by matt walker » Fri Apr 18, 2014 2:39 pm
Thanks Guy, I'm pretty good at doing my thing. Ain't gonna stop now!
Lolly, I'd love to. So, there is an old orchard here, and the varieties are not that great. There is one absolute winner, a couple pretty good ones, a great pie tree, and then about a half dozen kinda crab apple looking things. I don't think they are crab, but they are smallish and tart, in a few different colors. These are all older trees, which I pruned hard when I moved in and haven't touched since, so they are really large canopies. They produce an amazing abundance. Like, I'm pretty sure literally tons of apples. I use what I can, dry a winter's worth, make some wine and cider, bake pies, can sauce, box up a bunch for cow treats through the winter, just about everything I can think of. I have sent my neighbor to a pressing party with a trunk full of fruit boxes these last three years. Still, an amazing amount goes unused.
The orchard is past the driveway, so about 100' from the front door, 50' from where you pull in. When it gets to be late fall, and grass is getting scarce, that's the last place I put the animals. They go absolutely bonkers at first, just love it. When it's all said and done, the cows eat a whole lot of the surplus, the sheep eat some. There really isn't a smell, which is strange, because I lived in a place a few hours from here with an old orchard and that one the fruit on the ground was a nuisance. I think it was my attitude more than the state of the fruit, but I also think that the livestock eat a lot and trample/squash the remainder and help break it down more quickly. I've never really found myself walking around in a layer of apple muck here.
One of the huge benefits is the predatory insects all that rotting fruit attract. Now, most people don't see it this way, but there are so many yellow jackets, bald face hornets, and other stingy guys around during that time of the year that any pest problems I may have been experiencing on my produce go away. I had aphids in the greenhouse something awful a couple years ago. Spent a few tens of dollars on ladybugs, couldn't get rid of them. The hornets and wasps showed up, and boom, no more aphids, no more cabbage worms, and so on. So, I don't if that's going to help convince a doubter, since wasps aren't usually a plus for most folks, but I would miss them like crazy if they weren't around. So there is that.
I think if the trees were in zone 1 I would deal with them differently, but they are in an area that is multi purpose, pasture/orchard, and this works well for me.