I have 5 peach trees and 4 apricot trees that have survived 2 winters and 3 summers without any help. Clay soil, wet spring, hot dry summer, dry winter. I haven’t watered them at all.
Usually around March, before the trees break dormancy, we get our major rain for the year. This time it hit in May. Essentially, these trees have been sitting in standing water for a month.
No rain for a couple days, so things are starting to dry out, but two trees, one apricot and one peach, look like they’ve drowned.
I don’t want to lose them, since they’ve survived this long, so I’ll probably take cuttings, but does anyone think it’s worth trying to transplant them right now? I have a drier spot where they wouldn’t drown, but I’m not sure whether to leave them where they are and hope they live to be transplanted once they’re dormant, or transplant them now and risk them dying in transplant.
poor lil plants
The transplant shock these trees will get from transplanting in the summer will be rough on them (unless you expect more rain in the future)
But perhaps an immediate step you can take is (temporarily) remove the mulch around the trees (wherever you think the rootmass is) to dry the soil around the trees faster.
Depending on how waterlogged your soil is and how big the area, you could also dig a hole next to the rootmass of the tree and use a sump pump to pump excess water away.
Do i miss something? They look fine to me. If you want to kill them move them now. I’ve moved one i had given a year to root out into a rootball, moved it in winter , severely pruned it and it didn’t survive.
You can see a healthy tree behind the peach. They’re turning yellow and dropping leaves. Looks like they might be trying to go dormant, which in June is a bad sign.
I’ve lost a bunch of trees to this. I made a bad decision as to where to put my orchard, not realizing that there’s no drainage and it’s essentially a standing puddle in the spring.
I have a suggestion! Dig a big trench on either side of each tree, which can collect excess water and drain it away from the trees. In theory, that ought to help them a lot!
Actually, berms and swales may be the best solution for your fruit trees, in general. If you plant them on berms, the swales will flow away the excess water when there’s too much, and probably also make it easier for the trees to access water collected near them when there’s not enough.
If you make each long swale shallowest in the middle and a deepest at the edges, that will also help to send the water flowing away from the trees when there’s too much.
I am using berms in other areas. That’s one of the dry areas I am considering moving the trees to. I suspect that eventually most of the trees in this area will either be moved or die.
As far as a trench, I can certainly do that. Actually draining the water becomes a different issue, since I would have to dig a drainage ditch to the nearest area where water can run off, about 30 feet.
No drainage ditch is needed, just a big hole where water can drain in, and this setup:
Add this switch to it if you only want it to run when the hole has water in it:
It is easy to set up, you don’t need to be an electrical genius, I sure am not and I figured it out without electrocuting myself. I use a similar setup, including battery, to pump water into my garden from outside the garden with heavy rains.
A pond for all the excess water to pour into would probably be a really cool thing to have, especially since I’ve heard frogs like to move in when you have a pond, and they do a great job of eating pest insects. I imagine that would be a major long-term project, though.
