Trees: A Stealth Prep That Pays Now

Prepping is insurance. You pay now — in money, time, and effort. You hope you won’t need most of what you paid for. How about a prep you put most of the work in up front, but it continues to pay back for years on end? Plant some food-producing trees. The best part is, it’s valuable without an emergency, and *very* valuable if there is one.

What do you get from trees?

We’ve put in a lot of fruit and nut trees over the last five years or so. We have what will fit here at home in town, and more at The Place. Here’s what we get from the trees:

• Food. Organic apples run $3/lb; cherries twice that. I get as many as I can preserve. How would some *fresh* fruit go down after a while of living off your stored food?
• Shade. Trees make a yard more pleasant, and those that shade the house reduce cooling costs.
• Wildlife attraction. Salty sets up with his camera trained on our apple tree and captures beauty. If it’s meat you want instead, there are fresh deer prints on my fruit tree path at The Place every single week. We could set up there and get a shot as reliable as hunting gets.
• Beauty. Trees improve a homestead. Chosen well and reasonably cared for, food-producing trees can be as pretty as anything.
• Trade goods, potentially. Salty and I will never need as much fruit as our trees will provide. The excess could be traded, whole or preserved. You could also learn grafting and make a side business of supplying saplings.

What do you pay for trees?

Putting in trees is work, for truth. Here’s some information on picking trees. Click here for more on how to do it. If your soil’s bad; well we have experience with that and what we’ve learned can be found here. The thing is, it’s a lot of work … once. For a tree that’s likely to produce food for your whole lifetime.

Upkeep takes some time for each tree, but not much. There are many old fruit producers around my town that get zero care. I prune once a year, in late winter. The trees at The Place, with its horrid soil, didn’t produce that well last year, so this year I’m going to fertilize. I’ve heard good things about fertilizer stakes, so I’m buying a big batch. That’s a prep in itself.

Watering? Mostly we don’t; but you do get bigger yields if you water when it’s dry. We have a lot of young, more delicate trees, so we did water last year during a drought. I may run some drip irrigation for the trees closest to collection roofs at The Place, because why not? It’s an easy setup and no work to maintain.

We discuss planting and maintaining fruit trees in this podcast:

Is that all?

Other care is optional. We mulch to reduce weeding. Sometimes we plant companions the trees will like instead, such as peas or mint. At The Place, we have to fence out the deer. I put some kind of trunk sleeve on the lower trunks in late fall to discourage rabbit nibbling. If it’s a yard, you may have to compost some fruit that drops, to reduce mess.

Now’s the time!

It’s late winter as I write. This is the perfect time to prune what you’ve got and plan what you’ve not. You’ll want to put the trees in early spring, before they come out of full dormancy. (But it’s ok to plant other times of year too; they just don’t get the full first year growth.) I’ll put in those fertilizer spikes if the ground ever thaws in this endless winter…

In a prepping sense, this year is the year. All these nifty, high producing varieties won’t be available after a collapse. Apple trees and many other species are grafts, meldings of the roots of one variety with the shoots of another. Apples don’t breed true; plant the seeds from a great apple and you’ll get a different variety of tree from each seed, and most will be barely edible.

I’d love to see fruit and nut trees in every yard, and planted as ornamentals in public spaces too. They are pretty, and provide a local and reliable good food source. Isn’t ongoing self-reliance the Best prep?

And now, a shameless exhibition

As mentioned in the podcast, in the winter our fruit trees (and shade trees) are filled with birds. Salty takes bird pictures. Here’s a shameless sharing of just a few of them from the last week or so. Many of the birds are perched on the front yard apple tree.