How do I prepare my land before the trees arrive?

Drainage, ripping, amendments and layout — the work that can only be done while the field is still empty.

Land preparation is the last time you can work on your soil freely.

Once the trees are in the ground, every job has to work around living roots, drip lines and a crop you cannot afford to lose.

This is your one chance to look at the whole soil profile, fix what can be fixed, clear the difficult weeds, and put the drainage, water, roads and rows where they belong. Some of these problems can only be solved now. After planting, they stay with you for the life of the orchard.

What “ready to plant” means

Reserve your trees early. Good varieties and their pollenizers are planted out in the nursery seasons ahead, and you want the variety you chose, not what is left over. Ordering early does not commit you to a planting date — tell us when you want the trees and we deliver them then.

Your field is ready when you can answer these six questions with evidence, not opinion.

The six questions

Soil profile. You have dug pits and tested the soil by depth, in every different part of the field.
Water and soil chemistry. You have laboratory reports for both your soil and your irrigation water, read together.
Drainage. You know where the water goes when it rains, and you have a place for it to leave.
Compaction. You know whether you have a restricting layer, at what depth, and whether it can be broken.
Weeds. You have walked the block and mapped the difficult perennial weeds.
Layout. Water lines, roads, headlands, rows, tree positions and pollenizer positions are all decided and marked.

Once the rows are staked, measure your real plantable area and confirm your final tree numbers against it. That figure is almost always lower than the one you calculated from the size of the field.

The order of work

Do the permanent work first and the easily changed work last. Each step depends on the one before it.

Map and investigate. Land history, soil pits, laboratory tests, water source, weed map.
Design the permanent system. Drainage and grade plan, roads, headlands, irrigation, row direction, tree and pollenizer positions.
Control the difficult perennial weeds. Deal with them now, while you still have full access to the field.
Fix the physical problems. Grading, drainage, deep ripping, berms.
Fix the chemical problems. Amendments based on tests, then leaching.
Build and stake. Water lines, pump and filter, valves, roads, headlands, rows and planting points.
Check everything. Test the irrigation, test the drainage with real water, check the stakes.

Dig soil pits

Do not dig one good pit in the best corner of a 50-hectare block and call it done. Dig in the good areas and in every suspect area: low spots, places where water stands, cut and fill areas, road edges, heavy patches, and anywhere the vegetation looks different from the rest of the field.

What to look at in every pit

How deep the good soil goes. This is the volume your roots will actually live in.
Sudden changes in texture. Where a sandy layer sits on a clay layer, water stops and sits above the change. That trapped water sits on the roots.
Dense or massive layers. Look for a hardpan, a claypan or a compacted zone, and note its exact depth and thickness.
Grey colours, orange mottles, seepage or standing water. These are signs the soil is saturated for part of the year.
Stones, gravel, buried rubble or old fill. These reduce your usable area, or need a different design.
Salt crust on the surface. Test the chemistry by depth before you decide anything.

Soil and water tests

One mixed topsoil sample is not enough. Salt, sodium, lime, texture and nutrients often change sharply within the first metre, and an average across that metre hides every one of them.

Ask the laboratory for — soil

Texture, organic matter, pH and lime content.
Saturated paste electrical conductivity (ECe), the standard salinity test for soil.
Sodium, as SAR or ESP.
Boron, chloride and nitrate. A soil can be low in total salt and still carry enough boron to damage walnuts.

Ask the laboratory for — water

ECw, pH, calcium, magnesium, sodium, bicarbonate and carbonate, chloride, sulfate, boron, nitrate and SAR.
Test every source, and do it before you buy an irrigation system.
Sampling a well: run the pump long enough to clear the standing water in the pipe first.
Sampling a canal or a river: sample flowing water, not a still edge.

Drainage

You can plant a tree on a mound. A mound does not fix a blocked outlet, an impermeable layer or a badly designed irrigation system. Find out which of these you actually have before you decide the answer is earth moving.

What you find	What to do about it
Water standing on the surface	Survey the levels, find where the water wants to go, and make sure there is somewhere for it to leave. Level out the harmful low spots.
Water trapped above a clay layer	Check your pits after rain or irrigation. Break the layer only if breaking it will really work, and combine it with surface or buried drainage.
A high water table across the whole site	Monitor it through the season and get qualified local engineering advice. Berms help locally, but they do not lower a water table.
Heavy soil and wet crowns	Plant on berms, improve water entry into the soil, and water in shorter, more frequent runs instead of long ones.
Cut and fill areas	Treat these as separate zones. Fill behaves differently from undisturbed soil, and it settles.

