The BEST Way to Water Fruit Trees in the Desert

Today we're going to show you the ideal way to water a fruit tree here in the Arizona desert. That's up next. Hello everyone this is Duane with Edge of Nowhere Farm and we're coming to you here today. It's a beautiful bright morning here in March of 2021. So if you guys follow us you know that we have a whole lot of trees we just put in the ground. In fact this will be tree 170 and we've got our one-year anniversary of starting to plant trees here on the new farm that's actually coming up tomorrow. So what we wanted to do with this final tree here in the ground for this season is we wanted to go over the specific details of how we irrigate our fruit trees here in the desert and how you would be able to implement something just like this. What you see behind me here is a bear's lime tree. That is our favorite lime. It's a nice big juicy lime. They're seedless generally speaking and the tree is very productive. We're a big fan of limes with cooking. We use it for cocktails. We use lime a lot. So we're pretty excited that this is the tree that we're putting in the ground last because we know it's just so so productive. Before we get started there's a lot of options as far as how you irrigate trees. Traditionally here in Arizona it was actually done with true flood irrigation and some of the older areas in Phoenix you still have that. So they've got just mass flooding that you do in large yards and the old citrus orchards use that type of flood irrigation. Now there's other options today. You can use drip irrigation. In fact on the old farm that's what we did. We used drip irrigation out of necessity. We were on a shared well. We couldn't pull a lot of water at once so we didn't really have a choice. We had to use something that didn't utilize a lot of water at one time because we couldn't draw a whole lot of water at once. However here on this farm we do have a little more capacity and the ability to use a flood type irrigation which really is ideal for fruit trees at least here in Arizona. Now a primary reason why you'd want to use this type of irrigation is we have a tremendous amount of different types of minerals in the water and those have a tendency to build up at the top of the soil and basically kind of give you this caked layer. Doing a flood type irrigation allows you to drain a lot of that material down into the ground and to help to wash some of those minerals out through the roots and down into the ground. And then of course you want that heavy deep irrigation infrequently especially during the summer months when these trees really need to make sure they're able to hold and maintain that moisture. Okay so we're going to go ahead and walk you through the details. I'm going to start with what we're using as far as the irrigation head. We use a standard PVC irrigation system. You guys can check out some of our videos on that. And what you see down here is a half gallon per minute irrigation bubbler. So we have that attached to a schedule 80 riser right here. You'll see us working around this. But this gives us half a gallon per minute. You know if you use drip irrigation typically your irrigation heads are anywhere from half a gallon up to about four gallons per hour and this is half a gallon per minute. Now we use half a gallon mainly out of necessity. We have a certain number of trees we have on each one of these zones. We can't use more than half a gallon and have this amount of trees on this zone. Now you can go higher. In fact we do that in some other areas of the farm. I really like the one gallon per minute flow. I think that's really ideal if you're able to do that. But we're going to go ahead and use a half gallon per minute. Okay that's the head. Now of course what we're going to need to do first is we need to get a hole dug. We're going to use an auger because we plant hundreds of trees. So we use an auger to dig this hole. Obviously you can do that with a shovel. You guys have watched it before. We have this whole area here that was covered in wood chips for the last few weeks. We've been watering it about once a week. So we have fairly pliable soil that we're going to be working in today. But let's go ahead and get started by getting the hole dug and get the tree planted in the ground and then we'll come back to irrigation. I better find the root ground here. We know it's usually buried. We have the tree in the ground. What I wanted to do is show you a couple things because I feel like I can't plant a tree without pointing a couple things out. Especially for us here in Arizona. So you'll see that the tree itself is mounted and you saw me digging out dirt. Now there's a couple reasons for that. The primary reason is making sure that the tree itself is not planted too deep. The potted trees like this have a tendency to settle. Well all trees do, but potted ones as well. So the tree will settle slightly in the hole. So it's going to continue to go down. And then we also want to make sure that we allow the tree to have space for the roots to grow out and down before they hit our caliche layer. That's that hard rocky layer that we all have two or three feet down. So we want to make sure we give that a little bit of space. But that primary reason is to make sure that we're not burying this or planting it too deep. So you saw me pulling soil out from the