Dr. Arnold Schumann's OHS Planting at Gapway Groves

Dr. Arnold Schumann, from the CREC in Lake Alfred, established an OHS planting at a grove near the Center. It has microjet, which will be used for cold protection, and Arnold added the drip system. He's using two plug-in emitters per tree, and he'll add more as the trees grow larger. I don't know if he has plans to eventually add a second drip line.

There is an area in the block where the trees don't have drip -- they're on microjets operated by the grower. It appears that Arnold's trees are larger, and the trunks are nice and small. Thin diameter trunks indicates that the trees are nearly stress-free - something I've noticed in every OHS system. Skinny trunks, then, are a good indicator of the way that water and fertilizer are managed.

From the looks of it, Arnold is growing off the trees very nicely. It'll be interesting to follow this planting since he is monitoring salinity and soil moisture along with different water and fertilizer treatments. Go Arnold!

3-Row Advanced Production System for 58 ft beds

We just finished planting an Advanced Production System block in an existing grove that originally had 58-ft double beds. We designed and installed microjet manifolds that tied into the original two submain connections and provided 3 connections for poly lines to convert each bed to 3 tree rows. Richard's Arapaho tree planting crew helped lay out each bed to accommodate differences in shape, mostly about 18' between the tree rows on the tops with wider spacing across the relatively deep water furrows, then planted the trees at 8' in the row. That's roughly equal to 281 trees/acre. It looks really good, and saved a lot of money over re-doing the beds and irrigation system! The basic premise of Advanced Production is to increase the tree count to minimize production losses as trees are removed for HLB management.

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