It’s getting to be that time of year: Seed catalogs in the mail every day. It’s too early to plant yet, but it is time to be deciding about trees. Trees are best planted quite early in the spring, before they’ve fully awakened from their winter slumber.
Trees are of special value to preppers: How many things can you put in the major work one time and have fresh and highly nutritious food show up every year for decades? Moreover, it’s very versatile stuff, since if you choose varieties wisely you can get food that stores for months without refrigeration, is good for cooking or fresh eating, is easily dried or canned, can be made into wine, and/or provides useful protein and oils (in the case of nut trees).
It’s even a prep that can readily be carried off by anyone; it’s useful in every situation from ‘the stuff in the stores doesn’t taste as good’ to ‘it has hit the fan’; and it’s a stealth prep to boot. Not a whole lot of people see an apple tree and think “Look, a Doomsday Prepper!” You can probably tell we here at BBBY are big fans of perennial food plantings. We also put our sweat where our mouths are, having already put in more than two dozen trees and as many vines both at the house in town and at The Place. While I’m no expert, the planting projects have prodded me to learn some useful tips on trees.
Planting trees is definitely work; but once its done time and effort spent on upkeep are tiny compared to the payback.
For those of you who prefer a listen to a read, Salty and I talk over trees here:
The site
How much space do you have? Some don’t take up a lot of room, but you have to know before you choose. There are dwarf, semi-dwarf, and full-sized varieties; and if the space is narrow you can even do espalier trees. This is where a the tree, often a dwarf apple or pear, is trained and tied so it grows in the shape of its trellis. You can control the shape of the tree and make it easy to harvest – some of them double as really cool landscaping; nice for those of you with grumpy neighbors.
You also have to consider the soil type. You’ll get tired of reading ‘prefers fertile, well-drained soils’, because that’s the plant equivalent of ‘likes well-cooked, hot meals’, but some varieties are much less finicky than others. The Place has All The Clay, so I have to both heavily amend the soil I plant in and choose varieties that are tolerant. Also consider if anything might be running through the soil you’ll have to dig: power lines, sewer or water pipes. In Missouri, one calls 1-800-DIG-RITE about a week before one plans to dig so all the utilities can mark off where on your place they have underground things to avoid; I’m sure other states have similar programs.
Compost, sand, and mulching layered into the hole will help give this tree a start, but any tree going in at The Place has got to be ok with clay soil in the long run.
Sun is important, but most trees that produce edibles like the same thing: several hours of direct sunlight a day.
The climate
It’d be great to have bananas, but it ain’t happening in Missouri. If you google Climate Zones you can easily find maps or interactive guides to find out what climate zone your growing place is in. Plants are rated and advertised by which zones they prefer. I always aim for a plant where my zone (5b) is near the middle of its preferred range, so the occasional but inevitable unusually cold winter or hot, dry summer is less likely to kill my trees. If you’re near a zone border and in a city, go with the warmer zone — cities are several degrees warmer than the countrysides.
Missouri’s climate zone map. You can find your own state by landing first at the USDA national map at http://planthardiness.ars.usda.gov/PHZMWeb/
Pollination
Here’s one that surprised me: If you plant one apple tree, or a half dozen of one variety, you’re likely to get no apples at all. Some fruit and nut trees require cross-pollination, and other members of the same variety are too genetically similar to fertilize one another. If you can only plant one or a couple members of a species, choose one that is self-fertile. That’s easy for peaches and cherries, but limits the selection of apples quite a bit.
Of the ‘good eating’ apples, I know of only one (Golden Delicious) that’s strongly self-fertile. It’s also good at pollinating nearly any other apple, so I’ve planted several. Crabapple fruits are only good for cider, but they’re very hardy and can pollinate essentially everything (themselves included). For the advanced orchard keeper (more advanced than I am at the moment) they also provide very good root stock to graft other varieties onto. That would make a great post-collapse resource, if you’re planning runs that way.
This crabapple started blooming two weeks after being planted. Now that’s a tough little tree!
Reading the background information on the varieties your considering will fill you in on each plant’s needs. The trick is to not just blithely pick up anything from outside a big box store and hope for the best.
Because I like it.
Now that you’ve figured out what Could be successful, it’s down to what you Want to be successful. I’m all in on hardy varieties, as I like to go organic anyway and might be forced to if the chemicals get hard to find. Varieties that ripen at different times extend the harvest. Some varieties store better than others. Some you just like better. That’s the real beauty of tree plantings: You get a lot of value from them no matter if you end up ‘needing preps’ or not.
One thing I always address when considering fruit trees–great resource for now, but when TSHTF…think about neighbors that don’t prepare for food shortages.
Yep–will you shoot a child stealing those apples??
Nope. But there are a lot of apples, some of which require ladders to pick, and there are fences. I like my chances of getting a bunch. It’s a good thing to consider, especially when siting trees (out of easy sight, for example), but I don’t think the resource becomes useless. (Worst case, feeding hungry people is not useless in my book, unless said people are predatory low-lifes.)
I think we, as a community, focus far too much on the Mad Max SHTF scenarios at the expense of a lot of far more common and high likelyhood emergencies…
If we ONLY concentrate on TEOTWAWKI we tend to waste a lot of our prepping resources on things that are much less likely to be used. Yes, I understand that food would need to be guarded in a long-term TEOTWAWKI situation, but I also know that personal SHTF situations are going to happen in every single life, guaranteed.
If we need to guard our garden and trees, we will. If we need to stop thief, we we will… but I’ll worry about whether I need to shoot somebody for pinching an apple when the time comes… and concentrate on growing the apple in the first place… since NOBODY gets fed by a tree that is never planted.
I have a question. But, I should probably preface with My family and I live in Missouri, south of Harrisonville. I want to plant apple trees. Space is not an issue. I want apples to eat fresh, cook, store, and make cider. I realize that will require more than one variety. Any suggestions? Also when should I plant? Thank you for what you do.
One quick question before we can answer, what is your soil like? Are you in a clay area, are you in the “Ozarks rocks” type of soil or is it good dirt? Your area can have all three, and it makes a big difference with fruit trees. Weather wise, that “just south of I-70” area is PERFECT for apple trees (except for the ice storms).
Thank you