some trees up on the site as these will provide plenty of fruit for the community to share in over the next few years.

We dug the holes a few weeks ago, they needed to be quite deep so we could get all the underground goodness that we could into them. In each hole we put seaweed, compost, topsoil and fertilisers. It is said that trees need 84 elements to be healthy and that seaweed can provide the bulk of these. The extra nutrients we added were agri lime for calcium, rock solid fertiliser for amongst other things for phosphate and silica, paramagnetic dust and then a plant accessible nitrogen fertiliser.

All of the nutrients we gave the plants are important. In very simple terms some of the key ones we added are:

Calcium: Its role in plants is similar to that in people, it helps them grow and promotes good structure.

Phosphate: Stimulates good root development in the plant.

Silica: Promotes strength in the leaves and stems of the plant and helps fruit to last longer off the tree

Nitrogen: Amongst other things helps plants use the carbohydrates available in the soil to gain the energy, it is important for good plant formation and functioning. Though nitrogen is often present in our soils providing it in a form that is easily useable by the plant
is important.

The compost we used was made on the site last year, it had a lot of  white mycelium growth as we put a heap of branches and wood chips in it when we made it. This is great as more fungal compost is good for planting trees in.

All of the elements and minerals we added stimulate the soil biology this will promote the growth of healthy and nutritious fruit trees.

When we planted the trees we trimmed the roots – seems to wrong to do that but it enables the tree to grow more roots and for the roots to penetrate more fully into the ground, this way the tree makes a more complete attachment to the earth, it is possible to plant a tree and have its root grow round into them selves and form a ball, this
means it will be easily pushed over. To prevent this we trimmed the roots to about 10 cm. This will help the tree roots to grow out into the soil sorrounding it. We planted each tree with its largest root to the south as when trees grow they align themselves with the magnetic field in the earth, this means that the strongest root faces south, the trees will have done this in the nursery so by doing this we were putting it in facing the same way as it grew.

On September 18th time we will be planting an understory, lots of flowers and plants to further support the growth of our trees. September 3rd we will be getting the vege garden ready for the beginning of Spring. Be great to see you there.

For further tree planting info check
out this link: http://www.koanga.org.nz/articles/how-plant-fruit-trees