The Master Gardener Orchard at Martial Cottle Park is a demonstration orchard developed and maintained by the Master Gardeners of Santa Clara County. As a demonstration orchard, our mission is to help Santa Clara County residents grow their own fruit trees, using the best science-based and sustainable practices. We want to teach, show and answer questions so you can grow healthy productive trees with bountiful delicious fruit.

This blog will track what we are doing through the seasons at The Orchard. Hopefully, it will provide useful and timely info to help with your trees. We'll note planting, pruning, harvesting, fertilizing as they are happening. We'll also note less obvious things like grafting, odd fruits we are growing, and changes to the watering schedule as the seasons change.

Our first resource is The California Backyard Orchard, a website maintained by UC Davis, the institutional home of Master Gardeners in California. It has ALL the information you (and we!) need to take care of fruit trees. It starts with tree selection, before you even have a tree, through planting, watering, fertilizing, pruning, picking, and managing those pesky pests. And it has specific information for each of two dozen types of trees. When in doubt, look it up at The California Backyard Orchard.

We did a COVID-safe Zoom talk “Getting Fruit Trees off to a Good Start” in January 2021. It provides a great overview, in about an hour, of everything we did in the first two years in The Orchard.

The first trees in The Orchard were planted in January 2019, so we are now completing our third growing season. We have been minimizing fruit production to focus the trees on strong growth. The wait is over, we are anticipating our first significant harvest in 2022.

You can visit us at The Orchard. Martial Cottle Park is Santa Clara County's newest urban park. “In order to maintain its agricultural history and preserve this land for future generations”, the Cottle-Lester family donated their 287-acre farm “to the State and County for development of a park that informs and educates the public about the agricultural heritage of the Santa Clara Valley”. Master Gardeners are developing 4 acres of the park as a demonstration garden. The Orchard occupies ¾ of an acre in the Master Gardener section. Martial Cottle Park is at 5283 Snell Ave.

The easiest way to access The Orchard is to park on Chynoweth Ave near Vauxhall Circle and enter the park through the Chynoweth gate.  The Master Gardener section will be on your left, the entrance is about 400 feet down the park road.  Once in the Master Gardener section, The Orchard is at the farthest corner opposite the entrance.