Fruit tree tags

In an effort to drum up some money for me to buy some land I plan on making some fruit tree tags to sell. I tend to find the plastic nursery ones usually fall off or break after a year or two.

The following would make sense:

Kind: e.g Apple
Cultivar: e.g Cox's Orange Pippin

However I would like to find out what people what consider important outside of that. Some other information could be:

Latin name:
Uses: e.g Dessert, Cooker, Cider
Pollination group: Is there even a standard classification for this?
Ripening period:
Origin: e.g U.K.
Date: e.g 1830
Rootstock:
Perentage:


Any other suggestions?

Although it would be nice to put it all on there they would be made to order and obscure fruit varieties could be more difficult to research. Also I have to think of the size of the tag itself.

Thank you

What are you going to make them out of, for the durability you're looking for?

I must be one of those oddball farmers that rarely puts a name tag on any plant for any reason. I don't keep maps of what goes where. It really doesn't matter to me what someone else called a plant before it arrived in my garden. If it survives I'll call it whatever I want to call it. Much of what I plant into my garden from the outside world dies anyway, I wouldn't want to give one more likely-to-fail variety the dignity of a name...

Resistant to scab - Yes, No, Moderate
Resistant to fireblight - Yes, No, Moderate
Resistant to powdery mildew - Yes, No, Moderate
Resistant to cedar-apple rust - Yes, No, Moderate

Dan Boone wrote:What are you going to make them out of, for the durability you're looking for?

Most likely slate and metal wire. I like the idea of copper wire for malleability but wether the weather would corrode it and make it potentially toxic to things is another thing to consider.

Joseph Lofthouse wrote:
I must be one of those oddball farmers that rarely puts a name tag on any plant for any reason. I don't keep maps of what goes where. It really doesn't matter to me what someone else called a plant before it arrived in my garden. If it survives I'll call it whatever I want to call it. Much of what I plant into my garden from the outside world dies anyway, I wouldn't want to give one more likely-to-fail variety the dignity of a name...

I think that is a good approach to have, seeing things as they really are rather than the labels we give it. However not tagging trees means the knowledge can be lost if you go also I can't make any money out of your approach!

Mike Haych wrote: Resistant to scab - Yes, No, Moderate
Resistant to fireblight - Yes, No, Moderate
Resistant to powdery mildew - Yes, No, Moderate
Resistant to cedar-apple rust - Yes, No, Moderate

Excellent idea, thanks.

Also thought about Biennial tendency since it can affect wether you prune it or not.

Henry Jabel wrote:Most likely slate and metal wire. I like the idea of copper wire for malleability but wether the weather would corrode it and make it potentially toxic to things is another thing to consider.

Zinc or copper

I drill a hole through the end and thread wire through. If you're attaching to a branch, be careful. As the branch grows, the wire will cut into the branch. I never attach to a plant.

Might want to indicate male or female or self-pollinating.

Henry Jabel wrote:The following would make sense:

Kind: e.g Apple
Cultivar: e.g Cox's Orange Pippin

Who do you intend on selling these tags to? If you are planning on selling to local nurseries, then having the kind of tree on it makes sense. However, if you are going to be selling to orchard hobbyists there's no point in having the kind because they can already tell the kind based off the bark, leaves, or fruit. Every single one of my fruit trees has a label on it, but the only thing I've ever put on the label is the cultivar. If I was running a You-pick, adding the ripening period and some of the other information might be useful...although I would also use something much larger than a typical tag in that case.

These days, I make my tags out of vinyl from a chopped up rain gutter that are etched with a Dremel type tool.

In the past I used labels made out of etched aluminum flashing material, but after several labels became unreadable in my nursery beds I switched to etched vinyl. To be fair, most of the labels were lying directly in contact with the ground so conditions were far rougher than would normally be expected for a label on a more mature tree.

Consider a custom label service, rather than pre-making batches. Are these a hand-crafted product or machine printed?

Alternatively you could sell a kit - 10 pieces of slate pre-drilled with holes, plus a length of wire and a sample sized pot of paint. Paint a few dozen display specimens up.

Personally I like the permanence of engraved metal. A while ago there was a guy on ebay doing engraved brass keyring tags at about 50p each. I got 40 done to organise all my various bunches of keys (5 different households, 3 different sets for work , spares etc... a LOT of keys). 3 years later and they are going strong.

Regarding why you might want to preserve variety names for plants - if you ever plant to propagate and sell them it is a legal requirement in most places that the parent plant is permanently tagged to maintain the provenance. Fading ink just doesn't cut it.

I did painted stakes. What I wanted to know was name of species, the size of the tree and the kind of fruit. That's all I put for mine and that's all I really need. I have a notebook I can look the rest up in if I feel the need. I am doing a U-pick. The stakes are fairly brightly painted. You can see one off to the side in this pic. I have the size of the tree on it because I placed the stakes before the trees arrived. They were my mapping tool.

Date planted would be useful as well.