Fruit Trees

Between rain storms we planted most of the fruit trees we had. Some were gifts and others we got from an order we put into Peaceful Valley. Just a note, if you see trees in their catalog that you want than you better get in line in Nov. or otherwise they will be sold out by the time they send you their spring catalog. This is what happened to me and I am none too pleased.

Here is a list of some of what we planted (BR- bare root):

Harcot Apricot-BR
Green Gage Plum-BR
FuYu Persimmon
Brown Turkey Fig
Blake's Pride Pear-BR
Potomac Pear-BR
Bing Cherry-BR
Black Tartarian Cherry-BR
Pluot-BR
Pomegranate
Gala Apple
Pinklady Apple
Fuji Apple

I wanted a different kind of cherry and we are unsure how well the apples will do in our climate but we will try. They are beautiful trees. All these trees were planted on the south swale. We have gotten a lot more germination of the ground cover with all this rain. Even the north swale which is less fertile has gotten a lot of germination. All good things.

We read up on how to best plant BR trees and trees in general. Some nurseries and books suggested amending the soil a lot. Some begged the planter to NOT amend the soil at all, just mulch heavily. I remember watching Sepp Holzer planting his bare root trees on his farm. He had the tree in one hand and a shovel in the other. He stuck the shovel in, pushed forward, put the tree in and then pulled the soil back over the tree roots and stomped down with his heel. No hole twice as large as the root, no amending, no nothing. Now, his trees are raised on his farm. They are adapted to his location and they were smaller than the trees we have been planting. It also didn't look like he has the sticky clay soil we have. We decided to not amend the soil. We did make a large effort to make sure all the air pockets were pushed out of the hole and we did have to add some extra soil to the hole. We shall see. I heavily mulched around the base of each tree but kept it off the trunk itself.