We're kicking off this years planting season with a bang, or at least a sharp blow to the head. At least that's how it feels after a few weeks of tree planting.
We're busily laying the groundwork for our mini-orchard, and have planted about thirty trees and will eventuall plant around 75 or more shrubs to go with them.
We will have fruit trees, nut trees, nitrogen-fixing shrubs as support species for the fruit and nut trees, as well as dozens of fruiting shrubs such as blueberries, gooseberries, aronia, goumi, red and black currants, seaberries, cranberries, and more.
Here are some of the trees we have planted:
European Pear: Bartlett, Ubileen, Conference
Asian Pear: Chojuru, Shinseiki, Hosui
Plum: Early Laxton, Brooks, Early Transparent
Apple: Gravenstein, Hudson's Golden Gem, Wynooche Early, Chehalis
Peach: Avalon Pride, Oregon Curl Free, Q1-8, Charlotte
Nectarine: Kreibich
Apricot: Puget Gold
Asian Persimmon: Nikita's Gift, Early Fuyu, Early Jiro
Cherry: Lapins, Bing, Ranier, Montmorency
Fig: Stella, Desert King
Chestnut: Colossal, Maraval
English Walnut: Manregion, Franquette
Heartnut
Stone Pine: Italian Stone Pine, Korean Stone Pine (2), Siberian Stone Pine
Once all of the trees were planted, we spent another three days trying to protect them from the various animals that will want to nibble on them. We might have gotten carried away building fortifications against animal invaders, but we wrapped the base of most trees with 1/2" chicken wire to prevent our friendly-neighborhood beaver from chomping them in half and wrapped plastic deer fence around the rest of the tree to prevent deer from eating the tender shoots.
To the right and below are pictures of us and our friends Abel and Tao -- who helped plant most of the trees with us, our field with the newly planted trees amidst our glorious fall cover crop, and finally one of Christina protecting our apricot tree from animals.
We still have more work to do, though, as shipment #4 of trees and shrubs should arrive any day with more to plant. Most of what remains to plant are more of the nitrogen-fixing support plants and fruiting shrubs. We will be filling in the spaces between the (eventually) larger semi-dwarf fruit trees with these shrubs.