Gadenin日本語Get the appFour jobs decide the year
An almond will survive years of neglect, but four jobs, each with a narrow window, account for nearly all the difference between a tree that gives you nuts and one that gives you a fine display of blossom and nothing else. Everything else on the calendar is support work.
The first is the rain cover, up before midwinter and down when the leaves are fully out, which is the only reliable defense against peach leaf curl. The second is watching the frost through flowering, because an almond opens its flowers earlier than anything else in the garden and open flowers die at around 28F (minus 2C). The third is pruning, which happens in the growing season and never in winter, because winter cuts let in canker and silver leaf. The fourth is drying the tree off from the moment hull split begins, which prevents hull rot and gets the crop in sound.
If time is short, do those four and let the rest slide. Skip any one of them and no amount of feeding or watering makes up for it.
The year, season by season
The table is written in seasons rather than months so that it reads the same in either hemisphere. Anchor it to your own tree by the buds: the moment the flower buds visibly swell and show color is the start of the working year, and everything before that is winter preparation. On an almond that moment comes remarkably early, so do not use the neighboring plums and apples as your guide.
| Season | Main jobs | The decision to make |
|---|---|---|
| Early winter, dormant | Put the rain cover up. Strip any nuts still hanging on the tree and clear every fallen nut, hull and leaf from the ground. Check ties and stakes. | Whether the cover clears the branches everywhere; a bud touching wet plastic is still infected |
| Late winter | Do nothing to the wood. Mulch 2 to 3 inches (5 to 8 cm) deep over the root area, kept a hand's width off the trunk. Check the cover after wind. | Resist all pruning; every cut made now is an invitation to canker |
| Bud swell to flowering, very early spring | Watch the forecast nightly. Row cover the tree on frosty nights and remove it in the morning. Hand-pollinate under a cover, carrying pollen between varieties. | Whether frost is forecast during bloom; this is the single most common reason for no crop |
| After petal fall, leaves opening | Take the cover down once the leaves are fully out and the weather has settled. Apply a balanced feed as growth starts. Watch for aphids on soft tips. | When to remove the cover: too early risks late infection, too late draws the tree soft |
| Spring, tree in leaf | Prune: dead, damaged, crossing and inward wood, plus water shoots. Shorten leaders on young trees only. Begin regular deep watering. | How much to take; an almond fruits on spurs, so remove about a fifth of the old wood, not more |
| Early summer, nuts sizing | Rub out badly placed new shoots while they are soft. Water deeply and evenly. Keep the ground under the tree clear and mulched. | Whether the soil is swinging wet to dry; uneven water at this stage costs kernel size |
| Midsummer to hull split | Stop feeding nitrogen. Watch the highest hulls for the first crack along the seam. Taper the watering off as the split begins. | The moment hull split starts; watering past it causes hull rot and dead shoot tips |
| Hull split to harvest | Wait until about three quarters of hulls are open, then lay sheets and shake the tree limb by limb. Hull the same day and set the nuts out to dry. | Whether to harvest early because rain is forecast; a sound early crop beats a rained-on ripe one |
| After harvest | Prune out the oldest spur systems back to young wood and cut out any shoots killed by hull rot. Clear every nut from tree and ground. | Which young shoot to keep on each limb; that choice builds the spurs for the next four years |
| Autumn, leaf fall | Rake up and remove all fallen leaves, hulls and nuts. Give a low-nitrogen or potash-rich feed. Do not cut wood. | Whether the ground is genuinely clear; overwintering pests live in what you leave lying |
Water and feed: where it usually goes wrong
An almond in the ground needs far less water than most fruit trees and resents wet roots, but there is a window where it does need a steady supply: from the nuts starting to size in late spring through to the beginning of hull split. Swings from dry soil to a heavy soak during that period give you small poorly filled kernels. Water deeply and infrequently, a long slow soak wetting the soil to 12 inches (30 cm) once a week in dry weather, rather than a daily sprinkle that keeps the roots at the surface.
Then, at hull split, do the opposite and mean it. Cut the water right back. Hulls that stay wet do not split cleanly, and the sugary interior of a damp opening hull is where hull rot starts, which kills the shoot behind it and costs you spurs for years. A dry finish is what an almond is built for.
On feeding, the mistake is nitrogen late in the season. Nitrogen in spring is right and builds the leaf area that fills the kernels. Nitrogen after midsummer pushes soft growth that will not harden before the cold, and soft unripened wood is exactly what canker, winter damage and hull rot take advantage of. From late summer onwards, switch to potash if you feed at all.
A tree in a large pot is a different case. Its compost dries out in a day of heat and needs checking daily through summer, with a liquid feed every fortnight from bud break until the nuts have sized. Stop both the feed and most of the water at hull split, exactly as you would in the ground.
The early bloom is the thing you plan the year around
Almonds flower before almost anything else, often when the weather is still genuinely wintry, and that single fact drives most of the calendar. It is why frost is the usual reason for no crop, why insects are scarce when the flowers need them, and why the pollination partner has to overlap properly rather than approximately.
You cannot move the bloom, so you prepare for it. Have the row cover where you can reach it in the dark before the buds show color, not after. Two layers thrown over a small tree or over the face of a fan in the late afternoon, and taken off in the morning so insects can reach the flowers, will hold a marginal night. Watering the root area in the afternoon before a frosty night helps a little too, because wet soil stores and releases more heat overnight than dry soil.
Have the brush ready as well. In a cold wet bloom the insects will not fly, and ten minutes with a soft brush every other day, moving pollen deliberately between two different varieties, is the difference between a crop and nothing.
The five dates worth writing down every year
Keep a short record and this calendar stops being generic advice and becomes your own tree's timetable. Five dates carry nearly all the value: the date the first flowers opened on each tree, the date the last petals fell, the date you first saw a hull split, the date you harvested, and the date you first saw leaf curl or any other disease.
The two flowering dates on each tree, side by side, tell you whether your pollination pair genuinely overlaps, which is the first thing to check when a tree flowers well and sets nothing. First hull split, over two or three years, tells you how long you have between the first crack and the day you commit to harvesting. And the first sign of disease, counted backwards, tells you how early the rain cover really has to go up in your garden rather than in a textbook.
Add the position and variety of each tree and one line on how the crop turned out, and after three seasons you can tell whether a poor year was frost, pollination, hull rot or simply picking late. Without those notes, every bad year looks identical and gets blamed on the weather.