Hi Karl, you did the right thing so don’t feel bad about it. Not pruning young trees is a huge mistake, removing 80% is no problem, they will have foliage and branches back in the right place in no time. Trees don’t come out of the nursery knowing how to grow, they need training. Keep up the good work
Hello. I'm Stephen from Kenya. I'm very happy to learn more about macadamia pruning. I have one acre of macadamia young trees and now I have learnt much about how the young trees are supposed to be pruned. Thanks.
Hi Stephen. Its good to hear from you. Do macadamia farmers in Kenya harvest nuts by hand? I have read nuts are collected in South African orchards by hand. In Australia labour is expensive so nuts are usually collected by machines.This difference would affect how one prunes and shapes trees. From what I have been told and based on limited experience, if limbs ars close to ground level machinery will not effectively operate around the trees. I would prefer to keep the lower limbs and have a compact tree but advice is this is a bad idea. Good luck with your macadamia orchard
Sounds good Stephen. Some orchards are like that here too, not very big and nuts collected by hand. I think we will probably buy a little harvester that attaches to a tractor. It should not cost too much money compared to the time taken picking the nuts up.
@@kabuchi254 hi Stephen. Recently we bought a tractor. Its a big investment for us. It is making work easier for us. Do any farmers where you are have or are thinking of buying a tractor for their farm?
Sorry about the ads appearing on this and other videos on this channel. TH-cam changed their terms of service and they now have the right to put ads on all videos posted on TH-cam even if the channel owner doesn't want them. Its really annoying and I don't make a dollar out of it.
If there is root stock to graft to then yes. We will try to graft some trees maybe in two years time. We had a few trees die above the graft. They are coming back as root stock. The nursery we buy most of our trees from will come out and cincture some branches we will be pruning for their own grafting and show us how to graft. Cincturing is basically ring barking a branch. Horticulturalists do it to so the branch gets full of sap and sugars so will be full of energy when its grafted to the root stock. Here is a video on cincturing. th-cam.com/video/kFqW2SAL9vg/w-d-xo.html
I just let mine go totally And it looks great ..produces heaps of nuts ...as long as I give it a little white oil on flowering The aphids destroy the flowers
Yeah I regularly see the tree at the end of this video. It does not receive any attention or care, is on the side of a suburban road and next to a concrete driveway. It looks to be doing fine and drops plenty of nuts. Some maca trees are just good.
@@Karl_Degraa thankfully I'm lucky then I can't get citrus to grow properly despite a decade of trying And the Macca was unstoppable in the same soil ..its clay largely. I see the tree at the end of the video isn't grafted it's got a prickly leaf edge
Its a learning experience for us. Looking at the first video I took a few months after the trees were planted then yes some of the trees could have been pruned back then as they were already starting to spread out like a bush. However we did not know that much about it. One of the main reasons I started putting up videos is to get feedback like this. So thanks. Its appreciated. We do not get to spend much time on the farm as we live in the city. When we get up there we have a fair bit to do, mainly planting trees so do not have a huge amount of time for maintaining the trees already planted. However planting should be almost finished next year so more time can be spent pruning, mulching, spraying and fertilizing the trees we have planted.
They are all grafted. Almost all macadamia orchards in Australia have grafted trees. The most common root stock comes from a nut of the H2 variety. A few of my trees have died above the graft. I plan to try to graft them myself when I have time. and the root stock is better established. There is one tree I plant to try it out on, using H246 or H849 as the scion.
Karl, I’m not sure what makes you braver - cutting your trees or braving the current weather! Surely there must be some trade-off between overall plant growth and shaping. Did your expert prescribe an age or tree height at which this pruning should be performed?
The decision to prune I think is the right one. Based on the comments in this video the consensus is "earlier the better" th-cam.com/video/H_8nl-SOr_4/w-d-xo.html I feel the pain as it is a waste to prune away two thirds or even three quarters of a tree and lose a year and a half of growth so the tree can have the right structure. I guess its better to get the trees growing the best way as early as possible, removing unwanted growth. The grower was confident to prune them as we are doing them. He said he bought his place back in 2006 and has around 2000 trees. When he bought the farm half had just been planted. He said his biggest mistakes was not pruning the little trees early and also not regularly fertilizing them. We are back in Sydney now but I've been able to see the pruned trees via a webcam till yesterday, overlooking part of the orchard. The pruned trees look alright and I guess this wet weather helps them to recover. We also gave the trees a handful of a fertilizer mixture to give them a boost. The weather. Yeah its been extreme there. My mum says the trees are doing alright. Down the bottom the trees will be sitting in water but they seem to be able to handle this. Hopefully the rain will ease off and the water will drain away from them. It takes around a day for this to happen. Power was lost there there and the Internet has failed too. They are cut off from town. A weather station in town measured 300mm of rain fell on Thursday and another fell on Friday. That is a huge amount of rain.
