Persian Walnut Planting Plan

This is a 2 stage planting plan where "P" represents the permanent trees and "S" represents the intermediate trees that would be removed in time. Planting the "S" trees doubles the population of trees, so the production in the early years would also be doubled. For several years intermediate annual or semi-permanent crops can be grown to bring income from the land while the walnut trees are reaching commercial production. The 20 foot row spacing might cause difficulty for some agricultural machinery so crops need to be chosen to accommodate. In the Niagara Region pick your own strawberries and pumpkins are grown as intermediate crops with great success.

It would require 54 trees per acre in the planting year. Seedling trees often produce good orchard trees, so a seedling orchard is possible. If all seedling trees are used then care needs to be taken to identify the good and poor trees. Latex paint can be used to code the trees so it is easy to identify the "P" rows and also to identify the best and poorest trees in the orchard. It is possible to tree spade good seedling trees of "S" sites to "P" sites where poor trees exist. It is also possible to graft the poor trees on site and convert them to good trees.

Another alternative is to plant all "P" sites with grafted trees and "S" sites with seedlings. Care would be needed to plant protandrous trees and protogynous trees in a suitable arrangement for adequate pollinization in the final "P" rows. One tree every 5-7 should be enough to provide adequate pollen in the orchard.Thinning out the "S" trees would not be necessary for at least 10-15 years. The "S" trees can be hedge pruned to reduce the competition with the "P" trees for a few years before they would need to be removed. A stump grinder is the best way to remove the stump without disturbing the ground cover in the orchard. A fairly smooth orchard floor is desirable for harvesting and other orchard work.

 
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SONG Members would like to thank the CanAdapt Small Projects Initiative 2000. Without their assistance this project would not have been possible.
 
 
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