Build Your Orchard on a Foundation of Knowledge

Don’t Start with Buying Trees, But Do Start!

A house built without a solid foundation will eventually fall. That is to say, perhaps the least visible part of the house is arguably the most important part of all. If you build your house without a proper foundation (or any real foundation at all) the worst thing that can happen is disaster (the house falls), and perhaps the best case scenario is that you’re stuck with expensive repairs.

There’s risk in the tendency to jump right into a new interest and just start “doing.” For the new orchardist, this temptation manifests itself in the purchase of fruit trees too early in the process. This often doesn’t turn out well. Fruit trees aren’t the foundation of a solid orchard, knowledge is.

My own journey as an orchardist started with a gift of fruit trees from my sister-in-law. I loved the gift but I really didn’t know what I was doing, and most of the trees never really thrived. The gift did kick-start my interest in growing fruit and I looked for all of the information I could find on the subject. My background is in computer science and my self-admitted tendency is to research everything to death (to a fault). Once fruit trees were an interest, I tried to consume everything I could find on the subject: books, articles, YouTube videos, et cetera, gleaning whatever bit of information I could as I went.

Slowly a cobbled-together foundation began to take shape. It wasn’t pretty. I was starting with little to no horticultural knowledge but with a lot of enthusiasm and determination. I knew little to nothing of the terminology of fruit growing, let alone the practices. However I began to realize that if I wanted my trees to thrive, a solid foundation of knowledge went a long way.

I don’t believe in the proverbial “green thumb,” as if some folks just have a knack for growing and others don’t. Perhaps growing does come more intuitively to some, but it can also be learned and practiced like geometry or archery or ceramics.

I recognize a tension here. Were it not for those first few fruit trees given as a gift, my passion for growing fruit may never have developed. At the same time, those trees would have been better served by someone who had taken the time to do a bit of research into how best to care for them. The urgency of the trees’ lives depending on me forced me to learn at a much greater rate than I would have otherwise, and gave me the benefit of hands-on experience as opposed to purely theoretical knowledge.

Begin by building a solid foundation: your knowledge. Then go and start your orchard on its solid foundation.

Developing a Signal to Noise Filter

When an electronic device is processing an incoming signal like a radio transmission, how does the device know which part of the transmission is signal (the good information), and which is noise (the bad information)? It has to have a way of processing and filtering out the noise in order to be left with the good information.

When you’re starting out on your orchard journey and attempting to learn as much as you can as quickly as possible, the tendency is to assume all content you come across has equal weight; that it’s equally valid and valuable, that all of it is signal (good information). That’s obviously not true. Information, perhaps especially on the internet, requires consumption with a healthy wariness of noise. But how does one go about forming such a filter?

Learn from Trusted Resources

(a note from Jim)

From my own experience, talking to someone who is growing what you want to grow in the same geographical area is the best initial input. They may not be doing exactly what you want to do but glean from them what you can. Tim’s experience with at a commercial fruit farm, discussed on the next page, is a good example. Once you get context you can read and modify your plans based on your specific goals. Besides working for a fruit farmer, attending on-site orchard meetings, and touring successful farms in other not too dissimilar areas would also be helpful.

Beware, everyone thinks what they are doing is best and you should follow them exactly. But your goals for farming and business may be different. Nothing beats a mentor if one can be found.

(a note from Caitlin)

As a researcher, I would recommend new orchardists seeking information via a variety of printed books, university websites, and information found on “.gov” or “.org” or “.edu” websites. Most of that information has been vetted at least once by someone else, or has been published in such a visible place that it would be scrutinized (and hopefully edited) if there was something glaringly wrong included.

I would advise people to note the year the website, article, study, or book was published and consider the original time period and audience of the author. I've found a lot of excellent growing advice in farming books from the 1940s and the 2010s. And I've found a lot of terrible growing advice in farming books from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Similarly I have found great growing advice on university reports from the 90s and horrible growing advice in lazy online gardening articles that were written just last year. Just because a book or website is "new" or "old" does not make it more or less instructive, clear, or correct. As in any form of research it's important to verify information from multiple sources before you take serious note of it or before you decide to implement that idea on your farm. It's also good to ask yourself, as you're doing research, how much an idea will “cost” you in terms of time, money, brainspace, emotion, and labor.

(back to Tim)

Ask Questions of the Information You Come Across

Be wary of accepting information at face value. Some of the questions below may help to qualify and contextualize the content, or at least think more critically about it.

• Who is presenting this content and what qualifies them to speak on it?

• Is the presenter speaking from the experience of 5+ years of fruit growing? Or are they still in the heavy learning stages of startup?

• Does the presenter have an alternate agenda in presenting this content, like sales of a product or service?

• Is the presenter growing in the same sort of context that I am (climate, size of orchard, etc) such that the information applies to me?

• Does the information they’re presenting conflict with what I already know? If so, how will I determine if I’m mistaken, if my understanding was incomplete, or if the information is just plain wrong?

A Filter for Context

Information from a growing context different from your own needs to be viewed in light of that context. For example, growing organic apples will look very different in the temperate and rainy Mid Atlantic and New England than it does in the arid orchards of Eastern Washington or southern California. Therefore, publications written from regions like California and Washington will need to be viewed with a grain of salt. They may have some concerns that we don’t need to worry about (pocket gophers?), but our humidity levels and rains cause issues that are less of a concern in their dry climate. Solutions that work because of their very different context may not work in ours.

Context is critical. Seek out resources for growing that reflect, as closely as possible, the conditions where you hope to grow. Don’t necessarily discard information from sources outside of your context, but understand the differences and view your situation in light of them.

Filters Come With Time and Experience

A good signal to noise filter is developed slowly, over time. Over time you gain enough knowledge and experience to reject the noise and consume the signal. As an organic orchardist, this is an incredibly valuable skill, and ensures that your foundation is rock-solid. This handbook will help to begin to develop that foundation of knowledge and alongside it, your filter for your farm and orchard.

But what about learning through experience out in the orchard? That’s the subject of the next section!