Hello steemians!!! For ten years now...we have been slowly growing our small orchard on 1/4 lot here in s. Utah. We now have over a 100 fruit trees growing on this lot. One of the BEST WAYS we have found....to grow fruit trees on a small lot like this...is to grow the trees just down grade from the house's rain gutters. We use small swales/ditches to catch the runoff water, but we also take it one step further and on some drainpipes...we attach perforated tubing. This technique infiltrates.... WATER deeply into the soil. We will show you an example below and HOW to do this yourself:
First Step: We purchased some "perforated" flexible tubing at the local box store. This tubing comes un-perforated also. GET the perforated!!!!! The main goal will be to let the rainwater runoff slowly infiltrate into the soil over time.
Attach the the perforated tubing to a smaller piece of solid tubing. They will snap together. The smaller piece of solid tubing attaches to the drain pipe. The larger "perforated" tubing will run down hill...into the orchard.
Dig a trench that has a small grade drop.....into the orchard. This is an apple orchard that as been growing near this rain gutter for about a decade now. Having your trees growing near the down spout of the rain gutters will increase the orchard's health A LOT.... but this tubing takes it one step further....in our opinion. DEEP INFILTRATION of water!
For extra drainage....we put a small amount of volcanic cinders at the opening of the tubing.
We added a drain at the end of the line as an added failsafe
Then back fill and compact.
In our case, the tubing is still exposed near the drain pipe, as we are still finishing some earthworks near the home and will be back filling more of it. You could easily take the tubing lower....and bury it right off the drain pipe. We have four drain pipes off our home ....and three are using this technique to infiltrate water into our soil.
Here's a recent post we made on our backyard food forest orchard....and a video tour: https://steemit.com/gardening/@rawutah/100-fruit-trees-cascading-from-blossoms-into-green-food-forest-tour-vlog-4
Thanks for viewing!!!! Cheers to growing our own!!!!! WE appreciate ALL of you!!!!!
-The Raw Utah family