We have been busy the last few weekends adding even more trees to our growing orchard! It’s been a team effort of me going out to find and purchase the trees, and Pat doing the dirty work of clearing shrubs, digging holes and planting them. We’re lucky to have a pretty big lot for our area, but even after our first phase of tree planting, I already felt the need to be thoughtful about what we were going to use space to grow. With my goal to get all our produce (fruit and vegetables) from our yard to feed our whole family, I’ve been considering what fruit we like to eat, harvest times, variety, and maybe most importantly, what fruits the birds and annoying squirrels will least likely consume. I’m already sort of regretting the cherry tree we put in…. and am thinking about how we can net it in the future to keep as many cherries to ourselves as possible.

Besides the cherry and asian pear trees that we put in as bare root trees during phase 1 of backyard orchard planting, we added: a bacon avocado, haas avocado (grown from a seed from our friend’s dad!), Washington naval orange, Clementine mandarin, bearss lime (to replace one that died from winter frost), barlett pear, fuyu persimmon, honey crisp apple, and fuji apple. We put the naval orange and avocado trees alongside our fence that borders the sidewalk because they will keep their leaves year-round and get pretty huge, giving us added privacy from the outside street in future years. Everything else went in toward the back fence and pretty close together, since we’re planting pretty densely to maximize our year-round fruit harvest.

Pat and I talk a lot about how long it’s going to take before we get any fruit. It will take about 4-5 years before we get anything from the bare root trees (Gianna will be in kindergarten by then!) and probably at least 2 years to get fruit from the others. While we wait though, we have been getting lots of kale from the garden and Pat and the kids have also been finding a handful of blueberries every few days from our bushes out front. Gianna and Caleb both go crazy over the berries.

We’re done with planting trees for the year and will wait to see what we might need to change or add. I’ve been learning quickly that not everything you plant makes it. We already had to return a pomegranate and plum tree that just remained as sticks in the ground for months. I’m pretty excited about everything else we planted, so I hope they all survive!