|
|
|
|
|
Chris Kott wrote:I just finished my read of the article you posted, Hisham.
What I noticed was the tendency to stress the specific goal of increasing the rate of growth for trees, of eliminating growing competition in early stages of tree growth, and of maximising fruit production over the short to medium-term. I also noticed a disconnect, wherein predator-prey interactions between beneficial predatory insects and pest species were to be encouraged, but post-emergence sprays were being used, which would kill off your predators, prey, and pollinators.
If your trees are already grown, their roots will be established to the point where having a supportive guild or pasture mix growing to within a foot around each tree won't have any negative effect on tree growth or fruiting.
As to your salinity concerns, I think that if you can increase rapid infiltration of what rain you do get, and if you keep your soil covered, and maybe experiment with air well structures, you could decrease the evaporation enough that you could keep it from salting up more. You could also look to see what halophyte (salt-loving) crops work well as green manures in your area. Especially if you are growing it out for grazing, you could effectively sequester salt in the plant matter you then feed to your animals, removing it from the soil and decreasing the need for mineral salt in the animals' diet.
Even so, pomegranate, fig, and olive trees are in the middle-category of salt-tolerance, with only date palms, I believe, better at it than them. I am not saying you shouldn't worry about salting your soil, but if you adopt salt management techniques now, you might not have to replant in date palms.
-CK
Bryant RedHawk wrote:hau Hisham, several people have given good ideas.
I take it from your "Ideal look" photos that you want your orchard to look like a conventional commercial orchard, which is usually done for mechanical harvesting.
Things to think about when you do a conventional orchard; 1. the bare strip under the trees will allow for soil erosion from around the roots of the trees. 2. bare soil looses 5 times the moisture by evaporation compared to a heavily mulched soil. (increases the need for irrigation)
3. Using herbicides that are in vogue today insures that the fruits of the orchard will be tainted with that herbicide, making the product less desirable to an ever increasingly informed consumers (buyers).
If you simply must have the bare space under the trees. It might be a good idea to use one of the plastic mulches made for farming, combine that with a layer of mulch placed ontop of the plastic and you have cut off the light to the "weeds", that will stunt them out and they will end up dying, or spreading to areas with light.
To address the salinity issue you can use calcium carbonate as a soil dressing, that will remove quite a lot of salinity over a year period but it will also increase the alkalinity of the soil somewhat.
I encourage you to not use commercial herbicides since almost weekly we are finding out they are so much worse than ever thought before, many are proving to be carcinogenic and most persist long after they are used on soil as well as being incorporated by the plants as a nutrient that ends up in the fruit or vegetable.
Many of the new herbicides drift as much as a mile from where they were applied which can lead to lawsuits by those affected by that drift, here in my USA state there are 14 of these lawsuits filed by one or two farmers against another farmer who believed it was safe to spray his fields. The drift wiped out the other farmer's crops and so they are in court to get their money back.
Redhawk
Chris Kott wrote:Poisoning your orchard won't save it.
Maybe if you could tell us a bit about your orchard and your goals, we could determine what will get you what you're really after.
Just a few things. Bare soil, like the strips for the trees in your picture, is frowned upon, especially in cases like yours, where you lose so much moisture to evaporation. The more exposed soil you have, the more evaporation, the more you'll have to water with your higher-salinity water, and the saltier your soil will get.
I think you are operating on a number of unfounded assumptions, the first of which being that your orchard needs to look like those pictures. It doesn't.
If you want lanes of grazing open between your rows of trees, that's great. I think you can probably manage what you have there, as many others have suggested, by mowing before anything goes to seed, and then mowing again before everything goes to seed. Herbicides will just cost you money, and ensure that the weeds that pop up later won't care what you spray them with, because they will be descended from plants with immunity enough to survive spraying. They also kill the soil microbiome, which does all the real work for you.
I would suggest getting some mulch on everything. I would look to see what the fastest-growing green manures for your area are, and overseed with those after mowing with a mulching mower, and mowing perhaps a little lower than you would for grass that you want to encourage to thrive, to give the green manures time to overgrow the cut incumbent plants. You haven't told us where you are except that it's a mediterranean climate without much rainfall.
If you haven't looked at Air well (condenser)s yet, I suggest you do. The idea is that you use stacked stones in different configurations so that, by creating cool shaded areas within stacks of stone, you cause humid air to be condensed out onto the cool inner surfaces of the stone piles, which then infiltrate the ground.
This might be helpful.
It might be a good idea to consider mulching with hand-sized stones or rocks on the sunward side of each row or tree. This will shade the soil and the root zone, and if an air well effect is created, will provide added moisture and succor the soil microbiology, to boot.
Just to be clear, bare soil is bad. As long as there's air movement around the trunk at the natural trunk-soil interface, more mulch is better than not enough, and none is just a recipe for failure.
In your position, I would check out to see if anyone has figured out guilds that work well with olives, pomegranates, and figs. You might find that there are hosts of supportive plants that will occupy the soil around the tree in a way that benefits it, by attracting predatory wasps to kill tree pests, by creating scent distraction or acting as a sacrificial trap crop, or like marigolds, by secreting an insecticide through its root zone, so powerful that some types, African and French, I believe, can toxify soil to the extent that nothing will grow, if grown for too many years in the same place.
You might even find that there are berry plants that work in your situation, or some other relatively low-growing food plant that can grow in the strips between the trees (not in the alleys of pasture you want to grow fodder in). If you grow a variety of herbs and flowering plants, for instance, you will be sure to increase the number of pollinators that visit your property, increasing yields.
I don't know if a feed-the-birds mix would work to keep them out of your trees, but I know that many orchardists will plant out mulberry trees as the aforementioned sacrificial trap crop. Birds prefer mulberries, apparently, over many other tree-borne fruit. But I know that a pollinator mix with wildflowers will draw and support many different types of pollinators, including honey and bumble bees, and those mixes will also contain plants like clover, which host nitrogen-fixing bacteria as well as producing a flower for pollinators, and also being a fodder crop.
If you are intent on killing everything with a spray, I suggest looking at vinegar, first, like a good 5% cleaning vinegar. It's honestly the least likely to poison your soil. You could even go with a water sprayer and spray the leaves on anything you want to die right before the height of heat of the day. The magnification of the sun's rays through the water droplets will burn everything, with a tendency to affect broad-leaved plants more than narrow-bladed grasses.
But I suggest you do a little more perusal on this site first. You are far from the first person newly arrived to this site with this same issue. Also, if you could tell us where in the world you are located, that will help us to direct our advice to things more relevant to your situation.
Pictures would be nice. Keep us posted, and good luck!
-CK
Artie Scott wrote:Hi Hisham, won’t it require a lot of irrigation in your dry climate to grow grass or alfalfa in the orchard rows? That could be a problem, especially if you already have salinity issues. Would native wildflowers be an alternative? Or maybe, as Tyler suggests, just mow the weeds periodically and let the cuttings add to the fertility of the soil?
Tyler Ludens wrote:Weeds are so useful as green manure if you can mow them! If you can mow and bag them, you can use the bagged material as mulch around the trees to block further weed growth.
I'm actually quite thrilled when I get lots of weeds growing, because I can use them as mulch or for compost heaps.
Meg Mitchell wrote:Do you know specifically which weeds you have? There might be some removal methods besides herbicides that you don't know about. Some of the worst weeds around where I live are easy to remove if you know the trick to it (and almost impossible otherwise).