A mature olive tree will drop most of its crop one year and load up the next. Growers call it alternate bearing, and for a long time they blamed the tree. I have stood in enough of these groves to…
A pistachio orchard is the highest-value drip decision most arid-climate growers will ever make, and the money in it has almost nothing to do with how much water you apply. It is about when. Water a pistachio tree generously in…
Mango trees are funny about water. Give them too much at the wrong moment and they put out a flush of leaves instead of flowers. Give them too little a month later and the young fruit drops off the panicle…
I spent a few days last summer walking almond orchards in California’s Central Valley with a grower who’d just ripped out 40 acres of micro-sprinklers and converted to double-line drip. His reason was simple: the sprinklers were wetting the trunk…
