Rejuvinating Orchard for Replant

[Leewd]

Hola! I've owned an avocado orchard for 11 years but mostly chipped at it on the weekends. Got laid off from my job down the hill, so it's my only source of income. To make this orchard profitable, I am trying to clear an old section of non-productive trees and replant with a new avocado variety. Herein lies my problem. I'm grown up a suburbanite and have very little knowledge of AG. I own a John Deere 3320 tractor with front loader, gannon box, Bearcat chipper and a posthole digger. I've been using it to dig out and push over the trees but now what. I want to level the land, do a deep ripping to dig up the old irrigation pipe and loosen the subsoil, trench for new pipe and then put in a cover crop to tame the weeds before I drill and plant new trees next spring. Common culture is to plant the trees on a mound for better drainage although I don't think I need to with the DG soil I have (sandy loam).

How do I do this, what implements do I need and what order to I use them in?
* Rake the surface to remove weeds/roots/large pcs.
* Rip 12" - 18" deep
* Disc
* Rake to break up clods?
* Form mounded rows
* Trench and install irrigation piping
* Seed drill or broadcast and rake cover crop?
* Drill holes for new trees
Thanks in advance

 

[Kyle_in_Tex]

Are you going to try and find a new job? I don't know much about avocado trees except that I love the purplish rough skin type and I hate the smooth greenish skin type. How long until the newly planted trees bear fruit you can sell?

It takes a bunch of HP to rip 12-18" deep. Multiple passes can help.

Had a friend of a friend who had a big tree in his yard in San Jose. He would tell people at work to come pick them up by the bushel. I think they said the tree was maybe 3 stories tall???

 

[bruceha2000]

Are you going to try and find a new job? I don't know much about avocado trees except that I love the purplish rough skin type and I hate the smooth greenish skin type. How long until the newly planted trees bear fruit you can sell?
Had a friend of a friend who had a big tree in his yard in San Jose. He would tell people at work to come pick them up by the bushel. I think they said the tree was maybe 3 stories tall???

Grafted trees, a couple of years. Seedlings, 8+ years. But that isn't a "bushels to the Farmer's market quantities" time frame.

And yes they can get quite tall. There was one in the neighbor's back yard at the house I grew up in. That sucker was easily 40 ft+. Great shade tree and anything on our side of the fence was ours to pick. I don't remember when it WASN'T there and we moved in in 1959. Of course, being only 3 at the time, I don't recall how big it was then. Still producing when I was last there, Mom died in 2003.