They are looking good, you shouldn’t have as many problems with wind now but allocasurina litteralis (think I spelled that correctly, or black sheoak) makes a nice windbreak tree. Grows to over 6foot in a year. I agree with the fertiliser comments. When I first started I planted out 50trees before I had my soil tested and they sat for months and did next to nothing. When you prune the tree back the trunk really thickens up and builds the root system. Now I fertilise every 3 months, feb, May,August and December with a compost application in December. Only problem being really is it also makes the grass and weeds grow around the tree hence the herbicide. Small trees just planted get it too, usually on the next run.
We are now regularly fertilising the trees. However it seems to give the grass a boost more than the tree! We are back there next month. I’ m going to try a few actions in regards to grass around the trees. Firstly try to make a guard for the brush cutter blade so it can’t hit a tree trunk. Secondly lay down cardboard around each tree, three or four pieces of cardboard. Thirdly lay a fair bit of wood chip mulch around each tree. The mulch we have put down is now all decomposed. It does not matter how thick we lay it down, it rots away.
Most trees in this video were planted in May 2019. This video was filmed in January 2021 I think. So the trees would have been planted around a year and a half before filming this video.
hello. I have a question and my question is on the upward curling of the leaves what may be the cause is it variety characteristic or moisture stress or probably sigustus weevil
Hi, could you give me a time in the video where you see leaves curling up? I'll look at it and give my best idea as to what causes it. However as a guess most probably a pest, more likely to be leaf miner than anything else is causing the leaves to curl. Its unlikely to be a lack of moisture as we have had a lot of rain since late last year. I do not think curling leaves is a characteristic of the H849 or H246 variety trees which most of these trees are. I do not think the sigustus weevil is present in my orchard in great numbers. It could be there and we are trying to deal with it by cutting the grass below the older trees and collecting the nuts. So most probably another insect causing the curling. We are planning to release some predator insects as a biological control next time we are on the farm. I want to place lace wing eggs around the orchard. The lace wing larvae is to all accounts a voracious predator. I want to avoid spraying pesticides as much as possible.
Most of them were planted in May 2019. So they have been in for around a year three quarters. This video shows them I think in around September 2019 a few months after they were planted. th-cam.com/video/dJScFaP36W0/w-d-xo.html Some of the trees down the bottom were planted in May 2020 so they have been in the ground for around nine or ten months. I guess its probably best to let the tree settle down for at least a year before getting into serious pruning but I really am not sure. We've only pruned around 10% of the trees so we have a lot to go. We basically pruned all of the trees planted in 2019 and a few planted in 2020
Haha, you will love the GTA 26. If there any women around when using it they will want to try it out. I think the battery is rated for around 200 cuts but I’m not sure. We bought a second battery so one charges while the other is cutting.
We planted all of ours in 8 meter rows. The varieties growing bigger we planted 4 meters between each one. We have a few hundred trees that will not grow so big. They are planted 3 meters apart. Row spacing depends on a lot of factors, primarily the size of your land and how many trees you want to have. The general rule is the smaller the spacing is, the more productive the orchard will be in the short term, and the more work there will be in the long term. If I had more land I would have planted them in 10 meter rows and 5 meters between each tree but my farm is pretty small.
All seedlings come from macadamia nuts. If you know someone with mature trees that produce nuts then you can get them. Otherwise find a nursery selling macadamia seedlings.
Hi Karl, you did the right thing so don’t feel bad about it. Not pruning young trees is a huge mistake, removing 80% is no problem, they will have foliage and branches back in the right place in no time. Trees don’t come out of the nursery knowing how to grow, they need training. Keep up the good work
Hey Tim, good to hear. Did you see the tree at the end of the video? It looks like mine may have turned out without pruning.
Karl Degraa yes I’ve seen many thousands of trees like it, not the structure you want
Hello. I'm Stephen from Kenya. I'm very happy to learn more about macadamia pruning. I have one acre of macadamia young trees and now I have learnt much about how the young trees are supposed to be pruned. Thanks.
Hi Stephen. Its good to hear from you. Do macadamia farmers in Kenya harvest nuts by hand? I have read nuts are collected in South African orchards by hand. In Australia labour is expensive so nuts are usually collected by machines.This difference would affect how one prunes and shapes trees.
From what I have been told and based on limited experience, if limbs ars close to ground level machinery will not effectively operate around the trees. I would prefer to keep the lower limbs and have a compact tree but advice is this is a bad idea.
