Planting 100 new apricot trees

Volunteers from Mission San Jose helped our City Orchardist, Phil Doetsch, to lay out the grid for planting 100 new apricot trees to restore the productivity of our heritage orchard. The trees are the heirloom variety, Blenheim apricots, grafted onto hardy root stock. This is the variety first planted in the orchard in 1901-1902 by J. Gilbert Smith. Phil will pick up the baby trees in a few days and keep the bare root stock moist until planted.

The grid is 11.5 feet, wide enough to allow tilling with a tractor and to provide for laying the drip irrigation lines that are planned for the future. We are hoping eventually to establish a beneficial plant guild along the drip lines, to replace tilling and provide a ground cover that will help restore a complex food web.

I was delighted to see several bluebirds in the orchard today. One perched on a post right in front of me, as if to say thank you. Yet I was not fast enough to get a photo.

Posted on February 11, 2020 11:51 PM by jmpackard