The Grounded Orchardist

I wanted to write a piece about this spring, the spring of 2025. It has been unusually warm, very dry and not at all windy. I was a little worried but also intrigued. How would the trees fair in such conditions? In almost 13 years of orcharding, I have never known these spring conditions before.

Frost

Now, fruit trees are incredibly fussy. They need a certain amount of cold or they will not fruit. Thankfully, we hit our chill hours target for most varieties in winter. Obviously at blossom time we really do not want a frost. We had two mild frosts at peak blossom season, so we shall call that a gentle thinning.

In our French section, most varieties here bloom later than the rest of our trees, and they escaped the frost completely.

Pollination

The glaringly obvious thing was at blossom time, there were stacks of pollinators. Even the Honey bees were out on the trees every day. Usually any wind or rain makes them stay inside the hive. Pollination was not a problem this year at all. Now that’s great, but as the pollinated fruit started to grow, it puts pressure on the tree. Worried the lack of rain would make the tree shed too much fruit in order to conserve energy,  I stuck the irrigation on…in early spring! I have only been orcharding with irrigation for four years, but I have not had to do that before. I am very frugal with the irrigation too, it comes from a borehole on the property, not off the mains, but that doesn’t mean I use it for the sake of it.

Wind

The next noticeable thing was the lack of wind. Now I would rather work in rain than wind. I find windy days very annoying, so selfishly I was very pleased with this. However, I quickly learnt how helpful the wind was to the trees. When the blossom had gone over, the fallen petals and unpollinated blooms dropped on the tree and just stayed on branches, in crevices and wedged between fruitlets. Ordinarily,  the wind blows this away. An additional worry to this was that if it rained and these spent blooms were stuck to the tree, it would actually create a fungal problem. As organic growers air and light are a big tool in our fight against fungal diseases (You’ve heard me say that a lot!) so I didn’t want this “chaff” taking up space in my trees. Thus, another spring job was added – take off unwanted spent blooms!

The lack of wind also meant that although the dry conditions are perfect for powdery mildew, there was no wind to spread it. So this has been very contained, meaning it’s a lot easier and quicker to manage.

Leaf quality

The next noteable thing was the lack of scab! Such a happy thing. The leaf quality on our trees is amazing, in fact it wasn’t until June that I saw a proper scab event…such good news!. Some of this is due to me taking out scab, leaf by leaf last year and some of this is due to the dry conditions.

Pear leaf blister mite and Peach leaf curl was also so much better. I believe that is due to my organic controls over the last few years though more than the weather.

Irrigation

One worry now is the Quince. They are very thirsty trees that do not cope with a sudden injection of water. I have been irrigating these every few nights. This is to try and stop the fruit from splitting when the rains finally come…hopefully, we have done enough!

In terms of the other trees the sun has helped the fruit get to size, We have mature trees and as I do not water them all the time they are seeming to dig deep to find their water. I am keeping a watchful eye though, any signs of stress and I will turn that water on for a few nights.

The other problem I had and I know a lot of growers found this was at fertilising time. We do a blanket spread of chicken manure pellets in spring. This needs to be carefully managed so it is timed for when the leaves start to arrive. However, no rain means the pellets will just sit there on the top baking rather than leaching into the soil. I waited and waited for rain to be forecast and it didn’t happen. In the end, I had to spread it and turn on the irrgation. The irrigation is trickle piping, so it is not really ideal for this purpose, but it was all I had. The fertiliser scorched the grass a bit but did eventually get in. That’s a lot of money degrading on the surface of the ground,  but every little helps.

The sheer amount of sunlight.

Another thing is an obvious factor will be the sheer amount of sun. We have had blush on our Granny Smith, Bramleys and numerous other usually green fruit (At this stage anyway) for a very long time.

Sunburn has begun to be a problem already on our susceptible varieties.  It also begs the question, Will our crops be early this year? That remains to be seen.

Soil quality

In terms of the soil, it looks fine, particularly under our spindle trees. As they create a bit of shade on the ground. As we have mature trees, we keep the grass and wildflowers underneath the tree and just strim it back for air, light and aesthetics. Being a 5* hotel aesthetics matter!

I was walking the dog yesterday across a sports field near my house and it has big cracks in the ground from the drought. However, the orchard does not. The grass where more open in the orchard is going brown but the grass under the trees is still green. This implies some moisture and as the trees are digging much deeper than this, so they should still be ok. The grass is acting as a living mulch, which is stunning to witness. Having sprayed Glyphosate in the old orchard I used to manage, causing  barren bare earth under the trees. This would crack and not be showing any life in times of drought.

Our organic soil and undergrowth is looking very good!

Final thoughts

It really has been interesting working with different weather conditions and I would say it has been largely a more positive season than normal! The clearly much more erattic weather means we need to be prepared for anything and I have a few things to think about going forwards.