tree and what I was looking for, I was looking for the root crown. So where the roots start to come out from the tree. This is the root stock right here. That's my graft point. You can see nice and high up above the ground. And then I have a root crown. That's where the small feuder roots start to come out from the tree. And that's right there. So I know that I've got this planted at just the right height because my root crown, where it starts to flare out or root flare is right here. And again, a couple inches above ground. And then of course, you're about to see how we do the rest of the trenching. Also distance, you saw us doing a specific amount of distance from that emitter head. Remember these trees are going to continue to get bigger. So as you're designing your irrigation, you want to make sure that you can extend the irrigation when the tree continues to grow outward because you want to be watering at the drip line. Right now the drip line is where these branches are, where the pot is. That's the edge of the roots. Those will immediately start pushing out this way and we want to encourage that. So we're about five feet from the emitter head, which is going to give us, you'll see in a moment, a channel that's going to lead to basically a swale and a berm around this tree. You saw me clearing away the dirt that we had here, the fill dirt. That's so I know where the hole was dug. One of the other reasons we don't dig an extremely wide hole, we want to make sure we're irrigating encouraging those roots to do what they need to do. And that is actually get acclimatized to your soil and start growing into your soil. This rootstock is designed and grown here in Arizona in Yuma. So it's designed for this soil. So we know it's going to do that. And now what we're going to do is create a channel around the tree here. That's going to encourage that root growth out. And you're also going to see us doing a channel that comes from our irrigation head. So it can feed water right in here where we need the watering done for this tree right now. We have our first ring done. You can see that we go down a couple more inches just using a shovel. And this is where our initial water is going to be, which is going to encourage this tree to grow out. It might be hard to pick up on camera once we get this going, but this is a swale and a berm. So it's a typical thing you would use in permaculture. We're doing that on a miniature scale here. And what this does is this will have water here and it'll basically sit in here. So whether you're irrigating or you happen to get a heavy monsoon in the summertime, this will fill with water and that water will sit in sink. While it does that, it's also penetrating into the soil in both directions. So it'll penetrate in and through this berm on this side. It'll also do the same thing on the berm on this side. That's going to allow water to hit the roots now while the tree is young. As the roots grow out into this particular swale, they'll grow beyond this berm here and start going this way because you'll have water penetration that's actually out here. So that way you give plenty of space for those roots and you encourage those roots to continue to grow out. Okay, now we're not done. This tree is on the same schedule as several trees that are larger and we know this is going to grow out. So there's a second part that we need to do. We're going to be using a small Sun Joe tiller in order to break up our extremely hard ground. So we're going to use that. If you have softer ground, you don't need to use that tiller, but we need to get a second ring designed and you're going to see that now. Now you'll get an idea of what this double ring design is going to look like. The first thing we did was we actually got this trenching dug with the tiller pulled back to create these berms on the outside. These don't need to be super high because of course we dug down into the ground a few inches, but this area here is about as low as that center area there. You also saw that I put a nice high berm on the backside here. That's important. The reason why is eventually water is going to back up this way. We want to make sure we continue to push the water towards the tree as opposed to allowing it to spill over the back in case you water a little too much. Or if you're going to be doing this by hand, we'll talk about that in a minute. Next thing you saw me do was install this valve box. We keep these. These are about five or six bucks at Home Depot. This is basically an insurance policy to help keep the emitter head safe from rabbits, coyotes. We've watched them tear those things apart. The sun, a lot of sun damage, UV rays. So we have this valve box. You'll see me filling it with rocks here in a moment to help keep different types of creepy crawlers from crawling up in and pushing dirt up into the same area where you have your valve. You see us putting rock there as well in just a moment. You also saw, if you could pick it up on camera, this is one of the unique things that we do with this design. You'll see it function here in a moment. When we started tilling, we tilled a little further away from this center channel here. Then all we did was just remove the dirt that was built up there. This is actually ground level here. We're lower in here, which is going to allow this channel in the water to flow into this