When you think of an apple orchard, you might think of large trees full of foliage and apples so high up in the tree that you’d need a ladder to reach them. However, today’s modern apple orchards look much different.
Known as high-density system, these trees are much shorter and smaller. Bill Dodd, a fourth-generation apple grower at Hillcrest Orchards in Amherst, Ohio, grows his trees in a slender spindle growing system; he shares with The Packer a little bit about the advantages of growing apples in a high-density system.
“Typically trees are planted 2.5 to 3, maybe 4 feet apart in the row — fully dwarfing rootstocks to control the size of the tree, needs to be supported,” he says. “This is a four-wire system with trellis posts, and then, because of the dwarfing trees don’t have much of a root system water is critical so we have trickle irrigation set up.”
Dodd still has some older plantings on his farm, with about 150 trees per acre, compared to his high-density blocks, which can range anywhere between 1,200 to 2,000 trees per acre. He says trees cost about $10 each, so it is definitely more expensive to grow in a high-density system
“You can do the math on 1,200 trees per acre, or 150 trees per acre,” he says. “It’s pretty expensive to plant the high-density.”
And that’s not only the trees; there’s also the wires and the poles to create the trellis system as well as the drip irrigation.
So, if it’s more expensive, why do growers do it? While it might seem counterintuitive, Dodd says those smaller trees in the higher-density plantings are more productive than the larger ones. There are fewer leaves on the higher-density trees, which means the tree can focus more on growing fruit than growing tall.
“This so very productive compared to the older style, bigger trees, much more efficient, easier to prune, easier to harvest,” he says. “Pretty much everything seems to be easier with them. Also, the fruit has access to way more sunlight, which helps with color.”
