Plant an orchid at home

Wouldn’t it be convenient to have a variety of fruits you harvest every season in your home garden? If you love fruits and would also love to have a home that looks good, then you should plant an orchard. It would also help keep your children at home.

For this reason, Ronald Mukiibi, a gardener and member of Mukwano Tree planting Association on Mukwano Road, explains how you can go about planting orchards at home:
For the location, you can demarcate a corner of your compound and plant your orchard there, or you can scatter your fruit trees all over your compound.

Types of fruit trees
You can plant tangerines, apples, strawberries, cocoa (which can also provide a small shade. It is difficult for it to get spoilt. It is a strong fruit tree), mangoes and oranges, among others. Strawberries don’t grow on trees. They are ground covers.

Although coconut palms are good, Mukiibi says they are not recommended for homes. “They grow into big, tall trees and should you get tired of them, they will cost you a lot to get rid of them. They don’t have many fibrous roots, but in the course of cutting them down, they could damage your wall, house or even the neighbour’s property.

Don’t space fruit trees too wide. For example tangerines, oranges and mangoes need a spacing of two metres square. Plant others like strawberry in pots and basins and place them near your house because it is a creeper and a ground cover fruit.
Plant others that grow taller about two-and-a-half metres square from each other and from the walls. If you plant them near walls, they will not produce good fruit.

Maintenance

If your soil is fertile, use only supergrow, a liquid fertilizer for the leaves. Otherwise you can also apply cow dung to the soil.

Keep weeding and pruning a bit, for the trees to produce good fruit. If you have just planted, water them twice a day – morning and evening, for eight months. After that, water them four times a week, at any time of the day, because they will have established themselves, with new roots through which they can feed.

Do this until you start eating the fruits. Grafted trees usually take about two years to produce fruit, while local species usually take about four years.

Weed at least one-and-a-half metres around your fruit trees. Then apply fertiliser to keep your leaves and flowers strong. Use a hose pipe to water your trees because it will be easier to water leaves that are high up.

Spray your plants the day you plant them. If they turn blackish and attract flies, spray them once a week for a year. You can apply Dudu Cyper or Ambush. A litre of Dudu Cyper goes for Shs50,000 and a litre of Ambush goes for Shs60,000 in shops in Kampala.

For a big compound of about an acre, with a house on it, planting an orchard could cost you about Shs2m. And if you take good care of that orchard, it can last about 50 years.
So, for Shs2m, you can take care of your family’s fruit needs.