Time to prepare to plant your orchard

Wade Muggleton, smallholder and author of The Orchard Book, shares his practical experience so you can create your own fruit collection

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It’s not quite time to actually plant your trees that you ordered but its time to plan and prepare in good time for their arrival.

The first consideration is ground preparation. The greatest struggle your young trees will encounter is compaction. Many soils right across the world are hard and compacted from years of mechanical tilling, the feet of countless grazing animals or just hard garden soil. So the best ground preparation is to loosen and aerate the planting area to give those young roots space to establish and expand.

Once you have taken delivery of your fruit trees from a specialist nursery it’s the exciting part of actually planting your new orchard. Whilst in the vegetable plot, I am a keen advocate of no dig systems, tree planting holes are an exception, so dig over and loosen a hole considerably wider than the roots of the young tree.

It would seem conventional gardening wisdom to enrich the planting hole with compost and even fertilizer but this can be counterproductive for if the planting hole is a considerable contrast to the wider surrounding soil, there can be a reticence on the part of the roots to leave the cozy, fertile confines of the planting hole and venture out into the, perhaps poorer, wider soil. This can be a particular issue with pot-grown trees where the roots have become accustomed to compost of the pot and in some cases become slightly pot-bound, hence when put in the ground the roots can continue to stay in that small area of the richer compost. I have seen potted trees planted out that, two years later, can almost be lifted out of the planting hole again, the roots simply not having spread out.

CONSIDER MYCORRHIZAL ROOT POWDER