How I Care for My Orchard After Harvest

With every harvest, I learn something new that helps me do better the following season. Hopefully, next year's fruit will be even higher in quality. I'm also planting a wider variety of crops, so before long the farm will be producing a much more diverse range of fresh produce.

Now that the orange season is over, it's time to focus on caring for both the trees and the soil in preparation for next year's harvest.

Pruning

After harvesting, I prune the trees during dry weather, removing any dead branches and selectively cutting others to improve the canopy structure.

A well-shaped canopy allows sunlight to reach more leaves, helping the tree photosynthesise efficiently. It also improves airflow through the orchard, reducing the risk of pests and diseases. Pruning encourages the trees to produce new growth while also supporting the development of a stronger root system.

Fertilizing

The period immediately after harvest is one of the most critical stages in the tree's annual cycle. By this point, the tree has invested a tremendous amount of energy into producing fruit and seeds—its next generation.

In nature, ripe fruit falls to the ground and eventually decomposes, returning its nutrients to the tree. Alternatively, animals eat the fruit and recycle those nutrients through their manure.

In agriculture, however, we harvest the fruit and take it away to sell. That means we're also removing nutrients from the orchard ecosystem. To keep the system healthy, those nutrients need to be replaced so the trees can recover and prepare for another growing season.

Of course, some minerals are continually released from the soil and underlying rock through microbial activity and natural weathering. However, this process—known as the weathering rate—is usually too slow to replace all the nutrients exported through harvested fruit.

This season, I applied the following:

1. Rice Husk Biochar Soaked in Fish Hydrolysate

I apply rice husk biochar to improve the soil's nutrient-holding capacity and gradually build soil organic matter over time.

Before applying it, I "activate" the biochar by soaking it for 24 hours in a mixture of fish hydrolysate and water at a ratio of 1:10. The biochar absorbs the nutrients from the fish hydrolysate, stores them, and then slowly releases them back into the soil for the trees to use.

If I have enough well-composted animal manure available, I usually mix it with the biochar before application. This time, however, I didn't have enough compost for the entire orchard, so I used only the activated biochar.

2. Bone Meal

I apply around 500 grams of fish bone meal around each tree to provide phosphorus (P) and calcium (Ca), allowing these nutrients to become available gradually over several months.

By spring, when the trees begin developing their flower buds, the phosphorus is already available to support flowering. I had already applied agricultural lime earlier this year, so there was no need to add more during this application.

Harvesting Biomass

Instead of making compost separately, I grow biomass-producing plants between my fruit trees and regularly prune them, laying the cut material directly around the base of the trees as mulch.

As this biomass naturally decomposes, it feeds both the soil and the trees while steadily increasing the soil's organic matter over time.