Orchard Layout

> Trees will be in rows 20 feet apart.
> They will be planted 10 feet apart in the rows.
> Plan is to plant 31,000 trees.
> That is thrity-one thousand trees!

Well, every other tree in a row would make for a 20 x 20, and it would be half the amount of nails. You could expand on that to 40 x 40 if you knew the planters were able to comprehend what you were doing.

My first thought is this:

• Set a row of stakes along one edge of the orchard with line stakes behind them.
• Do the same on one of the adjacent sides.
• Start planting the trees in one of the rows, furthest away from one of the staked sides.
• Plant the next row closer to the stakes, etc. This allows you to always maintain sight of the line stakes.

I've used this method for topography surveys when the client insisted on having a grid. Of course, this assumes that the land is relatively flat. Being that this is a pretty large are, you could also use a variation on this by setting some tree locations randomly throughout the orchard to maintain the lines. You'd really only need a minimum of 3 stakes per row.

Edit: after re-reading the original post, I see that you'd probably need more than 3 per row simply due to the size of the orchard. But a variation of this plan may work if you could simply minimize the number of stakes per row within line-of-sight.

It wouldn't seem like the tolerance would be tight enough to require a nail. You wouldn't want the error to accumulate from tree to tree, but if any given tree was 0.25 ft off the grid will anyone care? Maybe a paint spot would do?

Wendell's suggestion of staking the edges and some other reference points sounds pretty good, but for something this size you will probably need several rows and columns staked besides the edges.

Is my estimate right that it is around 140 acres?

Lay out a 200 foot grid using 48" lath, take care to set them plumb in both directions. Use the lath to hold line and the zero end of a tape and mark or plant the grid, with that you can plant the insides using a 200 foot rag tape or marked wire. When setting half mile rows for popular orchards we set the end points, occupied one end and set inter-visable lath along the lines and let the planters eyeball themselves in using those lath, they measured the distances between trees themselves, did hundreds of acres that way. Yep, we rode and carried bundles of lath on 4 wheelers.
jud

I would think a 100 foot grid would work pretty good. Should keep things straight, and planters can come along behind you, with stakes or guide poles to plant the trees using a 100 foot tape.

Depending on the size of your field and my rough math, that would be about 620 stakes for the 100 foot grid points.

Small Trees

Those "trees" seem awful close together.

Layed out a pecan orchard in 1973 on old hwy. 66 in Luther, Ok.
(35 40' 01" - 97 11' 41")

Seems to me the rows were 60' or 70' apart. Every other column was 'staggered' 1/2 way. We used flagged 16" stakes. The guys planting the trees did just fine. I remember driving by once while they were working and they had a tape out replacing a few stakes that got "runtoafer".

A man could go blind and go nuts standing out in the middle of all that.

I had to do a similar project to yours although not anywhere as large. I borrowed the machine used to paint the baseball/softball lines from the local private school. It has four wheel and sprays paint upside down.

I set 4' laths on every point using the total station along the outer edges and in the middle in both directions. At anyone point I could see two stakes in both directions and simply walked along eyeing the position and hit the trigger which sprayed a spot of paint.

I'd probably talk to the folks at John Deere or Topcon or similar that have already come up with planting and ag management solutions. It'd make sense to put a sensor on the planting auger for most efficient use of time and effort. Might as well mark the spots with the hole the tree goes in.

I getting ready to do this for about 12,000 apple trees for a friend at his existing orchard. He bought a couple hundred acres to add. His spacing is 21' between rows and 9' between trees. When they plant, the tractor is plulling a sub-soiler to open the ground, hooked behind is the tree planter with a guy that sets the tree in place, and them another implement that closes the ground. They only stop to pile on more trees.

I'm setting pairs of stakes 150' apart at the at the ends of the rows and high spots so he can stay lined up in the tractor. Then I'm setting pairs of stakes 50' apart on 99' intervals so the guy setting the trees can keep the spacing consistent. The planter has a rope with a painted weight at 9' and 18' to help keep spacing as well.

When they're done, believe me, a looks perfect enough. Plus keeping the trees spaced evenly helps with spraying, pruning, etc.

Set all around the perimeter, then "X" as much as needed.

Or would it work better to do a specific offset so that the planters do not have to deal with any stakes being in their path?

All sorts of possibilities.

Many years ago, field corn was planted with what they called a checkrow planter. A special wire with little trigger attachments was strung as straight as possible from one end of the field to the other. The corn planter machine was then pulled along the wire such that everytime one of the "triggers" passed through a receiver mechanism on the planter a seed ( or several) would be dropped into a small trench that was opened by the front part of the planter and covered by the rear part. The wire would then be moved sideways the same distance as the distance between "triggers" and the planter pulled along it as before. Hence all seeds were placed so that they were equidistant in the cardinal directions. The cultivation could then be performed, say, north and south one time, then east and west the next time. Thus weeds could be removed in all directions from the seeds. If the width of the cultivator could be adjusted, it would be possible to cultivate diagonally as well.

GPS And A Quad Is Called For

Since the trees will be planted in a clear area there is no impediment to using GPS. I would lay out a 200' grid with stakes using GPS. Then take at least 5 200'+ lengths of rope, with a loop on one end and a knot every 10'. Tree hole digger just stretches out the rope from the starting end. In one direction a stake is placed at every other knot, then the rope is stretched the other way for the tree holes. They are not planting much more than 1,000 trees a day at a rate of 2 a minute, 218 trees per acre, 5 acres a day, 142 acres total.

Paul in PA

have you thought of a tractor fitted with a GPS.
I just finished an irrigation setout - sprinklers 12.9m X 9m grid and that was tedious work for the blokes doing the work.

They ran the line for the excavation trenches with a GPS contolled tractor trailing a tine, and that worked well once they got the alignment right.
It produced row after offset row and it was accurate.

I just setup the alignment of each row and the start of each cross row and they did the rest.

Last August, my wife and I circumnavigated Lake Michigan by car.
In northeast Wisconsin, she got tired of me saying "I wonder how those orchards were laid out."

I'm with Richard...

A tractor with RTK autosteer and something on the back to make a mark, could lay it out as fast as you could drive. Just go both directions.

Or, if they are using an auger, put the auger on that tractor and not lay out anything. Probably be easier to lay it out first, would be hard to maneuver the tractor so the auger was right just using a monitor.

I've done a few of these, but not to the extent that you are talking about. We used pin flags at the tree locations. We placed a flag at every other tree point on every other row. Then went back and pulled a tape between the marked points and split the difference to fill in the blanks. Hope your ground is flat, ours was in the hills. 44°25'32.37" N 122°35'31.32" W

Thanks for the feedback!

I will check around for the ag stuff.

I don't have any GPS so would have to rent that.

I have the old school stuff like total station.

Luke

I have done this for myself. it wasn't fruit trees but never the less trees, hardwoods and conifurs. 15,000 a year for 5 years

so my first question is are these hand planted or machine/tractor? if machine planted with a tractor like mine where i used a small pvc pipe 15 foot long, for my row spacing. for my tree spacing i had to figure out and get a system going with the tractor driver and person on the planter, we had to adjust a few trees here and there but it saved a ton of layout work.