Habitat improvement picture tour

I did some spraying around my trees the other day and brought the camera along to show you fellas some of the work I’ve done on my property.
I have approx. 4-5 acres of bottom ground that was a total monoculture of cool season grasses when I bought the property. The first fall that I owned it I mowed and then sprayed 1 1/2 ac. to prep for a spring tree planting. In the spring I received 1,000 trees from the DNR and managed to get them in the ground within 5 days of picking them up.
I chose White spruce for higher ground, black spruce and white cedar for the wetter areas. Here’s a picture of the bottom ground(right hand side was planted in 08′, left hand side of bottom planted in 2010), trees(white cedar & black spruce in geopardy of being taken over by grasses), and the bucket method of spraying to eliminate competition. Pretty crude but it gets the job done. I use a 9$ pump sprayer from wally world, place it in my backpack, put the bucket over the tree and spray competing grasses with 4% glyphosate.

Last spring I planted 7 apple trees from Cummins nursery. Some were feathered trees other were just whips. The cages are built from welded wire to protect from browsing deer, I also used windowscreen to protect the trunks from rodents and boring insects. A few pictures of the apple trees that I just started training the branches on. It’s best to have large crotch angles (90 degrees from main trunk) on branches to produce a open canopy tree that will one day support large crops of apples. The last picture is what happens when you don’t cage apple trees….not much left of that little guy.

My little orchard sits on the front end of a 1/2ac. foodplot. I planted white spruce around the perimeter of the plot in 08′. In picture #2 you can see that the spring glyphosate treatment did a number on the plot, it’s ready to be worked and planted with soy’s any day now. In pic #2 you can see a tree on left hand side of photo that I bent over and wired to a fencepost to create a strategic scrape just 30 yards from a bowstand(within days of tying it down I had deer using it). The same picture also shows a stand of white pine that had zero understory and little deer usage. Two winters ago my dad and I went in and dropped a half a dozen trees to create some horizontal cover and the deer instantly took notice. Now they bed regularly in the pines.

I was fortunate to have some volunteer apples growing on my ground, but due to light competition it appeared as though they hadn’t produced apples for multiple years. The first one was easy to cut a large boxelder out and it produced a bucket full of apples last season. There were two others in the timber that I released by girdling(double girdled black oak shown) and cutting out competing trees. They each produced apples last year, but as you can see they are still competing for light and I should have removed more of the overstory around them.

Nice job! there are very few things you can do alone in this world that will impact the future… But planting the trees and improving your habitat will last long after you are gone. It looks like you have a good handle on training your apple trees, it is one of the most important things you can do to not only strengthen the branches but will produce more fruit. like you I have also found that by removing competition and pruning your existing wild apple trees your wild trees will become producers again.

Looks Great Shed, I have not done anything with training my apples, I have 9 trees in my orchard, rangeing from 2 to 5 years is it too late?

Thanks Bob and QDM.

It’s definitely not too late to start now. It’s easier to train them from the start but you can still prune and train branches to create desired structure. Here’s a good publication from Cornell University http://eap.mcgill.ca/CPTFP_7.htm

Excellent post shednut! I hope to use some of your tips on my own land.