Your Orchards

ALMOPOL allows you to create as many orchard designs as you like. You may want to have some designs that match your real orchards and you may want to evaluate the performance with alternative designs. It is easy to do both.

The an orchard model is made up of a number of rows, each one consisting of trees of a single almond cultivar type. The specification of a row includes, the cultivar type, the number of trees, the average size of the tree's canopy, and a measure of blossom density. The row to row configuration is used in the model to determine cross pollinating movements of bees.

There are two aspects of managing your orchards: editing existing orchards and creating or deleting orchards.

Creating an Orchard

At the bottom of the "My Orchards" page, you will see the "Create/Delete Orchard" grouping. If you have not created any orchards, this is where you need to go first. To create an orchard, type a name in the "Enter New Orchard Name" box and press the "Create" button. Once the orchard is created, its name will show up in the "Select Orchard" drop-down list at the top of the page and a default orchard area of 10 acres is established. If this is wrong size, enter the number of acres in the "Orchard Acres" field and press the "Update Acres" button. Now you can begin entering rows in the orchard. In the "Add Orchard Rows" grouping, you can add individual rows by entering the row number, selecting the proper cultivar type, entering the row canopy height and width, and entering a measurement of the blossom density on these trees then pressing the "Add" button. The row numbers are used to order the orchard and are important to define the physical relationship between the rows.

If you have a repeating pattern in your orchard, you can use the multi-edit "Duplicate" button to quickly add the remaining rows to your orchard. To do this, you select the rows you want to duplicate by checking corresponding "Select" box in the orchard grid. Once these are selected, pressing the "Duplicate" button will bring up an input box which will request you to enter which row to insert these duplicate rows after and how many times you would like to duplicate it. For example, if you have a three row pattern that repeats for 30 rows, you could enter the three rows as rows 1, 2, and 3. Then you can select all these, insert them after row 3 and duplicate them 9 times. The result will be 30 rows of repeating patterns.

Deleting an Orchard

If you find you don't need an orchard definition any longer, you can delete it. To do this, select the orchard from the "Delete Orchard" drop-down list found in the "Create/Delete Orchards" grouping. This list will only show your orchards. Pressing the "Delete" button will ask you to confirm the deletion and if you do so, the selected orchard will be permenantly deleted.

Editing Orchards

Orchard rows can be edited using the Edit Orchards grid. You will see an "Edit" and "Delete" button at the beginning of each row. In order to change any of the values for the row, you will have to press the "Edit" button. This will put the row in an editable state and the buttons will change to "Update" and "Cancel". Make any changes you like in the row then either press "Update" if you want to retain these changes or "Cancel" if you want to abandon the changes you made to the row. You can delete a row by pressing the "Delete" button.