Food Hedge Planting

After the bull pasture fiasco (which took up most of the morning) Daddy and Uncle and Seppi and Edmund got busy planting our new orchard trees and bushes.

As we mentioned before, our orchard is not so much a single discrete area as it is a network of fruit trees, vines and bushes scattered around the farm, taking advantage of edge spaces, lines and otherwise unproductive areas as much as possible.

The north/south running lane at the east end of the pastures, between our pasture and the neighboring housing development, is a wildlife corridor. That is, we hope to steer deer, rabbits, coyotes and other wildlife through it so they don’t have to cross our property. This is aided by the fact that most of the game trails we have seen are on that end of the farm anyway. Opening up those fences and closing off the rest should turn this alley into a path of least resistance that they take in preference to areas closer to our garden and chicken coop.

Not to lose productivity from this area, we are also going to plant it with fruit trees and bushes that should be able to handle some browse pressure, at least when mature, while being relatively low maintenance. We don’t want anything that requires daily or even weekly maintenance that far from the house.

More digging. I sometimes think our mascot should be a shovel.

Of course these little trees are very vulnerable to rabbits at this point so we have caged them for now.

Not far into digging one of the holes (for the apricot tree) we discovered a larger than usual rock.

Seppi took a turn trying to lever it out.

Then Edmund. But it was heavier than both of them put together.

It took Daddy and Uncle both with a pair of bars to lever it up high enough for Daddy to get his hands under it and roll it to flat ground.

Uncle and Edmund rolled it to our friendly neighborhood rock pile. We are not at all sure where it might have come from. It is not the typical glacial spall that we have in abundance. It appears to be granite, and looks like it might be a shaped block of some kind. We haven’t found anything like it on the farm before.

Victory!

The rest of the day was a race against the clock to try to get as much of the planting and caging done as possible before it was time to take the two older girls to their homeschooling co-op end of year finale.