area here. Then once that's nice and full, as this continues to run, this will act as a spillway. The water will spill out into the outside ring here. That's important because, again, we have other trees on this zone that already have roots out this far. We're going to be watering this tree a little bit longer than it probably would normally need. All we're going to be doing is building soil in this outside ring, and you probably guessed it, giving perfect soil for those roots to continue to grow further out and away from the tree. This is a temporary design until this tree is ready to be out here. Then all we'll need to do is basically just stop that gap there and start watering out here. You can see we can continue to expand this ring out as we go. Next thing we need to do is we need to test this. Now, we use a Wi-Fi controller in the back. I'm going to go ahead and turn this on and make sure that our irrigation is working. We're going to just watch the water and make sure that it's going to fill that in really well. If not, you just dig out some of the dirt. You can see we're a little bit lower on that side, a little higher on this side, which is okay. The important thing is the water is not going to back up here. We want the water flowing to the back. It's been just about a minute, and you can see that we already have the ring on the inside starting to fill with water. This is enough for our test. I'm going to go ahead and get some rock filled into here, and around this area here, we'll shut off our irrigation, and then we'll come back to you. This is completely optional. We have this tree staked because you can see it's kind of top heavy, and in fact, when we choose these trees, we prefer our citrus trees to be a bush. However, we deal with heavy rabbit pressure, jackrabbits and cottontail rabbits, and we utilize these cages to keep the rabbits away from the tree. We've had damage on citrus trees specifically from rabbits before. This allows the tree to grow up above the rabbits, keeps them away from the trunk, which is the most important thing. You also saw us painting the trunk. We use Arizona's Best Tree Trunk Paint. That paint is specifically to keep this trunk protected until the canopy can shade it from sunburn. We have the heavy intense sun, and that's why you see white trunks everywhere around town, especially where you see old citrus. That's to protect that trunk because they don't have it shaded by the tree. The last thing we need to do is just test this outside ring, get it all watered in. That'll solidify this dirt so it doesn't move around. Oh, one other thing I should point out. You saw that we put a lot of rocks in here. Now, this here will act as a French drain. We're going to be filling wood chips in. If you guys watch how we do our trees, we put wood chips into here nice and heavy. They start to create soil, and we don't want soil backing this up. So I've got rocks here in front of the emitter. That'll act again as a French drain. The water will flow through the rocks. It'll also flow through the wood chips and out into these rings to help completely hydrate this. So we're going to go ahead and get this watered in, test just to make sure that we've got water nice and balanced in this outside ring, and then we'll show you what it looks like when we're done. This will give you an idea of what it looks like when we're done. So I should point out, if I didn't mention it already, what's great about this. We had an irrigation that ran last night, so we got plenty of water on this brand new tree. Of course, we watered it in nice and heavy. You can see we fill it in completely with wood chips. We do that all the way up in through here in our citrus area. Water, as it sits inside this system, continues to penetrate out. So we want to make sure that we're establishing soil and something comfortable for these roots to move into. One other thing, if you notice, we had some video yesterday of Lori actually manually watering this ring. So we have irrigation run to this. Now, if we have any issues with irrigation and we have to water by hand, it makes it much simpler for us to go down the line, drop a hose into this section back here or right into these rocks, and that'll water this manually for you as well. So even if you're not running underground irrigation, these rings and this design is very effective with the rocks in the back because you can essentially just drop a hose into there, walk away for a bit, and let that manually water into these rings as well. Hopefully this video was a good one for you guys. If you had any questions or you wanted specifics on how we designed this ring, if you have any other questions, feel free to leave those questions in the comment section down below. If you haven't subscribed to the channel, hey, do that. There's a lot of things we cover here, not just fruit trees, although we do have a tendency to spend a lot of time on this and how we grow trees here in the desert. In our Amazon shop, I'll leave a link down in the description. That's a free, painless way to help support the channel. If you start with that link, it doesn't matter what you buy, you help to support us here. So I just want to thank you for joining us today and remind you, if we can farm on the edge of nowhere, so can you. Oh, I just heard what you said. You said the magic words. I swear I'm a professional.