When to Spread Compost Under Fruit Trees

Question from Mark:
I have many young fruit trees , many types of citrus (orange, blood orange, lemon, lime) AND pomegranit, Avacado, fig, apple and stone fruits (nectarine and peach are both fruiting)… I received some very high quality compost yesterday as gift – , is it okay to put on the trees that are NOT flowering or fruiting? Or too late to do this? Based on what i read in your book, it seems like it may be too late for now…. ?

Answer from Pat:
Compost is not the same as fertilizer. Compost is organic soil amendment. Adding compost to soil gradually builds up its humus content. Good, well-aged compost teams with beneficial organisms. As these organisms rot further in the soil they release natural nitrogen, but this is a long, slow process. it will not result in triggering growth at the wrong time of year. The conventional time to mulch fruit trees is in fall or winter, after pruning and dormant spraying and cleaning up the ground. Nonetheless, it’s fine to spread compost on the ground as mulch under the canopy of fruit trees at any time of year. I once knew a man who moved into a house on a flat mesa with hard clay soil into which the former owner planted many kinds of fruit trees as you have, but they never did well. There was a horse-owner living next door and the new owner went over to his neighbor’s house once a week for a wheelbarrow load of horse manure. He spread the horse manure on the ground as mulch year round. Within a few months, his fruit trees became remarkably healthy and productive and the ground teemed with earthworms. Before he moved into that house the clay soil had been bare and unproductive and the former owner had blamed the poor soil—even with a bonanza of manure next door! It was not poor soil, only neglected soil. All it needed was the addition of organic matter and the garden soon morphed into a little Eden.

A word of caution: Since you are placing this compost under fruit trees, do not dig or till it into the ground. It is a very bad practice to dig or till the ground inside the root zone of any fruit tree at any time of year since most fruit trees have many surface roots and any damage to these roots can make flowers, fruit, or leaves fall off. Last year my gardener who has worked for me for over fifty years saw a hoe leaning against a fence near my Meyer lemon tree that was covered with fruit of all sizes. I had left the hoe there by mistake, but he must have thought it was a hint to him to create irrigation holes. He used the hoe to dig under the lemon tree and make a watering basin. I just about died when I saw all the good organic mulch and fresh, white, young roots he had torn from the ground under the tree and piled up around the outer edges. All the green, young fruit had immediately fallen off and was littering the bare ground under the tree and all the tip growth died also and dropped its leaves, leaving bare green tips. It has taken me until now, months later, to get the tree to grow again and still it has not bloomed. I wanted to tell my gardener what he had done and show him what happened but I couldn’t. I’ve had experience in the past with trying to explain something like this and it always backfires. Good lesson to me not to leave tools lying around and to keep my gardener busy doing the things he is good at and knows how to do, like pruning all the hedges that surround my property.