Grade for controlled water movement, not for a flat-looking field. Keep the drainage routes open, do not concentrate fast water where it will cut the soil, and do not build a road or a bank across the bottom of a slope, where it will dam cold air as well as water.

After earthworks, open a few pits again. Cutting and filling creates a new soil map, different from the one you started with.

Deep ripping

Rip when your pits show a real restricting layer that your machine can reach and break. Do not rip because you own a ripper.

What your pits show	What to do
Deep, uniform soil, no restricting layer	Shallow loosening at 0.45–0.9 m is usually enough. Do not pay for depth you do not need, and do not destroy good structure.
A layered profile, a hardpan or a claypan	Deep ripping or slip plowing at 0.9–1.8 m may be needed. Decide the depth and the direction from the pit, before the machine starts.
A claypan that reseals	Clay can flow around a normal ripper tine and close again behind it. A slip plow lifts and breaks the clay layer instead, and works far better here.
Shallow rock, gravel or impermeable material	Usually not worth ripping. Change your layout, or leave that zone out of the orchard.
Wet or plastic soil	Do not rip at all. Wet soil smears instead of shattering, and you make the problem worse than it was.

Then protect what you fixed

A ripped profile can be pressed flat again by heavy traffic, especially on wet soil. Set your traffic routes, finish the main roads and headlands before the final tree-site work, and keep loaded trailers off moist planting rows.

Soil amendments

Salt, sodium and acidity

Salty soil (high ECe). You need to push the salt down and out of the root zone with good water. This only works if water can enter the soil and leave through a drain. Never promise yourself leaching without infiltration and drainage.
Sodium-affected soil (high SAR or ESP). Sodium breaks down soil structure and stops water entering. Gypsum supplies calcium to replace the sodium, but gypsum does not remove sodium by itself — the released sodium still has to be washed out through a soil that drains. Use the laboratory gypsum requirement, not a standard tonnage.
Acid soil. Lime can correct it. Follow the laboratory lime requirement, and mix it through the depth that needs it.

Lime, organic matter and nutrients

High pH and chalky, high-lime soil. Iron, manganese and zinc become hard for the tree to take up. You cannot change the pH of a strongly calcareous root zone with a small surface application of an acidifying product. Accept the soil chemistry, mark those zones, and plan your future micronutrient feeding around them.
Organic matter and compost. These improve soil condition, but they do not break a hardpan, drain a wet field or remove sodium. Check what you are buying for salt, weed seed and contaminants before you spread it.
Phosphorus, potassium and zinc. These move very slowly in soil. If a test shows a real shortage, this is the moment to mix them into the future root zone. After planting you can only put them on the surface.

If you cannot hire a backhoe or reach a laboratory

Most of the work above assumes hired machinery and a soil laboratory. On 2 to 5 hectares that is not always realistic. You can still prepare the land properly. You cannot skip the questions, but you can answer several of them with cheaper tools.

A backhoe, a laser level and a deep ripper are all one-day or two-day jobs on a small block. Hiring a contractor for a single day, or sharing the cost with neighbours planting in the same season, is far cheaper than owning any of them. Ask your neighbours what they used and who they hired.

If you cannot get a backhoe

Dig one full pit by hand, with a spade, in the most important zone. One metre is enough to see the layers, the colours and where the roots stop. Nothing replaces looking at the soil face with your own eyes.
Use a hand auger for the rest of the field. It is cheap, one person can carry it, and it tells you the texture, the depth of each layer, and where the soil suddenly becomes hard to turn. It will not show you structure, so use it to spread your investigation, not to replace the pit.
Push a straight steel rod into moist soil to find a compacted layer. Where the rod stops at the same depth again and again across the block, you have found a restricting layer — and you know how deep it is.

If you cannot get a soil laboratory

Test your irrigation water at least. This is one sample, it is the cheapest test you will buy, and it affects every year of the orchard’s life. Do not skip it.
For soil, reduce the number of samples rather than skipping the test. Take one surface sample and one deep sample from each clearly different part of the field, and ask only for the results that change a decision: pH and lime, ECe for salt, SAR or ESP for sodium, and boron.
There is no home substitute for a salinity or sodium result. If your land shows white crusting, bare patches, or water that will not soak in, get those samples analysed before you plant anything.

