How should chestnuts be planted and managed to achieve a high yield?
How can chestnuts be made to yield heavily? Please explain the methods. To make the chestnut trees you plant yield heavily, you can refer to the following methods: 1. Close planting. Reasonable close planting can not only increase early yields and obtain economic benefits as quickly as possible, but also facilitate intensive management of the orchard. Planting density: the spacing between plants and rows is generally 2m x 4m, 3m x 4...
How can chestnuts be made to yield heavily? Please explain the methods.
To make the chestnut trees you plant yield heavily, you can refer to the following methods:
1. Close planting
Reasonable close planting can not only increase early yields and obtain economic benefits as quickly as possible, but also facilitate intensive management of the orchard. Planting density: the spacing between plants and rows is generally 2m x 4m, 3m x 4m or 3m x 5m; the specific density should be determined by the characteristics of the rootstock, the characteristics of the scion or the site conditions. Within 6 years after planting, the investment in establishing the orchard can be recovered. On hillsides, fish-scale pits or level trenches can be dug along the contour lines as planting holes (trenches); on flat land, planting trenches are dug according to the row spacing, 1m deep and 1m wide, with the bottom layer filled with a mixture of topsoil and organic fertilizer, filled to about 70-80% full, with the remaining space left for storing rain and snow; after weathering and decomposition, plant the grown seedlings in spring.
2. Soil, fertilizer and water management
Chestnut is a deep-rooted plant with strong drought tolerance and tolerance to poor soil. Generally, water is applied thoroughly in the planting hole only at planting time, and no further watering is needed after it survives. On the basis of applying base fertilizer in autumn each year, chestnut trees are topdressed 2-3 times during the growing season. The amount of base fertilizer applied in autumn is 100 kg of organic fertilizer per tree, together with a small amount of chemical fertilizer. It can be broadcast over the whole orchard in combination with deep plowing of the orchard (when fertilizer is sufficient), or applied in ring-shaped trenches or radial trenches. Topdressing can be carried out before bud break, at flowering and during the rapid fruit growth period. It can be applied in trenches or holes, with 0.5-0.6 kg of urea or compound fertilizer per tree, or sprayed on the leaves with a 0.3% urea solution; at flowering, combined with a 0.1%-0.2% boron fertilizer solution, the fruit-setting rate can be increased by 8%-10%.
3. Training and pruning
For young trees, the main focus is on developing the tree form. The principles of "light rather than heavy, less thinning and no heading back, with winter pruning as a supplement" should be grasped to accelerate the expansion of the canopy, increase the number of effective branches, and achieve early fruiting and early high yield. Generally, excessively dense branches in the inner canopy, water sprouts and thin weak branches are thinned out, while strong branches are retained to be trained into scaffold branches, branch groups or fruiting mother branches, and the angles and proportions of the above types of branches should be adjusted well. Individual overly long shoots should also be appropriately cut back to facilitate shaping and promote effective branching. The extension branches of the scaffold branches can be left unpruned for one year and cut back in the second year.
After entering the fruiting stage, the main focus should be on maintaining a vigorous tree vigor and prolonging the fruiting period (especially the full fruiting period), concentrating effective nutrients to maintain vigorous tree vigor, and paying attention to selecting and retaining strong branches in the inner canopy to train as fruiting mother branches, so as to achieve three-dimensional fruiting throughout the canopy and achieve the goal of high and stable yield.
For fruiting trees that grow too vigorously, more branches should be appropriately retained and fewer cut back, so as to disperse the tree's nutrients and moderate the growth vigor. Strong fruiting mother branches should be lightly pruned in appropriate amounts, with less renewal pruning and more leaving unpruned; 3-5 branches can be retained on each 2-year-old branch. After a moderate fruiting mother branch produces a fruiting branch and bears fruit in that year, it is not easy for it to form a new fruiting mother branch, so it should be appropriately thinned. For fruiting mother branches with extremely poor fruit-setting ability that have already shown senescence, they should be thinned or renewal-pruned in time to promote new branches and cultivate them into fruiting mother branches. As for the treatment of fruiting branches, before the canopies meet, about 13-15 fruiting branches can be retained per square meter of canopy projection area; after the canopies meet, about 9-12 fruiting branches can be retained, with a branch spacing of about 30cm-40cm.
4. Pest and disease control
1. Plow the soil in early spring, which can kill many larvae overwintering in the soil, such as the chestnut weevil and the twig-pruning weevil.
2. Chemical control combined with scraping the bark, and using a dichlorvos kerosene solution (1-1.5 kg of kerosene plus 50 g of 80% dichlorvos), or applying a 10-fold dilution of 40% dimethoate emulsion or a 20-fold dilution of 50% monocrotophos emulsion to the trunk, can kill overwintering pests on the trunk, such as the chestnut clearwing moth and the chestnut spider mite; wrapping with plastic film after trunk application gives a better effect.
3. From late April to early May, promptly prune off the galls on the twigs and leaves of new shoots and destroy them centrally, which can reduce the population density of the chestnut gall wasp and effectively control the damage caused by the chestnut gall wasp.
4. From late May to September, depending on the occurrence situation, a 6000-fold dilution of 2.5% deltamethrin, or a 1000-2000-fold dilution of 75% phoxim, an 800-1000-fold dilution of 90% trichlorfon, or a 3000-fold dilution of 50% monocrotophos can be used to spray the canopy 2-4 times, which can kill large numbers of adults of various pests.
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