Good luck with your macadamia orchard
@@Karl_Degraa Also here in Kenya we do hands picking. We have cheap labour and the orchard are not that large.
Sounds good Stephen. Some orchards are like that here too, not very big and nuts collected by hand. I think we will probably buy a little harvester that attaches to a tractor. It should not cost too much money compared to the time taken picking the nuts up.
@@Karl_Degraa That will be a good move. Small harvester which is efficient and it will make work easier and the cost will be low.
@@kabuchi254 hi Stephen. Recently we bought a tractor. Its a big investment for us. It is making work easier for us. Do any farmers where you are have or are thinking of buying a tractor for their farm?
Super!! You deserve a credit.
I am going to start planting mine in early 2023,so far now,we are raising seedlings. Great video. Samuel,Lira-Uganda
Good luck with it. We've just about finished planting our trees. Only doing replacement of failures now.
I agree with Tim, thats a science of agriculture
You did the right thing, I know it seemed harsh at the time. Worth it in the end.
This seems to be the consensus.
Sorry about the ads appearing on this and other videos on this channel. TH-cam changed their terms of service and they now have the right to put ads on all videos posted on TH-cam even if the channel owner doesn't want them. Its really annoying and I don't make a dollar out of it.
I'm happy. Learned alot.
Thanks man*
Very helpful.
No worries, good luck with your planting.
awesome work
đồi rốc đẹp, nhưng sao bạn không cắt ngọn tạo tán ạ?
Is it worth it to use those pruned cuttings for grafting more trees?
If there is root stock to graft to then yes. We will try to graft some trees maybe in two years time. We had a few trees die above the graft. They are coming back as root stock. The nursery we buy most of our trees from will come out and cincture some branches we will be pruning for their own grafting and show us how to graft.
Cincturing is basically ring barking a branch. Horticulturalists do it to so the branch gets full of sap and sugars so will be full of energy when its grafted to the root stock.
Here is a video on cincturing.
th-cam.com/video/kFqW2SAL9vg/w-d-xo.html
I just let mine go totally
And it looks great ..produces heaps of nuts ...as long as I give it a little white oil on flowering
The aphids destroy the flowers
Yeah I regularly see the tree at the end of this video. It does not receive any attention or care, is on the side of a suburban road and next to a concrete driveway. It looks to be doing fine and drops plenty of nuts. Some maca trees are just good.
@@Karl_Degraa thankfully I'm lucky then
I can't get citrus to grow properly despite a decade of trying
And the Macca was unstoppable in the same soil ..its clay largely.
I see the tree at the end of the video isn't grafted it's got a prickly leaf edge
you should've done this pruning at an earlier time preferably at planting time now all that growth have gone to waste.
Its a learning experience for us. Looking at the first video I took a few months after the trees were planted then yes some of the trees could have been pruned back then as they were already starting to spread out like a bush. However we did not know that much about it. One of the main reasons I started putting up videos is to get feedback like this. So thanks. Its appreciated.
We do not get to spend much time on the farm as we live in the city. When we get up there we have a fair bit to do, mainly planting trees so do not have a huge amount of time for maintaining the trees already planted. However planting should be almost finished next year so more time can be spent pruning, mulching, spraying and fertilizing the trees we have planted.
Hi good information nice video
Seedling Plants or Grafted one.. Which one is best for. Macadamia nut plantation?? Please help..
They are all grafted. Almost all macadamia orchards in Australia have grafted trees. The most common root stock comes from a nut of the H2 variety.
A few of my trees have died above the graft. I plan to try to graft them myself when I have time. and the root stock is better established. There is one tree I plant to try it out on, using H246 or H849 as the scion.
@@Karl_Degraa In India Grafted plants is so High Price.. It's not easy to farming commercially.
Karl, I’m not sure what makes you braver - cutting your trees or braving the current weather! Surely there must be some trade-off between overall plant growth and shaping. Did your expert prescribe an age or tree height at which this pruning should be performed?
The decision to prune I think is the right one. Based on the comments in this video the consensus is "earlier the better"
th-cam.com/video/H_8nl-SOr_4/w-d-xo.html
I feel the pain as it is a waste to prune away two thirds or even three quarters of a tree and lose a year and a half of growth so the tree can have the right structure. I guess its better to get the trees growing the best way as early as possible, removing unwanted growth. The grower was confident to prune them as we are doing them. He said he bought his place back in 2006 and has around 2000 trees. When he bought the farm half had just been planted. He said his biggest mistakes was not pruning the little trees early and also not regularly fertilizing them.
We are back in Sydney now but I've been able to see the pruned trees via a webcam till yesterday, overlooking part of the orchard. The pruned trees look alright and I guess this wet weather helps them to recover. We also gave the trees a handful of a fertilizer mixture to give them a boost.