If you cannot rip the soil

Do not plant that zone as if the problem is not there. Either leave it out of the orchard, or plant on berms, accept that your trees have a shallower root zone, and water in shorter, more frequent runs so the water never sits. A shallow root zone needs more care every year, for the life of the orchard.

What you must not skip, whatever your budget

The drainage test.
Knowing how deep your soil goes before it becomes hard.
A water quality test.
Controlling the perennial weeds.

Those four decide whether the orchard works. Everything else on this page can be reduced.

Weed control before planting

Perennial weeds are far easier to control before the trees are planted. After planting, the trees and the drip lines block your access and limit your options.

Weed competition costs you most in the first four years. Weeds take water, nutrients and light from young trees, block your emitters, and get in the way at harvest.

Field bindweed and other deep-rooted perennial broadleaves. Clear or contain the mapped patches now. The roots survive superficial control.
Bermudagrass, johnsongrass and other creeping grasses. One treatment will not do it. Plan a repeated programme with follow-up checks.
Nutsedge. Where you find it, look for the wet spot or the leaking emitter that supports it. Fix the cause as well as the weed.
Annual weeds. Easier, but do not let them seed. Every year of seeding makes the first four years harder.

Irrigation, roads and headlands

These are the last three jobs before the trees arrive, and they go in this order. Each one is far harder to change once the one after it is finished.

Install the irrigation system first

The water source connection, pump and filter station, mainline, submains, valves, pressure and flow gauges, flush points and crossings should all be in and tested before planting day.

Irrigation design and row layout are one drawing, not two jobs. Your spacing decides lateral length, emitter numbers and how much water each zone needs at peak. Your soil chemistry decides how evenly the water must be delivered and how much extra you need for leaching. Design the rows first and the water second, and you will end up with badly balanced zones, or with trenches cut through planted rows.

Build the roads and headlands before planting

Set headland width from the turning circle of your largest machine — sprayer, shaker, sweeper, harvester and trailer — measured, not guessed. Decide where the harvest will be loaded. Keep access open for drain inspection. And do not put a permanent road where it blocks water or cold air.

Stake the rows last

Mark row centre lines, tree positions, pollenizer positions, headlands, roads, drain buffers and irrigation zones only after the survey, the earthworks and the infrastructure decisions are final. Then measure your real net plantable area and confirm your final tree numbers against it.

Final checks before planting

One pass with a machine is not proof that a problem is solved. Go and look.

Before the trees arrive

Run water through the system and watch where it goes. No ponding, no blocked outlet.
Test irrigation pressure, flow and uniformity across the block, not at one valve.
Walk the berms. Are they settled, straight, and out of the path of concentrated runoff?
Check the stakes against your planting map, including the pollenizer positions.
Drive your largest machine down a headland and around a corner.
Confirm the delivery date, the planting crew, and where the trees will be kept if planting is delayed by weather.

Mistakes worth avoiding

Every one of these costs real money. None of them leaves the field better than it was.

Planning and investigation

Letting a delivery date decide when you plant. Move the delivery to fit the field. Never rush the field to fit the delivery.
Treating the whole farm as one field. Soil, drainage and salt vary across a block. Use zones.
Leaving the perennial weeds until after planting. By then you have lost your best chance.
Installing irrigation after the rows are fixed. You get poor hydraulic zones, or damaged rows.
Not checking the work. One pass with a machine is not proof. Open the pit and look.

Machinery and amendments

Ripping wet soil. It smears instead of fracturing, and leaves the soil worse than before.
Ripping with no target layer. Money spent, nothing changed.
Gypsum for every heavy soil. Gypsum answers a sodium problem. It does not answer a clay problem.
Levelling to make the field look tidy. Careless levelling traps water, blocks outlets and dams cold air.
Believing berms are the whole drainage plan. Berms lift the crown out of the wet. They do not drain the subsoil.

The short version

Investigate before you hire a machine, and do the permanent work before the easily changed work. Almost every expensive mistake in this chapter comes from reversing one of those two.

And when the work is done, go back and open a pit. The only proof that a field is ready is what the soil looks like afterwards.