No, not really. I don't spray pesticides, and my fruit isn't beautiful like the kind you get at the grocery store, it has tree rubs on it and such, but it's so delicious. But I don't have disease issues at all, and very little insect issues. Lots of bees in the fall when the fruit starts falling, but I try to pick early so I don't have a lot of ground fruit. My grounders I make into apple sauce or jam or whatever.
As far as irrigation, I went a little overboard. I have two wells on my property, one for the house, one for everything else (outbuildings, irrigation, etc.). I buried the lines four feet deep to avoid frost issues and to make it impossible to hit with the rototiller. In my vegetable garden I have sprinkler heads that are between 1 and 6 feet high, depending on what I'm planting in that area. They're painted a bright red so I never hit them with the tractor or rototiller. In my orchard it is the same thing, except all those sprinkler heads disappear into the ground so mowing is easy. I put the irrigation in before the trees, no issues with roots that way, and it's ready to go for watering when I did put the trees in. I have two systems with 9 zones each. The garden runs irrigation in the morning, the orchard in the afternoon. The control junctions for those are in my wood working shop, which is insulated and heated so it never freezes.
It has taken me a decade to get everything to where it is today. Totally worth it.
lurkingdirk
forgot to ask what’s your irrigation setup for all this? Well with centrifugal pump? City water? Did you install it yourself? Etc.
thetreeplanters.com
