Walnut Tree Spacing and Orchard Layout Design

Designing a walnut orchard is a critical process that significantly impacts its long-term productivity. Several key factors influence how quickly an orchard begins production and its overall yield potential. These factors can be divided into two categories: those that cannot be changed after planting and those that can be adjusted throughout the orchard's life.

Unchangeable Factors After Planting:

• Climate of your land
• Soil characteristics (soil type such as clay soil, etc.)
• Tree spacing

In this article we will dive into how you can optimize tree spacing to maximize the yield from your orchard.

Tree spacing

Our goal in the orchard is to harvest more walnuts. Land is expensive but walnut trees are cheaper. Therefore, if we can plant the maximum number of trees we can to our land, we can maximize our harvest and profits. But planting the trees way too close to each other can be bad for harvest. Researchers have found a connection between how much sunlight walnut trees catch and how many nuts they produce. If a tree gets more sunlight, it produces more walnuts. Therefore, we need to find a balance between too close and too far. Let's look at what the optimal spacing is for walnut trees.

Many years ago, traditional planting was popular where growers planted trees by leaving 8 meters space both between trees and between the rows. In recent years "Hedgerow" became very popular. Hedgerow planting is a special way of placing walnut trees in an orchard. In this method, we plant the trees in long, straight lines. The interesting part is how close together the trees are placed in these lines. They're much closer to each other than in traditional orchards. Instead of 8 meters, we place them 4.5 meters apart. We leave 6.5 meters between rows for ourselves and our farm machinery and tractors to move freely in the rows. This spacing allows the trees to grow big enough to maximize our total harvest from our orchard.

Advantages of Hedgerow Plantings:

• Earlier yields
• Tree losses have less impact on the orchard
• Easier pruning using machines to trim the trees instead of pruning each tree by hand
• Faster return on investment