The weather. Yeah its been extreme there. My mum says the trees are doing alright. Down the bottom the trees will be sitting in water but they seem to be able to handle this. Hopefully the rain will ease off and the water will drain away from them. It takes around a day for this to happen. Power was lost there there and the Internet has failed too. They are cut off from town. A weather station in town measured 300mm of rain fell on Thursday and another fell on Friday. That is a huge amount of rain.
They are looking good, you shouldn’t have as many problems with wind now but allocasurina litteralis (think I spelled that correctly, or black sheoak) makes a nice windbreak tree. Grows to over 6foot in a year.
I agree with the fertiliser comments. When I first started I planted out 50trees before I had my soil tested and they sat for months and did next to nothing. When you prune the tree back the trunk really thickens up and builds the root system.
Now I fertilise every 3 months, feb, May,August and December with a compost application in December. Only problem being really is it also makes the grass and weeds grow around the tree hence the herbicide. Small trees just planted get it too, usually on the next run.
We are now regularly fertilising the trees. However it seems to give the grass a boost more than the tree!
We are back there next month. I’ m going to try a few actions in regards to grass around the trees.
Firstly try to make a guard for the brush cutter blade so it can’t hit a tree trunk.
Secondly lay down cardboard around each tree, three or four pieces of cardboard.
Thirdly lay a fair bit of wood chip mulch around each tree. The mulch we have put down is now all decomposed. It does not matter how thick we lay it down, it rots away.
@@kdegraa that's great..what do you mean by cardboard and what will be it's advantage..??
@@mattmacadamia1336 is the same pruning skill apply on avocado..??
I mean as u prune back, will root network increase and what's science behind it..?
macadamia ở đâu vậy ạ,?
These trees are how many years?
Most trees in this video were planted in May 2019. This video was filmed in January 2021 I think. So the trees would have been planted around a year and a half before filming this video.
hello. I have a question and my question is on the upward curling of the leaves what may be the cause is it variety characteristic or moisture stress or probably sigustus weevil
Hi, could you give me a time in the video where you see leaves curling up? I'll look at it and give my best idea as to what causes it. However as a guess most probably a pest, more likely to be leaf miner than anything else is causing the leaves to curl.
Its unlikely to be a lack of moisture as we have had a lot of rain since late last year. I do not think curling leaves is a characteristic of the H849 or H246 variety trees which most of these trees are. I do not think the sigustus weevil is present in my orchard in great numbers. It could be there and we are trying to deal with it by cutting the grass below the older trees and collecting the nuts. So most probably another insect causing the curling.
We are planning to release some predator insects as a biological control next time we are on the farm. I want to place lace wing eggs around the orchard. The lace wing larvae is to all accounts a voracious predator. I want to avoid spraying pesticides as much as possible.
When were these trees planted?
Most of them were planted in May 2019. So they have been in for around a year three quarters. This video shows them I think in around September 2019 a few months after they were planted.
th-cam.com/video/dJScFaP36W0/w-d-xo.html
Some of the trees down the bottom were planted in May 2020 so they have been in the ground for around nine or ten months. I guess its probably best to let the tree settle down for at least a year before getting into serious pruning but I really am not sure. We've only pruned around 10% of the trees so we have a lot to go. We basically pruned all of the trees planted in 2019 and a few planted in 2020
Ok. Maybe 6months after planting before they get a summer flush on
How many trees can your GTA do on one battery? I have just ordered one.
Haha, you will love the GTA 26. If there any women around when using it they will want to try it out.
I think the battery is rated for around 200 cuts but I’m not sure. We bought a second battery so one charges while the other is cutting.
mình kết bạn chia sẻ kinh nghiệm nhé
I dnt prune my trees.n they r now blossoming n r about 4 years old.when shud i prune them
What is that plant spacing ?What's the best spacing then?
We planted all of ours in 8 meter rows. The varieties growing bigger we planted 4 meters between each one. We have a few hundred trees that will not grow so big. They are planted 3 meters apart. Row spacing depends on a lot of factors, primarily the size of your land and how many trees you want to have. The general rule is the smaller the spacing is, the more productive the orchard will be in the short term, and the more work there will be in the long term. If I had more land I would have planted them in 10 meter rows and 5 meters between each tree but my farm is pretty small.
Tôi muốn để cành ở thấp hơn. Liệu có ổn không?
Lower branches could get in the way of machinery like mowers and harvesters.
Can I get macadamia seedlings
All seedlings come from macadamia nuts. If you know someone with mature trees that produce nuts then you can get them. Otherwise find a nursery selling macadamia seedlings.