3 ms·
Apple, cherry, pear are all hard crops because of bug predation. My rudimentary understanding (I am a farmer just not a fruit farmer, so I just know what other
by pard68 3y ago
Apple, cherry, pear are all hard crops because of bug predation. My rudimentary understanding (I am a farmer just not a fruit farmer, so I just know what other farmers tell me) is that these non-native fruit trees have to contend with bugs it has no defense for. The native fruits are far more successful.
My personal experience matches. Our apple and cherry and peach harvests are hit or miss. Our pawpaw, hickory, and passion fruit harvests ae always exceptional.
- myth_drannon 3y agoYes, maybe it's the non-native tree issue. So I'm in Canada now, but I clearly remember as a child in Belarus/USSR that we had so many apples trees and never had issues with bugs. We would collect many boxes and have them stored until early spring.
- gdubs 3y agoThere's another crucial aspect to this which is that most orchards you see are absolute monocultures. There's an enormous value in planting a diversity of companion crops and staggering species in orchards, and you see a lot less ruin in these types of orchard designs. The problem with monocultures is you have no breaks where competition from other bug species, birds, animals, etc, keeps an ecosystem in balance. So you end up creating this environment where a pest can take off without any resistance. This is usually not done out of a desire to maximize yields. Farmers don't want to take up space with trees that are 'not producing'. But the other way to look at it is that those other plants and trees are producing a ton of value, they're just not producing a crop per se. That said, many companion plants can also be valuable crops in their own right.