Calculators, guides, and planners built from the ground up for specialty fruit production in the Southeast. The specialized knowledge shouldn't live only in extension offices and agricultural universities.
Five years of perennial production in the Southeast produces a lot of hard-won knowledge. Most of it isn't written down anywhere useful. It lives in trial and error, in conversations with old-timers, in extension bulletins that assume you already know what you're doing.
These tools are an attempt to change that. Each one encodes a specific decision that growers in the Upstate SC foothills — and throughout the humid Southeast — have to make, often without good guidance.
They're free. No account required. No sign-up. If you grow fruit in the Southeast, they're for you as much as they're for us.
Input your soil test results and target pH. The calculator recommends specific amendment rates — lime, sulfur, gypsum, compost — tailored to fruit tree establishment in the Southeast.
Enter your location and the tool estimates seasonal chill hour accumulation for the Upstate SC foothills. Cross-reference against your target varieties to see if your site meets their dormancy requirements.
Seasonal disease pressure forecasting for the Southeast. Input current temperature and humidity, see risk levels for fire blight, brown rot, cedar-apple rust, and other common threats by variety.
Answer a short set of questions about your land, goals, and constraints. Get a curated list of varieties suited to your specific situation — not a generic list, but one that accounts for the Southeast's humidity, disease pressure, and chill hour variability.
Select your primary variety and the tool shows compatible pollinators with overlapping bloom windows. Covers apples, pears, plums, and paw paws — including triploid flagging and self-fertile notes. Bloom-window visualizer included.
Choose a fruit type and describe your soil conditions, planting density goals, and irrigation situation. Get a matched rootstock recommendation with trade-off notes — size control, anchorage, disease susceptibility, precocity.
Build a visual harvest calendar for your planting mix. Shows overlapping windows, succession opportunities, and market gaps across your full variety list. Helps you design a planting plan that spreads production across the season.
A structured observation template for mapping microclimates on a candidate property. Frost pockets, cold air drainage, aspect, slope position, windbreaks — captures the observations that site evaluation frameworks miss.
An interactive visualization of what's happening across the orchard in each month of the year — bloom windows, harvest windows, management tasks, disease pressure peaks, and pollinator activity. Tied to the Living Library data.
"Your tools are not extras. They are part of your mission to democratize specialized knowledge. The grower who can't afford a consultant deserves the same decision framework as the one who can."
If there's a decision you keep making without good guidance — a calculation you do by hand, a trade-off you can't find documented anywhere — tell us. The tools list above grew from exactly that kind of problem.
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