Another project we have moved forward (ever so slightly), is our orchard. As I mentioned in a previous post, our orchard is not so much a discrete area of the farm separated from other areas, as it is the total of perennial fruiting plants we have scattered about the place. We have the apples, pears, and crabapples on the north lawn. There are also two ancient cherry trees by the front drive. The area on the north and east of the garden that we just fenced in (see the last two blog posts) has elderberries, raspberries and goumi berries. To the east of that is the area we refer to as the “old orchard.” This has an old, gnarled asian pear, badly in need of a prune (it got overlooked during the pruning festival two weeks ago. It also has several currants, a josta berry, a row of useless blueberries (too dry for them in the summer) and two enormous rows of thornless blackberries, as well as three young figs.
We have a ton of orchard plants coming in the next month or so, and while most of them will be part of the food hedge at the east end of the pasture, some will go in one or the other of these existing orchard areas, mostly along fencelines, or to take the place of the blueberries once we pull them out.
The first installment came in last weekend from Raintree Nursery, two strawberry trees, five lingonberries and a Dr. Yao cinnamon vine.
Believe it or not, I have actually sketched out where I want to put them all, for once, and so there was a reason to bring out the measuring tap. Ideally we wanted to get the fence in (location marked by the line to the right of Seppi in the picture above) but such was not to be.
Once the locations were marked we started digging. We didn’t get very far initially because Winnie decided it was nap time, so we had to go back to the house for some snuggles and a nap.
Once she was asleep, Evie and I came back out to finish the planting.
Enough rocks per cubic foot in this part of the field that we could probably build a rock wall around each tree if we wanted.
Kind of a Charlie Brown Christmas tree looking sort of thing for right now.
Lesson learned from last year: mulch everything heavily. This keeps them from drying out in the summer months, because, let’s face it, we are too busy to irrigate everything on the farm every day, and it has to be able to survive and produce fruit in summers that could bring up to 90 days without rainfall, or we don’t want it.
Yes, the T-posts are upside down. That was done deliberately. We will put the rabbit barriers attached to them, but when the trees are mature we will take them out and use the posts for something else, and I didn’t want to have to pull that T-post up after the tree’s roots had grown around it.
Next, we planted the lingon berries. These will be along this fence line, in between the grape vines that will be climbing on this fence (God Willing!)
The kids decided to name them. Peter, Ruth, Jane, etc.
This one is called “Abraham.”
Abraham Lingon.
That wasn’t berry good. Honestly, I tried.
Little Farm in the Big City 