I have a seedling fruit tree population growing in heavy clay loam. Mostly peaches and apricots so far, but they have survived two winters and no water through three summers.
No blossoms yet. Usually when people tell me they won’t fruit, I respond that I’ll then have a good rootstock that thrives in clay.
Most fruit trees are said to thrive in well draining soil, and there seems to be a consensus that they can’t survive in clay.
How much interest would there be in having rootstocks that survive in various types of soil and more challenging environments? I know commercially it would be a waste of time, but for communities like this it might be helpful.
We’ve got heavy black clay here, and I’m all sorts of interested in learning to graft. My one peach is up on the berm where the soil is a touch less heavy, but not by much, and its covered in blooms atm. I’m going to have to explore this idea! Lets keep this conversation going, for sure.
Yep, we have the same clay. It can be a great soil if you know how to manipulate it.
Adding compost help a lot. Clay has the benefit of holding (and trapping) nutrients and if you amend it with lots of organic matter those nutrients can be more easily accessed by the plants.
There are also a lot of tricks/techniques that can help with planting in clay.
Planting trees high (1-2 inches of root ball above surface level) helps prevent drainage and sinking/settling issues.
Also digging a square hole vs a round hole helps prevent circling roots. A round hole in clay can act as an in-ground pot especially if dug with moisture and left with slick walls.
0 have died (2 grafts were rejected). If you have heavy clay, the type of rootstock doesn’t seem to be that important, except for eventual size of the tree, per my experience.
I received the rootstocks on 4/8 (zone 6 here), put the rootstocks in a bucket filled with water, grafted the scions on them, like a noob, whip-and-tongue, with electrical tape, no sealant. Planted them the next day.
In my experience, clay isn’t an immediate “tree won’t survive” problem, it’s more that you have to take more care at planting time to ensure survival. Trees I planted in wet clay with a barely sufficient, round hole? Didn’t last two years, and didn’t grow well at all. The half-dead 5’ Santa Rosa plum that I took care to ensure the hole was wider and didn’t form a solid-walled “pot” in the ground at planting (as @JinTX mentioned) is over 12’ tall at a couple years in, and if the wind + cold snap we just had didn’t damage the bloom, I expect a decent fruit set this year!
I’m growing native Sand Plums, which as the name suggests like sandy, well-drained soil, in my suburban-former-farmland back yard, where they trucked in generic clay “topsoil” before seeding the new lawns after building. Despite the heavy clay and being in basically the lowest part of the yard (thus receiving all the rain runoff) they’re doing so well that I actually need to go reduce some of the edges of the “thicket” because the clay hasn’t stopped their spread!
That said, a project working toward extremes-tolerant rootstock is not a bad idea. I’d definitely be interested in the results you get over time.
I have found that a lot of thicket-forming plants tend to do really well in clay soils.
Or maybe that is just a trait that allows them to do well in most soils.
That’s a fair point… thicket forming ability does give it an advantage. I will say, though, that with them being in something completely opposite of their natural soil preference, I expected them to at least be stunted a bit. Instead, the original surviving plant ended up as tall as if not taller than the ones I picked the original seed from, and some of its offshoots are heading that direction.
It probably helps that they sprouted naturally in that space. I had harvested a TON of sand plums that year to process for jelly and wine, and the wormy/nasty ones were just tossed straight into what was going to be a small open compost pile. The seeds overwintered, popped up in the spring, and took off on their own with no help from me. I imagine a transplanted plant would have struggled more.
If I get a good fruit harvest this year off my slightly reduced thicket (badly timed frost and/or birds can do a number on my yield) I should have some seed available if you want to try that route?
