Nick's Island Tropical Fruit Orchard Maintenance скачать в хорошем качестве

Nick's Island Tropical Fruit Orchard Maintenance

As we get ready for the upcoming fruit season, I wanted to show you what we do in the off season to maintain the orchard. Orchards and groves need to be properly maintained to keep them healthy and to maximize fruit production. This requires the trees to be pruned and thinned out when they get too big. We like to keep our trees between 12 and 15 feet tall. This allows a harvest without having to use ladders and other potentially dangerous equipment. New growth is where the fruit is going to come from, so pruning the trees is an important maintenance function to promote new growth and therefore produce more fruit. Our grove was planted in 2012 from 3gallon material. That means all the trees were basically three feet tall when they were planted. So, in the last nine years the trees have done wonderfully and grown to over 15 feet tall. It was time to bring the trees back down to a safe working height and thin the centers of each tree. This helps let the sun in and lets the air flow through the trees. So, around October of last year, we had a professional “Topping” and “Hedging” company come in and “Top” and “Hedge” the orchard. Top means to cut the tops of the trees down to a desired level. We chose 12 feet. Hedging means cutting the sides of the trees. If you do not hedge the trees, they grow into each other and you can’t get a tractor or other necessary equipment down the aisles for whatever reason. The machine we used is the same machine that is used in the orange groves here in Florida. It is called a TOL 1200. It does both topping and hedging. We thought the machine was really cool and since most of you ask a lot of questions about the orchard, we decided to make a video and show you how we maintain the trees. In summary, what you will see in the video are the trees being cut, new growth emerging, and lots and lots of flowers. The video is just over eight minutes long. As I sit here today, six months later, you cannot tell the trees were cut. I hope you enjoy the video.