The Chilkat Valley Orchard Project is drawing to a close. The two year program, funded by a USDA grant, focused on spreading the knowledge required to tend an orchard in our local climate.
Prompted by his fifteen year failure at growing fruit trees in his backyard, resident Burl Sheldon teamed up with Chilkat Valley Historical Society president Sue Chasen to write the grant in the winter of 2020. Due to the COVID outbreak, the project took form as an online class, offered at intervals over the last two years. Sheldon cites bears, moose, voles and snow as major hindrances to getting trees to the point where they bear fruits, all these obstacles and more were addressed during the course.
They received help and a wealth of knowledge from Ed Buyarski, from Juneau, who has 40 years of experience with fruit trees in Alaska, and Rob Bishop, who tends 600 apple trees at his home in Hoonah.
The culmination of the effort is a 28 page grower’s guide, mainly written by Blythe Carter, a Haines orchardist. Carter has been growing a variety of fruit trees on her Comstock road property.
She started seven years ago and now tends to over a hundred trees, producing mainly apples, plums, sweet cherries, sour cherries, some pears, and she has a couple peach trees growing in a partial greenhouse. She enjoyed putting down what she has learned along the way into the booklet.
She has recommendations for beginners
“The easiest ones to take care of are probably apples, you plant them, and still have to do some maintenance but you don’t have to put a ton of netting to protect from birds, I love sweet cherries too, if you are in the townsite, you can get fruit off of them within a year”
And warns that it can be a lot of work,
“Most intense is in the spring, and it’s actually quite intense during the winter if you have a lot of snow, you have to go out and dig the snow off and help them survive so they don’t get their limbs broken off, but this time of year it’s pretty intense too because they have to be readied for winter. Yeah, there is always something going on.”
It is a labor of love:
“I in particular always had a fascination with fruit trees, I think I was a fruit bat in a previous life”
The next step for the Chilkat Valley Orchard Project will be to start an experimental orchard, there are talks of planting an acre at the Henderson farm on Allen road.
All their material can be found at the Chilkat Valley Orchard Project website.