The Orchard Begins

Another thing that I did last weekend was start the new orchard at our new home.

For those that knew our house in Chandler we had the following trees in our backyard: Plum, Fig, Peach, Orange and Pomegranate. And we had a pretty good size garden as well.

Well last weekend I started the process of learning about, buying and then planting new trees. I headed over to Adam’s Garden and Nursery in Nampa. They are the best local owned nursery in the area from what I can tell (and from the research my father-in-law did as well). I was sent with the goal of getting a few fruit trees. We had looked into multi bud trees that have multiple fruits on one tree, and that was what I was going to look into. Once there though I talked to Chris (the fruit guru there), and he convinced me that I would be better off buying single trees of the fruits we wanted and then plant them close together and create a grid system. Then you trim the trees so that they grow outward and not into each other. I had never heard of this before. He told me that people without a lot of room do it and that it works quite well. So, then I started looking at individual trees. The issue was that there were lots of types of trees and I didn’t know exactly what the family wanted. “B” was indisposed for a while and so I talked to the girls for a little while. They like the idea since it meant more fruit possibly, but they didn’t know what kinds of rust to get.

To kill time until “B” was done with her thing and to get some more input from someone more knowledgeable than me on the topic I called my father-in-law and talked to him for a bit. He agreed that the idea made a lot of sense.

So, back into the garden (I did the call in my car) and I got ahold of “B” and the decision was to get plum, apricot, pear, cherry and nectarine. They were out of cherry, plum and nectarine, but Chris said to call in March and that I would be able to get them then to plant. He said get these started and go forward from there. So, I grabbed a Santa Rosa Plum (the same we had back in Chandler) and a Seckel Pear tree.

AND while I was waiting to talk to people I decided to look at berries as well. Well, I got Chris’s input on what to get, and I talked my family and I ended up bringing home a Marion berry and a Munger Raspberry plant. The Munger is a black raspberry but Chris said they are amazing.

I spent 3 hours at the nursery. Then home.

Sunday I spent a little while taking out a couple shrubs and then digging holes to plant trees.

Here they are:

We decided not to do the grid system and instead put them around the yard edges. There was a lot of random plants in the yard and “B” didn’t like a lot of them. So I will be taking them out anyways and we thought it would be good to replace them with useful things like fruit trees.

The berry plants are going to go in a different area of the backyard that isn’t ready yet, and so they ay not make it in right away. I may try taking things out next weekend and get the berry area ready.

So for now they are in pots:

So the beginnings of our new fruit orchard/garden. I am told that there is good chance that the ladies will have a couple fruit even starting next year on these two trees if things go well.

I will have to stay up on them and make sure they don’t get too big, keep them covered from birds, and anything else that could cause issues. That is my job with the trees. I don’t eat any of these fruit (well I have been known to eat a raspberry from time to time), but the ladies in my house love them and it will be nice to see them growing and blooming.