Been a while, but this one is in my wheelhouse.
7000' with 500 fruit trees in Torrey Utah. Mostly cider apple varieties. Also perry pears, pie cherries, quince, etc. 80+ varieties of apples. And trialing some grapes. Started planting in 2012.
We get trees from mostly Cummins Nursery in Ithaca, vines from Northeastern Vine Supply in Vermont to get acclimated plants that ship at the right time.
Now to keep them alive. We have adapted Michael Phillips' general instructions in his books for our situation. 1) we do not strip the existing pasture, just mow. 2) we get the rental bobcat and auger 12" holes 4' deep. 3) backfill with only the native soil plus 1 lb Azomite and 1 lb rock phosphate. Treat the roots with myccorizal dip to establish tree microbiota. 4) 10 gallons of water at planting. They don't get water again until our irrigation cycle, every 11 days. 5) cage or wrap to protect from voles. We only plant trees in the spring, except a few trees we grafted ourselves that needed to get in the ground before winter. They did okay, but not my preference.
We do everything with the intention of driving the roots deep before winter. I know three new growers near our altitude in UT and CO trying to establish trees on drip irrigation and they are having terrible winter kill problems. One guy had 20% losses his first year. We don't get winter kill. Maybe 6 trees in 9 years. But they are all on drip and doing it the way the consultants say. I have offered our experience, they don't listen. We don't get winter kill {shrug}. If you use drip, do it on a cycle that saturates deeply at intermittent intervals. Best advice we got was from an old-timer here: water new trees on Thanksgiving, Christmas Day and March 1. We only do it the first year, about 10 gallons per tree, but do it religiously. Second best advice: "get ahead" on spring irrigation in the fall, at the end of the season when none of my alfalfa growing neighbors want water. I've augered holes the next April that were still damp 2' down despite a terrible snow season.
Prepare yourself mentally for slower growth than the books say, simply due to shorter growing seasons. The three year "Sleep, creep, leap" cycle is more like "Sleep, creep, creep, leap" at best, until they hit the summer irrigation water table here. Then they take off. Time to first fruiting doesn't really seem as correlated to rootstock as advertised; again I suspect it's just our short growing season. Maybe if we trellised we could have sped things up, someday if I find more land/water, I can run that experiment.
There's a link in my bio to my cidery and the site has a list of the trees we are growing along with some recommendations on which varieties we think are good for homestead use. But plant everything that you want. I was told we'd never get Virginia Crab to fruit here. Ha! I will happily be harvesting our first apples from that tree for cider in a couple weeks. Good luck!
